Cladistic language concepts

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Since Prof. Ghiselin is interested in collecting votes here, I'll
add mine to the effect that
 
         1) I don't think the issue of whether chronologically distant
        grammars representing a single continuous linguistic lineage
        constitute one or two distinct languages has generally been
        seen as a crucial or even very interesting problem in linguistics,
        and
 
        2) That historical linguistics has *almost* always been
        resolutely cladistic as opposed to phenetic--the received
        tradition of historical linguistics has since its beginning
        been concerned with establishing genetic lineages.  (Indeed,
        when I first encountered discussion of this issue in biology,
        I had a few moments difficulty in understanding what the issue
        was--it just hadn't occurred to me that anyone might for any
        reason be interested in any taxonomy other than a cladistic
        one).
 
The "almost" proviso there is in reference to a bit of a vogue in
the 19th century for a sort of linguistic equivalent to phenetic
classification--the sort of research that gave us ideas like "Turanian",
the hypothesis that most of the languages of Asia, from Dravidian
up through Altaic, belong to a single family on the basis of what
are indeed pretty pervasive similarities in grammatical organization.
(This kind of argument crops up every now and then since the 19th
century, too, but we tend to dismiss such suggestions as ignorant
or downright crankish).  But I think this may have been a problem
of methodology rather than theory, that is, I suspect that the
proponents of Turanian (was it Max Mueller's idea originally?)
thought they *were* identifying a genetic lineage, they just didn't
understand what kind of evidence is necessary for that purpose.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html