From aristar at linguistlist.org Mon Jan 4 22:49:44 1999 From: aristar at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar) Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1999 17:49:44 EST Subject: Some new web pages for HISTLING Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Colleagues, I've just received this information from Anthony Aristar (of the Linguist List); it may be of interest. Dorothy Disterheft from Anthony Aristar: We've just put up a web-page which will allow people to subscribe via the web to those lists we archive, and to search them as well. We hope it'll make it a lot easier for people to find histling, and to interact with the listserv, since we've linked this to our main page. The URL is: http://linguistlist.org/list-archives.html The form for interacting with the Listserv might be useful for those subscribers who never quite figure out how to get the Listserv to do what they want. The URL for this is: http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-histling.html Have a Happy New Year! Anthony From d_anderson at indo-european.org Sat Jan 9 00:30:58 1999 From: d_anderson at indo-european.org (Deborah W. Anderson) Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1999 19:30:58 EST Subject: New Issue of IE Bulletin Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- A new issue of the INDO-EUROPEAN STUDIES BULLETIN (formerly "IE Newsletter") has appeared. It contains news, book reviews, listings of new books, upcoming conferences and summer schools, new electronic resources for IE, IE books available for review in Language as well as essays. Contents of Vol. 8, No. 1, November/December 1998 Article: Rex Wallace, "Recent Research on Sabellian Inscriptions" News and Brief Communications Conference Reports: Colloque International: "Gaulois et celtique continental" (Joe Eska) Seventeenth East Coast IE Conference (Andrew Garrett) Aspects of Bilingualism in the Ancient World (Mark Janse) Book Reviews: Sound Law and Analogy, ed. A. Lubotsky (Brent Vine) Baltistik, ed. A. Bammesberger (Henning Andersen) Albanian-English Dictionary, ed. L. Newmark (Martin Huld) The Bronze Age and Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, ed. V. Mair (Karlene Jones-Bley) List of New Electronic Resources for IE List of Upcoming Conferences and Summer Schools List of New Books List of Books for Review (for the journal Language). The Bulletin is officially affiliated with the Indo-European Studies Program at UCLA. Contribution levels (which pay for this bi-annual newsletter and support IE activities) are $10 for students, $20 for others ($25 for those outside the continental U.S.). Checks should be made payable in US$ to "FAIES/UCLA Foundation" and sent to: FAIES, 2143 Kelton Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90025. Credit cards are also accepted. Eurochecks are not being accepted at this time. Back issues are also available. For a listing of contents of back issues, please see: http://www.indo-european.org/page6.html. For further information, please contact: dwanders at socrates.berkeley.edu From Stockwel at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sat Jan 16 20:46:36 1999 From: Stockwel at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (Robert Stockwell) Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 15:46:36 EST Subject: SHEL-1 Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Conference Announcement Studies in the History of the English Language: SHEL-1 Place: UCLA Date: May 28-30, 2000 First Session: Friday Evening Plenary Lecture Second and Third Sessions: Saturday Morning and Afternoon Conference Banquet and Second Plenary: Saturday Evening Fourth Session: Sunday Morning Purpose and Objectives: In Europe the biennial conferences known as ICEHL (International Conference on English Historical Linguistics) have served the field of English Language Studies extremely well, giving the field both focus and recognition that it almost certainly would not have achieved otherwise. These conferences have taken place at major English Language research centers over the past twenty years, each conference organized and managed by the faculty of the conference site: Durham, Odense, Sheffield, Amsterdam, Cambridge, Helsinki, Valencia, Edinburgh, Poznan, Manchester. In North America, despite the presence of many major scholars in the field, Historical English Linguistics -- the History of the English Language told in the light of contemporary linguistic sophistication -- has not emerged with the same kind of recognizable personality. Many scholars who do this kind of work are to a significant extent servants also of other fields such as general linguistics, English medieval studies, American dialectology, applied linguistics and teacher training. By organizing SHEL, what we hope to do is begin to provide the same kind of focus for English Historical Linguistics in North America as the focus achieved in Europe by the ICEHL series, in North America for Germanic Linguistics by GLAC (Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference), for American Dialectology by the American Dialect Society, for Social Dialectology by NWAVE, and of course for General Linguistics by the LSA. We are not in competition with any of these series or organizations; we believe, however, that a weekend meeting dedicated entirely to linguistic issues in the History of English will be an energizing and useful academic experience. We begin modestly: no organization, just a conference. Neither the timing nor the choice of UCLA as the first venue are accidental; in early June of the year 2000 Robert Stockwell will reach a major anniversary and has agreed to provide the first plenary talk in lieu of a 'retirement' lecture. Anne Curzan is offering to organize and host the next meeting in Seattle. We invite preliminary expressions of interest, including working titles of the paper you would like to present, to be sent to: Professor Donka Minkova Department of English, UCLA 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90095 Expressions of interest and working titles can also be sent to the following e-mail addresses: Minkova at humnet.ucla.edu or Stockwel at humnet.ucla.edu or ACurzan at u.washington.edu Our preliminary plan is to allow all participants one-half hour for presentation, with an additional ten minutes of discussion followed by a break before the next paper. One page abstracts in three copies, unidentified except by the cover sheet, should be sent to the organizers by January 15, 2000. These will be taken as submissions for anonymous review. While we wish to separate, very clearly, the research aspects, which we consider our primary focus, and the pedagogical aspects, we recognize that most of the likely participants are engaged professionally in the teaching of courses on the history of English. Anne Curzan has therefore proposed to organize a workshop on some aspect of the pedagogical concerns of the participants. Prospective participants should contact ACurzan at u.washington.edu. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 19 16:07:19 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 11:07:19 EST Subject: Q: Yakhontov's principle Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I have a very inexplicit reference to an article in Russian by Yakhontov (rest of name unknown). In this, the author reportedly argues that the Swadesh 100-word list can be split into two sublists, one of 35 words and the other of 65 words, in such a way that the proportion of cognates shared in the 35-word list is always greater than the proportion shared in the 65-word list, when the languages involved are related. Can anybody provide the full reference? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From vovin at hawaii.edu Wed Jan 20 13:02:15 1999 From: vovin at hawaii.edu (Alexander Vovin) Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 08:02:15 EST Subject: Q: Yakhontov's principle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry, The article by Sergei Ievgen'evich Iakhontov, Professor of Chinese in St. Petersburg State University, as far as I know, was never published. It was circulating, though, widely in late 80s in Russia, as a kind of handout. Iakhontov devised his own 100 word list, based on Swadesh's list (I believe he changed around 10 words or so). I believe you can find this list in Sergei Starostin's "Altaiskaia problema i proiskhozhdenie iaponskogo iazyka" (Moscow, Nauka (Glavnaia redaktsiia vostochnoi literatury), 1991). The rest is true: Iakhontov argued that if two or more languages are related, than the percentage of cognates within 35 list that contains more stable words must be higher than percentage of cognates within less stable 65 list. Hope this helps, Sasha ======================================= Alexander Vovin Associate Professor of Japanese Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures 382 Moore Hall 1890 East-West Road University of Hawaii at Manoa Honolulu, HI 96822 vovin at hawaii.edu fax (808)956-9515 (o.) t.(808)956-6881 (o.) On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I have a very inexplicit reference to an article in Russian by Yakhontov > (rest of name unknown). In this, the author reportedly argues that the > Swadesh 100-word list can be split into two sublists, one of 35 words > and the other of 65 words, in such a way that the proportion of cognates > shared in the 35-word list is always greater than the proportion shared > in the 65-word list, when the languages involved are related. > > Can anybody provide the full reference? > > > Larry Trask > COGS > University of Sussex > Brighton BN1 9QH > UK > > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk > From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Jan 21 20:41:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 15:41:08 EST Subject: Sum: Yakhontov's principle Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The other day I posted a query about a certain principle imputed to Yakhontov. I've received several illuminating responses. Sergei Yakhontov (or Iakhontov) is a distinguished Russian Sinicist, now occupying a chair at St. Petersburg University. Around 40 years ago, he published some classic papers on Old Chinese. Since then, he has rarely published anything at all, and he disseminates his work via lectures, mimeographs and personal letters. But he is alive and well, and one of my respondents rang him up. He has a major interest in the languages of East Asia, and also a big interest in Swadesh-style lexicostatistics. He has attempted to modify and improve Swadesh's 100-word list, partly in order to eliminate words which he considers too culture-specific to be generally useful, and he's devised a modified list with about ten different words. Further, he has divided his list into two sublists, of 35 and of 65 words, with the shorter list containing the words he regards as most resistant to replacement. Of these sublists, he has made some claims. My respondents cite two very different claims, and I am presuming that Yakhontov has in fact espoused both. Claim 1: If two languages are genetically related, then the proportion of cognates in the 35-word list will always be higher than the proportion in the 65-word list. I am told that this claim has been verified by checking against a number of languages known to be related. Interesting, if substantiated. Claim 2: If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list is higher than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word list, then this is evidence that the languages are related. This second claim I have big problems with. I myself do not believe that phonetic resemblances are of any significance at all in comparative linguistics, at least in the absence of a rigorous statistical underpinning. Given the current conspicuous disagreements among the linguists working on statistical approaches to comparison, and the plain absence of any statistical approach that is generally regarded as valid and effective, there can be no such underpinning at present. A published summary of this work can be found here: Sergei Starostin (1991), Altajskaja Problema i Proiskhozhdenie Japonskogo Jazyka, Moscow: Nauka, pp. 59-60. This book was reviewed by Bernard Comrie in Language 69. I am told also that Yakhontov himself published a relevant paper in a volume released in 1997, edited by Alexander Ogloblin, and called `Indonesia, Malaysia, Phillipiny'. Just for interest, here is Yakhontov's 35-word list, passed on to me by one respondent, and taken from Starostin: wind, water, louse, eye, year give, two, know, tooth, name stone, bone, blood, who, moon new, nose, fire, one, full horn, hand, fish, dog, sun salt, thou, die, ear, tail what, this, I, tongue, egg My thanks to Ralf-Stefan Georg, Leonhard G. Herzenberg, Alexis Manaster Ramer, Sergei Starostin, and Alexander Vovin. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jan 22 14:22:38 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 09:22:38 EST Subject: Sum: Yakhontov's principle Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Alexander Vovin wrote: > Larry, > > Hmmm... The following puzzles me: > > >Claim 2: If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list > >is higher than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word > >list, then this is evidence that the languages are related. > > >This second claim I have big problems with. I myself do not believe > >that phonetic resemblances are of any significance at all in comparative > >linguistics, at least in the absence of a rigorous statistical > >underpinning. Given the current conspicuous disagreements among the > >linguists working on statistical approaches to comparison, and the plain > >absence of any statistical approach that is generally regarded as valid > >and effective, there can be no such underpinning at present. > > I also have a big problem with this claim, and to the best of my > memory, I do not recollect it to be present in the Iakhontov's handout > that I had before, although he might have added it later. Is that > something more recent? I don't know. This second claim appears to be imputed to Yakhontov by Starostin in the relevant passage in Starostin's book. But the wording is not very explicit, so perhaps this is Starostin's own addition to Yakhontov's ideas. All this started with an open exchange of letters between Starostin and me in the pages of the American journal Mother Tongue. In his second letter, Starostin explicitly attributed only the first claim to Yakhontov, but then went on to invoke the second claim as though it were the same claim, a maneuver for which I chided him at the time. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From vovin at hawaii.edu Fri Jan 22 14:22:21 1999 From: vovin at hawaii.edu (Alexander Vovin) Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 09:22:21 EST Subject: Sum: Yakhontov's principle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry, Hmmm... The following puzzles me: >Claim 2: If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list >is higher than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word >list, then this is evidence that the languages are related. >This second claim I have big problems with. I myself do not believe >that phonetic resemblances are of any significance at all in comparative >linguistics, at least in the absence of a rigorous statistical >underpinning. Given the current conspicuous disagreements among the >linguists working on statistical approaches to comparison, and the plain >absence of any statistical approach that is generally regarded as valid >and effective, there can be no such underpinning at present. I also have a big problem with this claim, and to the best of my memory, I do not recollect it to be present in the Iakhontov's handout that I had before, although he might have added it later. Is that something more recent? Sasha ======================================= Alexander Vovin Associate Professor of Japanese Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures 382 Moore Hall 1890 East-West Road University of Hawaii at Manoa Honolulu, HI 96822 vovin at hawaii.edu fax (808)956-9515 (o.) t.(808)956-6881 (o.) On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > The other day I posted a query about a certain principle imputed to > Yakhontov. I've received several illuminating responses. > > Sergei Yakhontov (or Iakhontov) is a distinguished Russian Sinicist, now > occupying a chair at St. Petersburg University. Around 40 years ago, he > published some classic papers on Old Chinese. Since then, he has rarely > published anything at all, and he disseminates his work via lectures, > mimeographs and personal letters. But he is alive and well, and one of > my respondents rang him up. > > He has a major interest in the languages of East Asia, and also a big > interest in Swadesh-style lexicostatistics. He has attempted to modify > and improve Swadesh's 100-word list, partly in order to eliminate words > which he considers too culture-specific to be generally useful, and he's > devised a modified list with about ten different words. > > Further, he has divided his list into two sublists, of 35 and of 65 > words, with the shorter list containing the words he regards as most > resistant to replacement. Of these sublists, he has made some claims. > My respondents cite two very different claims, and I am presuming that > Yakhontov has in fact espoused both. > > Claim 1: If two languages are genetically related, then the proportion > of cognates in the 35-word list will always be higher than the > proportion in the 65-word list. > > I am told that this claim has been verified by checking against a number > of languages known to be related. Interesting, if substantiated. > > Claim 2: If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list > is higher than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word > list, then this is evidence that the languages are related. > > This second claim I have big problems with. I myself do not believe > that phonetic resemblances are of any significance at all in comparative > linguistics, at least in the absence of a rigorous statistical > underpinning. Given the current conspicuous disagreements among the > linguists working on statistical approaches to comparison, and the plain > absence of any statistical approach that is generally regarded as valid > and effective, there can be no such underpinning at present. > > A published summary of this work can be found here: > > Sergei Starostin (1991), Altajskaja Problema i Proiskhozhdenie > Japonskogo Jazyka, Moscow: Nauka, pp. 59-60. > > This book was reviewed by Bernard Comrie in Language 69. > > I am told also that Yakhontov himself published a relevant paper in a > volume released in 1997, edited by Alexander Ogloblin, and called > `Indonesia, Malaysia, Phillipiny'. > > Just for interest, here is Yakhontov's 35-word list, passed on to me by > one respondent, and taken from Starostin: > > wind, water, louse, eye, year > give, two, know, tooth, name > stone, bone, blood, who, moon > new, nose, fire, one, full > horn, hand, fish, dog, sun > salt, thou, die, ear, tail > what, this, I, tongue, egg > > My thanks to Ralf-Stefan Georg, Leonhard G. Herzenberg, Alexis Manaster > Ramer, Sergei Starostin, and Alexander Vovin. > > > Larry Trask > COGS > University of Sussex > Brighton BN1 9QH > UK > > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk > From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Sun Jan 24 17:26:57 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1999 12:26:57 EST Subject: Sum: Yakhontov's principle Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Alexander Vovin wrote: > > > Larry, > > > > Hmmm... The following puzzles me: > > > > >Claim 2: If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list > > >is higher than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word > > >list, then this is evidence that the languages are related. > > > > >This second claim I have big problems with. I myself do not believe > > >that phonetic resemblances are of any significance at all in comparative > > >linguistics, at least in the absence of a rigorous statistical > > >underpinning. Given the current conspicuous disagreements among the I always wonder what people by "phonetic resemblance" because sometimes things like this don't make sense to me. How is phonetic resemblance measured? Resemblance/Similarity is related to distance/difference. We can always measure or mentally use a scale from 0 to 1 in this case. For example, if the two words are identical the distance between them (i.e. difference) is zero. That means resemblance is 1 meaning maximum resemblance. I fail to see how regular sound change can fail to create a phonetic resemblance because they are functions of each other. It is distressing to find someone who has studied chemistry or chemical engineering to fail to make clear what exactly he is opposing. IT would be possible to create distance measures in which some results of regular sound change would register a very large distance but at that point the complexity would probably preclude any humans from registering the sound changes as regular. I posted a list to sci.lang and several groups to demonstrate this effect "live" but somehow its purpose seems to have been completely missed. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 25 14:54:07 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 09:54:07 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <36A95606.8460D996@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 24 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: [on phonetic resemblances] > I always wonder what people by "phonetic resemblance" because sometimes > things like this don't make sense to me. How is phonetic resemblance > measured? In most cases, it is not. As I have pointed out on various lists, phonetic resemblances play no part in standard comparative linguistics, which is based entirely upon patterns. Therefore it is pointless to try to define the notion `phonetic resemblance'. Why should we want to define a concept we don't use and can't see any value in? The exception lies in certain statistical approaches. Some (but not all) statistical approaches *do* make use of phonetic similarities. Therefore, the proponents of such approaches are obliged to provide rigorous definitions of what will be counted as a phonetic resemblance -- and also, of course, as a semantic match. Responsible workers do this, so that readers may have a chance to evaluate their work. The difficulty with much of the work called `multilateral comparison' is that it depends crucially upon the identification of both phonetic and semantic resemblances, and yet no criteria are ever advanced for identifying these. Or, if criteria *are* advanced, these are subsequently ignored. > Resemblance/Similarity is related to distance/difference. We > can always measure or mentally use a scale from 0 to 1 in this case. > For example, if the two words are identical the distance between them > (i.e. difference) is zero. That means resemblance is 1 meaning maximum > resemblance. Oh, no. Of course, the case of identity is trivial. But, as soon as we start looking at non-identical forms, the problem rapidly becomes far more difficult. There is a Website which lists the number-names from one to twn in over 2400 languages around the globe. It's here: http://www.tezcat.com/~markrose/numbers.shtml Take a look at the names for, say, `five' in a collection of languages. The semantics is rigidly controlled, so we can forget that. Now try to decide which words for `five' are phonetically similar and to what degree. I promise you, you will not find it easy to come up with a system that satisfies anybody but you. > I fail to see how regular sound change can fail to create a phonetic > resemblance because they are functions of each other. Not really. First, even regular changes can accumulate in layers of such depth that their combined effect produces an output in which the original regularity is difficult, or even impossible, to discern. Second, not all sound changes are regular. Third, sound change is not the only kind of change operating: lexical replacement, semantic shift, grammaticalization, and other changes are cutting across the language all the time. So, even if an ancestral word had undergone a series of perfectly regular changes, there is no guarantee that the word will still be a word, that it will still have its original meaning (or *any* recognizable meaning), or that it will still be in the language at all. > It is distressing to find someone who has studied chemistry or chemical > engineering to fail to make clear what exactly he is opposing. Would an ostensive definition do? ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From manaster at umich.edu Tue Jan 26 21:59:35 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 16:59:35 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry writes: "As I have pointed out on various lists, phonetic resemblances play no part in standard comparative linguistics, which is based entirely upon patterns." I don't think this is quite true. Perhaps it SHOULD be, but in fact, as Eric Hamp pointed out c. 1976, Indo-European lx got started by comparing sets where there IS transparent similarity like Gk. pate:r : Skt. pita: long before it discovered the patterns Larry refers to and moreover the patterns discovered first were again those involving phonetically similar segments. "Weird" correspondences like Armenian erk- for initial *dw- or z for *bhy were discovered much later. I think that the same is true in the case of other language families, e.g., Uto-Aztecan, Semitic, etc. And people who seem to practice standard comparative ling, and in fact claim to be its defenders, do appeal to phonetic similarity. E.g., Campbell in his critique of my proposal of a Pakawan language family does so repeatedly. It is not entirely clear to me whether this is as it should be. Nor whether it is possible to establish a language family strictly on the basis of "patterns" without phonetic similarities. In theory, it should be possible. But I don't think I know of any examples where this has been done. Alexis MR From hubeyh at Montclair.edu Wed Jan 27 00:59:07 1999 From: hubeyh at Montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey) Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 19:59:07 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Larry writes: > > "As I have pointed out on various lists, > phonetic resemblances play no part in standard comparative linguistics, > which is based entirely upon patterns." > > I don't think this is quite true. Perhaps it SHOULD be, but ... > It is not entirely clear to me whether this is as it should > be. Nor whether it is possible to establish a language > family strictly on the basis of "patterns" without > phonetic similarities. In theory, it should be possible. > But I don't think I know of any examples where this has > been done. To show that the statement by Larry Trask is untrue all that is necessary is to show at least one case in which the phonetic resemblance plays an important part. Here is a case: Language A Language B ---------- ---------- mother mother father father sister sister ..... hand hand finger finger .... .... one one two two ... ... Phonetic similarity on a scale between 0 and 1 is 1. Phonetic distance on the same scale is 0 meaning that they are identical. Genetic distance similarly is 0 pointing out the obvious fact that it is the same language. Nobody, I assume, would argue that any language is not related to itself genetically. I hope this news is not too disturbing, and neither the tone nor the content is deemed to be below that of normal discourse of such august company. -- M. Hubey Email: hubeyh at Montclair.edu Backup:hubeyh at alpha.montclair.edu WWW Page: http://www.csam.montclair.edu/Faculty/Hubey.html From alderson at netcom.com Wed Jan 27 10:34:16 1999 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 05:34:16 EST Subject: Searchable archives Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Thanks to the generosity of the moderators of the LINGUIST list, postings to the current incarnations of the Indo-European and Nostratic mailing lists will be available in searchable archives. The archives will be available at the following URL: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/ In addition, the previous postings will be made available in these archives after a bit of manual editing to add the required headers. This announcement is going out to the Indo-European, Nostratic, Historical Linguistics, and Linguist mailing lists; I apologize to those who thereby see it more than once. If you know of colleagues who would be interested but who do not subscribe to any of these lists, please feel free to forward this announcement to them. Rich Alderson From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Jan 27 10:38:09 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 05:38:09 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Tue, 26 Jan 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Larry writes: > > "As I have pointed out on various lists, > phonetic resemblances play no part in standard comparative linguistics, > which is based entirely upon patterns." > > I don't think this is quite true. Perhaps it SHOULD be, but > in fact, as Eric Hamp pointed out c. 1976, Indo-European > lx got started by comparing sets where there IS transparent > similarity like Gk. pate:r : Skt. pita: long before it > discovered the patterns Larry refers to and moreover > the patterns discovered first were again those involving > phonetically similar segments. "Weird" correspondences > like Armenian erk- for initial *dw- or z for *bhy were > discovered much later. I think that the same is true > in the case of other language families, e.g., Uto-Aztecan, > Semitic, etc. Yes, I am happy to concede this. Obvious phonetic resemblances have frequently -- probably even usually -- attracted the attention of linguists to language families whose members are rather closely related. But I know of no case in which a genetic link has been demonstrated on the basis of phonetic resemblances, nor can I conceive of a way of doing this other than a rigorously statistical one. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Jan 27 11:23:47 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 06:23:47 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > Obvious phonetic resemblances have > frequently -- probably even usually -- attracted the attention of > linguists to language families whose members are rather closely related. > But I know of no case in which a genetic link has been demonstrated on > the basis of phonetic resemblances, nor can I conceive of a way of doing > this other than a rigorously statistical one. Indeed, but can one imagine a statistical procedure which would take account of phonetic resemblance due to lexical borrowing? This takes us back to the point raised before on this list. There is no algorithm for demonstrating relationship on the basis of word lists. Phonetic resemblance may suggest a hypothesis, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to confirm (or its absence, to refute) it. Max Wheeler ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From manaster at umich.edu Wed Jan 27 18:37:40 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 13:37:40 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Examples: Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Indo-European, Shoshonean (later subsumed under Uto-Aztecan), Semitic, Malayo-Polynesian, Samoyedic, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic (for these last five see the paper by Sidwell and myself in JSFOu on Strahlenberg). I am not as sure but I think the same is true for Athapaskan, Algonquian (parts of it anyway), and many other of the Native American language families that are universally recognized. Finally, a particularly clear example is the Comecrudan language family proposed by Goddard 1979 and embraced by Campbell and as far as I can see universally accepted (in my scheme, of course, it is part of a larger Pakawan family). The small number of attested forms precludes any meaningful talk of regular sound correspondences since these would have to have one example each. Alexis On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > > Obvious phonetic resemblances have > frequently -- probably even usually -- attracted the attention of > linguists to language families whose members are rather closely related. > But I know of no case in which a genetic link has been demonstrated on > the basis of phonetic resemblances, nor can I conceive of a way of doing > this other than a rigorously statistical one. > > > Larry Trask > COGS > University of Sussex > Brighton BN1 9QH > UK > > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk > > From alderson at netcom.com Thu Jan 28 01:21:47 1999 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 20:21:47 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: (message from Alexis Manaster-Ramer on Wed, 27 Jan 1999 13:37:40 EST) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- To challenge Larry Trask's assertion that linguistic relationships are not *demonstrated* by phonetic resemblances, although they may suggest hypotheses, Alexis Manaster-Ramer lists the following: >Examples: Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Indo-European, Shoshonean (later subsumed >under Uto-Aztecan), Semitic, Malayo-Polynesian, Samoyedic, Finno-Ugric, >Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic Let's examine these for a moment. For sentimental reasons, I'll start with Indo-European. Sir Wm. Jones may have noted a "phonetic resemblance" among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin which piqued his curiosity, but we all know upon what evidence he drew his conclusions: The "affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar" of the three languages. Romance was simply "known" to be a family, given the historical knowledge that all these languages were somehow "corrupt" forms of Latin--not merely in the phonology but in the morphology. Similarly, tradition held that the Hebrew and Arabic languages were spoken by descendants of the two sons of Abraham, so the similarities in morphology and phonology were simply accepted. I believe--I admit I have not read the 1752 monograph--that it was morphology rather than phonology that convinced a Hungarian diplomat that the Finnish language was related to his own, though he likely noticed the phenomenon of vowel harmony first. I sincerely doubt that any of the accepted families in the list of examples are accepted because of similarities in the non-grammatical lexicon alone, or were posited only because of such similarities. While early writings may not share the rigour of our current discipline, it was clearly "grammar"--that is, morphology both inflectional and derivational--that was the deciding factor in the success of these hypotheses of relationship. Rich Alderson From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Thu Jan 28 01:25:49 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 20:25:49 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask wrote: > > Yes, I am happy to concede this. Obvious phonetic resemblances have > frequently -- probably even usually -- attracted the attention of > linguists to language families whose members are rather closely related. > But I know of no case in which a genetic link has been demonstrated on > the basis of phonetic resemblances, nor can I conceive of a way of doing > this other than a rigorously statistical one. I gave an example of the usage of phonetic resemblance. Here is another; CAse 2: Language A Language B ----------- ----------- haeend haend aam arm ... ... Language A is supposed be represent the typical Southern drawl of English. Obviously phonetic distances between pairs of words in language A and language B in this case are not zero but "small". That means obviously that there is phonetic resemblance. Furthermore, the semantic distances between the pairs of words is either zero or small meaning that either the southern dialect or the northern one might have additional slang meanings the other does not have. Thus we have a case of small phonetic distances and small semantic distances. This is how we know that the languages are dialects. Case 3: Language A Language B ---------- ---------- mother mutter father vater .... ...... one ein ... ... two drei ... ... The semantic distances are small (or zero) but probably larger than that of Case 2. The phonetic distances are larger than that of CAse 2. Yet these distances are smaller than that of say comparison of Malay to English. This is how we know that these languages are members of a subfamily, in this case Germanic. This is also the procedure we use to create other subfamilies such as Italic, Celtic, Slavic, etc. Case 4: Language A Language B ---------- ----------- one ras, adin two dva ... ..... brother brat ... ... Chances are the phonetic distances are larger than case 3, and semantic distances can be the same as case 2 or larger. Case 5:..... CAse 6:....... ---------------------------------------------------------- In all of these it is precisely the correlation of phonetic distances and semantic distances that are use to posit family relationships. The conclusion is that precisely the opposite of what Larry Trask says is true, namely that historical linguistics is about nothing else except the computation of correlation of phonetic and semantic distances. Of course, the word "resemblance" like "similarity" is nothing more than the inverse of distance. What Larry means by "rigorous statistics" is not clear to me. After all, the present families posited are nothing more than heuristic(heuristic) computations of the distances (phonetic and semantic) and a heuristic correlation of the said distances. And probability theory (and statistics) is nothing more than the same common sense except with explicit computation. However, where heuristics fails, explicit computation (i.e. prob theory and statistics) does not fail. It's time to move to the next stage of historical linguistics. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Thu Jan 28 13:19:46 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 08:19:46 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Max W Wheeler wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > > But I know of no case in which a genetic link has been demonstrated on > > the basis of phonetic resemblances, nor can I conceive of a way of doing > > this other than a rigorously statistical one. > > Indeed, but can one imagine a statistical procedure which would take > account of phonetic resemblance due to lexical borrowing? > > This takes us back to the point raised before on this list. There is no > algorithm for demonstrating relationship on the basis of word lists. > Phonetic resemblance may suggest a hypothesis, but it is neither > necessary nor sufficient to confirm (or its absence, to refute) it. Indeed there is no proof outside of mathematics. Even physics cannot "prove" that the sun will rise tomorrow. It's just that its probability is so high that we accept it. The same goes with other "laws" of physics like F=man, pV=nRT, etc. What separates physical sciences from social sciences is the great uncertainty and great complexity of the social sciences. The uncertainty comes from the complexity. Since we don't know the laws, we cannot predict anything and it looks extremely difficult, and it is. Some accept this to mean that it can't be done, but I don't. > Max Wheeler -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu Thu Jan 28 13:20:49 1999 From: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu (Johanna Nichols) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 08:20:49 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <199901272339.PAA15365@netcom.com> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I would like to add a comment to Rich Alderson's comment (below). Slavic is another family which was never discovered by a linguist. The ethnonym 'Slav(ic)', its use to refer to the Slavic languages as a family, and awareness of their historical unity, are all contributions of traditional Slavic wisdom. They entered western linguistics, as far as I can tell, through the work of Leibniz and his contemporaries, who used (writing in Latin) the terms 'Slavi' and 'lingua slavonica' to refer to the Slavs, the Slavic languages, and the Slavic language family, borrowing the term and its meaning from Slavic languages. This is from my paper 'The comparative method as heuristic', in Mark Durie and Malcolm Ross, eds., The Comparative Method Reviewed (Oxford UP, 1996), which discusses criteria for relatedness in traditional comparative method. I agree with Rich's assessment of Jones's evidence for IE. Johanna Nichols >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >To challenge Larry Trask's assertion that linguistic relationships are not >*demonstrated* by phonetic resemblances, although they may suggest hypotheses, >Alexis Manaster-Ramer lists the following: > >>Examples: Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Indo-European, Shoshonean (later >>subsumed >>under Uto-Aztecan), Semitic, Malayo-Polynesian, Samoyedic, Finno-Ugric, >>Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic > >Let's examine these for a moment. > >For sentimental reasons, I'll start with Indo-European. Sir Wm. Jones may >have >noted a "phonetic resemblance" among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin which piqued >his curiosity, but we all know upon what evidence he drew his conclusions: The >"affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar" of the >three >languages. > >Romance was simply "known" to be a family, given the historical knowledge that >all these languages were somehow "corrupt" forms of Latin--not merely in the >phonology but in the morphology. Similarly, tradition held that the >Hebrew and >Arabic languages were spoken by descendants of the two sons of Abraham, so the >similarities in morphology and phonology were simply accepted. > >I believe--I admit I have not read the 1752 monograph--that it was morphology >rather than phonology that convinced a Hungarian diplomat that the Finnish >language was related to his own, though he likely noticed the phenomenon of >vowel harmony first. > >I sincerely doubt that any of the accepted families in the list of >examples are >accepted because of similarities in the non-grammatical lexicon alone, or were >posited only because of such similarities. While early writings may not share >the rigour of our current discipline, it was clearly "grammar"--that is, >morphology both inflectional and derivational--that was the deciding factor in >the success of these hypotheses of relationship. > > Rich Alderson * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Johanna Nichols Professor Department of Slavic Languages Mailcode 2979 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Phone: (1) (510) 642-1097 (direct) (1) (510) 642-2979 (messages) Fax: (1) (510) 642-6220 (departmental) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From lsa at lsadc.org Thu Jan 28 20:23:10 1999 From: lsa at lsadc.org (LSA) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:23:10 EST Subject: December LSA Bulletin Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Please Post The December 1998 LSA Bulletin is now available on the LSA web site: www.lsadc.org From manaster at umich.edu Thu Jan 28 20:22:54 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:22:54 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <199901272339.PAA15365@netcom.com> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I see we have a failure to communicate. I was assuming that the question was whether to demonstrate language relatedness we need to have first established definite regular sound correspondences (as Trask seems to believe) or not (as I believe). Rich and Johanna appear to be dealing with a different question, namely, whether to establish relatedness we need to look at lexical or morphological items. This is an entirely separate question from the one I was addressing. It is indeed the case that some of the lg families I mentioned were established largely on the basis of morphological comparisons, but that was not the issue. My point is that, when comparing morphemes and morpheme sequences (whether lexical or grammatical) it is posible to (a) insist on regular sound correspondences or (b) look at phonetic similarities (as I will discuss another day, there are other possibilities besides), and I maintain that many generally recognized lg families were established using approaches of the latter type-- or some mixture of approaches but not pure (a). Rich and Johanna also say something about Romance and Slavic and Semitic being "obvious" even to nonlinguists, but this misses the point that many connections which nonlinguists take as "obvious" have turned out to be wrong. I know many people who think English is related to French in virtue of words like chef, place, etc., but they are wrong. It is thus still a significant question for lx how one decides about the correctness of even the obvious classifications. Back to the real issue. Another example just came to mind: Jeff Leer argues that Tlingit is related to Athapaskan (as I think everybody now agrees) but there is a lack of regular correspondences, which he tries to explain as a result of Tlingit itself being a mix of several quite different (Pre-)Tlingit dialects. AMR PS. The question of whether there are lg families which were established on the basis of purely lexical comparisons is also an interesting one but I will postpone discussing that one too. On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, Richard M. Alderson III wrote (and Johanna Nichols promptly endorsed his statement): > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > To challenge Larry Trask's assertion that linguistic relationships are not > *demonstrated* by phonetic resemblances, although they may suggest hypotheses, > Alexis Manaster-Ramer lists the following: > >Examples: Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Indo-European, Shoshonean (later subsumed > >under Uto-Aztecan), Semitic, Malayo-Polynesian, Samoyedic, Finno-Ugric, > >Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic > > Let's examine these for a moment. > > For sentimental reasons, I'll start with Indo-European. Sir Wm. Jones may have > noted a "phonetic resemblance" among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin which piqued > his curiosity, but we all know upon what evidence he drew his conclusions: The > "affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar" of the three > languages. > > Romance was simply "known" to be a family, given the historical knowledge that > all these languages were somehow "corrupt" forms of Latin--not merely in the > phonology but in the morphology. Similarly, tradition held that the Hebrew and > Arabic languages were spoken by descendants of the two sons of Abraham, so the > similarities in morphology and phonology were simply accepted. > > I believe--I admit I have not read the 1752 monograph--that it was morphology > rather than phonology that convinced a Hungarian diplomat that the Finnish > language was related to his own, though he likely noticed the phenomenon of > vowel harmony first. > > I sincerely doubt that any of the accepted families in the list of examples are > accepted because of similarities in the non-grammatical lexicon alone, or were > posited only because of such similarities. While early writings may not share > the rigour of our current discipline, it was clearly "grammar"--that is, > morphology both inflectional and derivational--that was the deciding factor in > the success of these hypotheses of relationship. > > Rich Alderson > From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Jan 28 20:22:13 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:22:13 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <36AFAD66.E46FE694@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: [snip of comparisons of English with English, German, Russian] > In all of these it is precisely the correlation of phonetic distances > and semantic distances that are use to posit family relationships. No; not at all. To begin with, you can *posit* a family relationship on the basis of anything you like, and people do this all the time. Positing is cheap, easy and generally not very interesting. The hard bit is to *demonstrate* a relationship beyond reasonable doubt. And this can't be done merely by appealing to phonological resemblances: it has to be done in a more principled manner. > The conclusion is that precisely the opposite of what Larry Trask says > is true, namely that historical linguistics is about nothing else except > the computation of correlation of phonetic and semantic distances. This is not what I said. I never spoke of the computation of anything. The classical methods of demonstrating a linguistic relationship do not involve anything that could reasonably be called `computation'. > Of course, the word "resemblance" like "similarity" is nothing more > than the inverse of distance. > What Larry means by "rigorous statistics" is not clear to me. I mean the expression to apply to something which does not at present exist. Though vigorous efforts are being made in some quarters, at present we do not have a reliable and generally accepted statistical technique which can identify otherwise obscure genetic relationships. I hope we will have such techniques one day, but we don't have them now. > After all, the present families posited are nothing more than > heuristic(heuristic) computations of the distances (phonetic and > semantic) and a heuristic correlation of the said distances. I think you are confusing the identification of families with the problem of subgrouping the languages they contain. What is described here is of some relevance to subgrouping, but not to the identification of families. In fact, it is perfectly possible to prove a language family without being able to provide an acceptable family tree (subgrouping). Semitic is a classic example of this, but there are many others, such as Austronesian, Austro-Asiatic, and, for that matter, Indo-European. > And probability theory (and statistics) is nothing more than the > same common sense except with explicit computation. Hardly. Probability theory is a triumph over common sense, not an elaboration of it. As has been demonstrated countless times, human estimates of probability are woefully inadequate. Most of you will already know that old chestnut, the shared-birthday problem. How many arbitrary people do you have to assemble in one room before the probability that two of them celebrate their birthday on the same date becomes greater than 50%? Ask this of *anybody* who is untrained in probability, and you will get a large answer: typically 183 or something even bigger. But the correct answer is 23. Most people, relying on their common sense, will refuse to believe this until it's explained to them, and some will refuse to believe it even then. And I won't even get started again on Marilyn and the Goats. ;-) > However, where heuristics fails, explicit computation (i.e. prob > theory and statistics) does not fail. It's time to move to the next > stage of historical linguistics. After you, Mr. Hubey. ;-) Actually, probability has not failed in comparative linguistics. But, so far, at least, it has not proved possible to develop probabilistic approaches to identifying families which work. If you'd like to propose an explicit procedure which *does* work, there are plenty of linguistics journals which will be happy to publish it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From sally at thomason.org Thu Jan 28 20:21:58 1999 From: sally at thomason.org (Sally Thomason) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:21:58 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 28 Jan 1999 08:20:49 EST." Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask and Rich Alderson and a few others are doing a great job of explaining why phonetic resemblances are not considered by historical linguists to be either necessary or sufficient to establish genetic relationships, but so far not much emphasis has been placed on the skewing that can result from language contacts of various kinds. It's not just the problem of ordinary borrowing -- which, in some contact situations, can penetrate into the basic vocabulary: ca. 7% in a Swadesh list for English, for instance, including words like "animal", which is as close to its French (or Latin) source as in Hubey's ironic same-language examples. In addition, though, you get the very strong phonetic resemblances in mixed languages, which for most historical linguists (I think) don't meet the standard criteria for genetic relatedness. It's only where both lexicon and grammar show systematic correspondences throughout that the languages under comparison fit the model of descent with modification from a single parent language. Compare English with Tok Pisin, for instance, and you'll see very strong phonetic resemblances throughout the vocabularies, but you'll find extremely unlike grammatical structures. Or compare Michif with Cree and/or French, where almost all the verbs will match Cree precisely and almost all the nouns will be identical to French; or the Media Lengua, where the entire vocabulary is Spanish but the grammar is Quechua; or Mednyj Aleut, in which most of the vocabulary is Aleut but the entire finite verb morphology is Russian; etc. Only a systematic comparison of vocabulary *and grammar* will reveal the mismatches in most of these cases -- Michif is the only exception, and there even the most fervent believer in the resemblance-is-all-you-need school will realize that to classify it genetically you'd have to toss a coin to decide whether nouns or verbs win. -- Sally Thomason sally at thomason.org ********************************************************************** PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING CHANGE OF ADDRESS: Old address: sally at isp.pitt.edu New address: sally at thomason.org USE THE NEW ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY IF YOU HAVE AN ALIAS FOR ME, CHANGE IT NOW. THIS CHANGE IS PERMANENT. ********************************************************************** From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk Thu Jan 28 20:21:37 1999 From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:21:37 EST Subject: resemblances and Romance In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >Slavic is another family which was never discovered by a linguist. >>Romance was simply "known" to be a family, given the historical knowledge that >>all these languages were somehow "corrupt" forms of Latin--not merely in the >>phonology but in the morphology. Yes. Rebecca Posner has given a great deal of thought to the question of whether we would know that Romance languages were Romance if we didn't have the historical evidence of their derivation from Latin; in particular, whether the Romance creoles would be recognized as such without the historical evidence of colonization by Romance-speakers. I don't entirely understand her answer, though; maybe some other Romanist on this list can? RW From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Jan 28 20:20:58 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:20:58 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <36AFC737.571AF3F8@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > > Indeed there is no proof outside of mathematics. Even physics cannot > "prove" that the sun will rise tomorrow. It's just that its > probability is so high that we accept it. The same goes with other > "laws" of physics like F=man, pV=nRT, etc. What separates physical > sciences from social sciences is the great uncertainty and great > complexity of the social sciences. The uncertainty comes from the > complexity. Since we don't know the laws, we cannot predict anything > and it looks extremely difficult, and it is. Some accept this to > mean that it can't be done, but I don't. Indeed, and for that very reason I carefully avoided the words "prove" and "proof" in my posting. I spoke of "confirming" or "refuting" a hypothesis. You may say I went too far in saying "refute"; "fails to confirm" might be more accurate. But at the point where one's doing that sort of hypothesis testing, phonetic resemblance is neither here nor there. Systematic correspondence, above the chance level, is what we're after. Max Wheeler ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Fri Jan 29 12:50:21 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 07:50:21 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Sally Thomason wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > Larry Trask and Rich Alderson and a few others are doing a > great job of explaining why phonetic resemblances are not considered > by historical linguists to be either necessary or sufficient to > establish genetic relationships, but so far not much emphasis has I, of course, disagree completely. It is based on nothing more than phonetic and semantic "resemblance". In order not to have useless arguments, I will use the technical term "distance" from now on. Instead of writing things everyone misunderstands, I will instead wait for someone to show the genetic relationships of two language via some examples, and then I will demonstrate why that is about nothing more than phonetic and semantic distance. > including words like "animal", which is as close to its French (or > Latin) source as in Hubey's ironic same-language examples. In addition, Excuse me. That is not irony. It is common place in mathematics. A general statement has to hold. A person is obviously genetically and familially related to himself/herself. With a slight perturbation of the same language example, you can see immediately that dialects are based on small phonetic distances, family groupings on larger phonetic distances, and so on. It is trivial to demonstrate that it is so. > though, you get the very strong phonetic resemblances in mixed > languages, which for most historical linguists (I think) don't meet > the standard criteria for genetic relatedness. It's only where > both lexicon and grammar show systematic correspondences throughout > that the languages under comparison fit the model of descent with > modification from a single parent language. That is immaterial. The fact is that certain words have been struck from the list. I posted the constraints before; 1. There must be a "matching" of M words 2. These "matches" must come from a specific set {a,b,c.....} 3. Some words that are close phonetically to the set {A,B,C,...} are void 4 The "matching" words must match semantically within a tolerance of x units. 5. The matching words must match phonologically within a tolerance of y units. #1. Nobody knows what M has to be. If anyone knows, please post it. #2. The specific set is usually Swadesh's list, because it is a formalization of the ideas inherent in this concept. The general version of it is that, some words are technological words and should not count, therefore the words must come from some restricted set. There is general agreement on this. #3. This is the infant-babble argument and it is wrong. I will explain why later. #4. This is the part in which there is confusion presently. I am more than happy to show why in every case which any linguist claims that the concepts of phonetic and semantic distance IS NOT being used, it is in fact, exactly that which is in use and nothing else. #5. This is the part that comparative linguistics still leaves flaky and in which it it easy to show that the same concept is used. > Compare English with Tok Pisin, for instance, and you'll see > very strong phonetic resemblances throughout the vocabularies, but That is rule number 2. The fact is that the specific set of words is not the ones. IT says nothing about the fact that phonetic distance is not being used. It is being used, but another rule determines that some words cannot be used. > etc. Only a systematic comparison of vocabulary *and grammar* will 1. systematic comparison has to allow for phonetic distances of words which are said to be technological and hence should be disallowed so it is not systematic phonetic distances that are used, only the phonetic distances from a specific set of words. 2. The grammar part is trickier. I would leave it for later because it is much more difficult than vocabulary. I don't mean that I want to disallow it. No, it is not really much more difficult than the other. But we should probably do things one step at a time. > exception, and there even the most fervent believer in the > resemblance-is-all-you-need school will realize that to classify it > genetically you'd have to toss a coin to decide whether nouns or verbs > win. You are using "phonetic resemblance" in a way that is not clear. I think what you want to say is something else because I do not see it the same way and I tried to show how the concept of resemblance and similarity is related to distance and how it is used in other fields, and even made it rigourously mathematical. YOu mean to say something else, but it is not clear to me. (It really is, but maybe not clear to others :-)). I have listed the general rules which are in use, even if they are foggy. PS. The concepts "systematic", "resemblance", "grammar" etc have usages which can (and does) lead to great problems. The only solution that has been found in the rigourous sciences it to create precise definitions. I did so with phonetic distance. An analogical one can be made in semantics, and should be made, but there are no takers. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Fri Jan 29 12:51:28 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 07:51:28 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Max W Wheeler wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > > > > > Indeed there is no proof outside of mathematics. Even physics cannot > > "prove" that the sun will rise tomorrow. It's just that its > > probability is so high that we accept it. The same goes with other > > "laws" of physics like F=man, pV=nRT, etc. What separates physical > > sciences from social sciences is the great uncertainty and great > > complexity of the social sciences. The uncertainty comes from the > > complexity. Since we don't know the laws, we cannot predict anything > > and it looks extremely difficult, and it is. Some accept this to > > mean that it can't be done, but I don't. > > Indeed, and for that very reason I carefully avoided the words "prove" > and "proof" in my posting. I spoke of "confirming" or "refuting" a > hypothesis. You may say I went too far in saying "refute"; "fails to > confirm" might be more accurate. But at the point where one's doing that > sort of hypothesis testing, phonetic resemblance is neither here nor > there. Systematic correspondence, above the chance level, is what we're > after. Actually you brought up something even more interesting. This problem of what is science has been and still is being debated by many thinkers, philosophers, epistemologists, Ai researchers, etc. of the past and present. From what I know of works by people like Chalmers, Feyerabend, Popper (the few that stand out), the historical development went something like this: 1. Baconian: the usual data,hypothesis,theory,experiment, proof cycle. 2. Debate over induction (abduction in some cases) and why there can be no proof. This led to "verificationism" i.e. experiment verifies the theory. 3. Debated over verificationism leads to confirmationism because verification still is based on finite number of data and is still induction. 4. More debates: an experiment cannot confirm either, because it still leads to the same problem of induction. 5. Falsificationism: this is the last stop championed by Popper. There can be nothing else except falsification of general statements. No theory can be proven, verified, confirmed, etc. It can only be falsified. So a theory with lots of good predictions (confirmation really informally) is assumed to be true until proven false. So, as far as historical linguistics goes, there is no proof of geneticity, only degrees of belief. The systematic correspondance of course is another way of saying that the odds of it being due to chance is virtually nil. But the data that is being interpreted and evaluated is based on nothing more than "phonetic distance" (whose inverse is informally called resemblance or similarity). > Max Wheeler > > ___________________________________________________________________________ > > Max W. Wheeler > School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences > University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK > Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 > ___________________________________________________________________________ -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jan 29 21:52:18 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 16:52:18 EST Subject: Marilyn and the Goats (not) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mark Hubey has asked me, on this list, to explain the celebrated (and funny) problem of Marilyn and the Goats. Since it's not relevant to the list, I have replied to him privately. If anybody else wants to hear the problem, let me know. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From sally at thomason.org Fri Jan 29 21:50:02 1999 From: sally at thomason.org (Sally Thomason) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 16:50:02 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 28 Jan 1999 19:24:20 EST." Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- re Alexis Manaster Ramer's comments: I wouldn't deny that Joseph Greenberg is a historical linguist at all -- he did some historical linguistics in the past (for instance on aspects of Semitic, if I'm remembering right, and on the history of Bantu tones). But I would certainly deny that he has been doing historical linguistics recently; all he's been doing, at least as reflected by his publications, is inspecting wordlists and a few affixes for phonetic resemblances and grouping languages on that basis. That isn't what historical linguistics is about. (Merritt Ruhlen, at least, explicitly distinguishes what he calls "classification" from historical linguistics, and says that he's doing classification. I don't believe Greenberg himself has explicitly said that he's doing classification rather than historical linguistics, but he's doing the same thing that Ruhlen, following him, is doing.) The problem with Comecrudan is that there's so little data available for *any* comparison. Goddard's proposal is actually quite cautious: "There is a basis, then, for postulating a Comecrudan family consisting of Comecrudo, Garza, and Mamulique..." (1979:380, in Campbell & Mithun, eds., The Languages of Native America). He clearly isn't claiming that the family is fully established. But what's most relevant for Manaster Ramer's comment is that Goddard does not, repeat not, postulate the family on the basis of resemblances alone; in fact, in the same passage he argues strongly for *rejecting* certain groupings based on similarities (on the grounds that the words are too similar and therefore most likely due to borrowing). Here's the crucial sentence about Comecrudan: "The case for relating Garza and Comecrudo seems strong; the agreement in the words for `sun' and `road' is particularly striking and shows a consistent phonological pattern suggestive of an historical sound law" (Goddard 1979:380). -- that is: a recurring sound correspondence. He then goes on to say that "The sparse Mamulique data compare well with Garza and Comecrudo as far as they go." And that's the postulated family. The reason he only discusses lexical items is that that's all the data there is -- wordlists. Campbell, in his 1997 book, accepts Goddard's classification; he doesn't say anything to suggest that he has carried out an independent analysis. And finally, as Larry Trask and others have pointed out, spotting phonetic resemblances in lexical items is a common stimulus to a systematic investigation of the possibility that two or more languages are related. So of course I wouldn't quarrel with Hamp's statement that comparison typically begins with items that are phonetically similar. The whole point is that no one who is doing historical linguistics would claim that that's enough to establish genetic relationship. Greenberg & Ruhlen do claim that; but their view is, to put it mildly, not popular among historical linguists (including the Russian Nostraticists, who, as Manaster Ramer and others have insisted, should not be lumped...no pun intended...with Greenberg & Ruhlen in their methodology). -- Sally Thomason sally at thomason.org From manaster at umich.edu Fri Jan 29 21:48:56 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 16:48:56 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <199901291244.HAA24093@redheat.rs.itd.umich.edu> Message-ID: This is from Alexis Manaster Ramer -- > >Sally Thomason says in part: > > > >"Larry Trask and Rich Alderson and a few others are doing a > >great job of explaining why phonetic resemblances are not considered > >by historical linguists to be either necessary or sufficient to > >establish genetic relationships," > > > >I would like to emend that to say "by some but not all historical > >linguists and by many but again not all linguists who do little if any > >historical linguistics but like to comment on it". > > > >Since Sally and I disagree about many things, but I think >> she will accept that Joseph Greenberg, Eric Hamp, >> Ives Goddard, Lyle Campbell, and I are all historical >> linguists. Now, it is obvious that Greenberg and I >> do not agree with her genealization. > >Moreover, as I have pointed out, Ives Goddard and > >Lyle Campbell, argue for a Comecrudan > >language family strictly on the basis of > >phonetic similarities (among lexical items only, > without any morphological comparisons at all!), > I also noted that Eric Hamp, one of the > >two or three most distinguished historical linguists > >alive, has argued quite specifically that language > >comparison typically begins with items that are > >phonetically similar, even if it does not end > >there. This was in 1976. To be sure, more recently >> he has made statements much like Sally's generalization, >> but I think that that was just in the heat of battle, >> as it were. > > > >AMR > > > From mkebbe at ksu.edu.sa Fri Jan 29 16:40:34 1999 From: mkebbe at ksu.edu.sa (Mohammed Z. Kebbe) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 11:40:34 EST Subject: Phonetic Res. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Hi, I find the discussion on phonetic resemblance very stimulating. Languages have been grouped on evidence of phonetic similarity; true. But a large number of similarities are just coincidental or chance resemblances. I can cite so many examples where Arabic seems to be very close to English, French or German; does this mean that Arabic is somehow related to the Indo-European family? Ziad Kebbe. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jan 29 16:35:51 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 11:35:51 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <36B13A19.E2EC5FE4@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > Instead of writing things everyone misunderstands, I will instead > wait for someone to show the genetic relationships of two language > via some examples, and then I will demonstrate why that is about > nothing more than phonetic and semantic distance. A demonstration that languages are related is far too large to post on an electronic list. To see such a demonstration, you must consult the specialist literature, and you must be prepared to devote quite a bit of time and effort to understanding the evidence. And the final presupposition is quite false. For the 87th time, linguistic relationships are not demonstrated in terms of "phonetic and semantic distances". This is a common misperception among non-linguists, and it is the reason I am constantly being approached by cranks who believe they have "proved" a relation between Basque and Irish, or Basque and Slavic, or Basque and Avar, or some damn thing in that vein. They do this because they mistakenly believe that linguistic relationship are based upon resemblances -- or, in your terms, small phonetic and semantic distances. But this is merely the mire that our illustrious predecessors crawled out of 200 years ago. > With a slight perturbation of the same language example, you can see > immediately that dialects are based on small phonetic distances, > family groupings on larger phonetic distances, and so on. It is > trivial to demonstrate that it is so. Very interesting. It is blatantly, howlingly false that "dialects" and "family groupings" are based upon degrees of "phonetic distance", as you can learn by reading any elementary textbook of historical linguistics. But you declare that your methods are readily able to prove this falsehood. So what conclusion should we draw about your methods? To begin with, the words `dialect' and `language' cannot even be defined in purely linguistic terms. The distinction is made, almost always somewhat arbitrarily, on the basis of a body of evidence, some of which is linguistic, but much of which is non-linguistic -- social, political, cultural, historical. Moreover, "phonetic differences" are characteristic of different *accents*, not of different dialects. In the US tradition, an accent is commonly regarded as just one aspect of a dialect. In the British tradition, however, an accent is regarded as something quite distinct from a dialect. These different decisions largely reflect the different states of affairs in the two countries. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From manaster at umich.edu Sat Jan 30 15:20:06 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:20:06 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask writes: "A demonstration that languages are related is far too large to post on an electronic list. To see such a demonstration, you must consult the specialist literature, and you must be prepared to devote quite a bit of time and effort to understanding the evidence." While I respect Larry and we usually agree about a lot of stuff, this is just plain wrong, and I think it is a cop-out typical of the people who like to criticize work on language classification but who rarely do it themselves and who also seem to be reluctant to discussing specific examples such as those I have repeatedly cited. What now follows is a crystal-clear example not only of an argument which is not too large but also of one which I have repeatedly cited as showing that Larry (and Rich and Sally) are quite wrong in their claims about how language relatedness actually gets established, perhaps because, again, it is not a topic they work on very much. Other examples of language- relatedness arguments which probably could easily be accommodated on this or any list include Swadesh and Hamp's work on the relatedness of Chukchee-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleutian, Hamp's work on the relatedness of Indo-European and Hattic, etc. Please note the name Hamp!! (On the other hand, these two arguments do not exemplify my broader points about phonetic similarity and lexical comparison). GODDARD'S (1979) ENTIRE SET OF COMPARISONS AND ENTIRE ARGUMENT FOR THE "COMECRUDAN" LANGUAGE FAMILY (COMPOSED OF MAMULIQUE, GARZA, COMECRUDO), ACCEPTED BY CAMPBELL (1996 and passim). Mamulique Garza Comecrudo sun atl ai al moon kan an eskan water aha(?) axe apanekla road -- aie aaul man (kessem) knarxe na woman kem kem kem sky -- apiero apel Goddard's entire argument for this relationship follows: The case for relating Garza and Comecrudo seems strong; the agreement in the words for 'sun' and 'road' is particularly striking and shows a consistent phonological pattern suggestive of an historical sound law. The sparse Mamulique data compare well with Garza and Comecrudo as far as they go. I cannot emphasize this too strongly. This is the ENTIRE argument, given by Goddard and fully endorsed by Campbell, two of the most vociferous advocates of the position that linguistic relatedness demands morphological and not just lexical comparisons and that correspondences and not just phonetic similarities are necessary. Note further: (A) The "historical sound law" Goddard alludes to is never stated. He is, of course, talking about the relation between ai and al and that between aie and aaul. But there is no single sound law that can be invoked here. Presumably (I have forgotten to ask him), he is talking about the relationship between Garza "i" and Comecrudo "l", but there surely a problem given that Comecrudo "l" also "corresponds" to Garza "r" (as in apiero : apel). (B) The reason Goddard puts a question mark next to Mamulique aha 'water' is that this is not attested as such. All we have is the sentence aha moxo cuexemad 'give me water', but there is no evidence that 'water' here is aha and not moxo or cuexemad. In reality, I have shown (but Campbell laughs this off) that cuexemad is the verb here, whose stem (*cuexe) is cognate with words meaning 'to drink' in related languages, so that the true translation was presumably 'cause- to-drink' rather than 'give'. So 'water' has to be either aha or moxo. (C) The reason Mamulique kessem is parenthesized by Goddard is presumably because he does not consider it cognate with the other forms form 'man'. This is correct, as shown by languages which have distinct cognates for the two etyma. References: Campbell, Lyle 1996 Coahuiltecan: A Closer Look. Anthropological Linguistics, 38.4:620-634. Goddard, Ives 1979 The Languages of South Texas and the Lower Rio Grande. _In_ The Languages of North America: Historical and Comparative Assessment, edited by Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, 355-389. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. See also: Manaster Ramer, Alexis 1996a Sapir's Classifications: Coahuiltecan. Anthropological Linguistics 38.1:1-37. 1996b. Sapir's Classifications: Haida and the Other Na-Dene Languages. Anthropological Linguistics 38.2:179-215. From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp Sat Jan 30 15:22:51 1999 From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:22:51 EST Subject: Phonetic Res. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mohammed Z. Kebbe wrote: > ----------------------------Original > message---------------------------- > Hi, > I find the discussion on phonetic resemblance very stimulating. > Languages have been grouped on evidence of phonetic similarity; true. > But a large number of similarities are just coincidental or chance > resemblances. I can cite so many examples where Arabic seems to be > very > close to English, French or German; does this mean that Arabic is > somehow related to the Indo-European family? > Ziad Kebbe. Very happy to hear someone talking about Arabic on histling. The short answer is that Arabic and IE are not related GENETICALLY, as far as our current knowledge goes. But they are related historically, since Arabic and its ancestors have been in contact with IE languages for thousands of years. I'd have to see your list of examples to decide what might be what. But I suspect the similarities have one of three explanations: 1) there is a small set of ancient agricultural terms which are shared by many ancient Semitic and ancient IE langauges: Ar. Haql/ Lat. ager, "field", Ar. qarn, Lat. corn "horn" 2) there are borrowings into Arabic proper from Latin, Greek, or Persian Ar. SiraT/Lat (via) strata, 3) there are borrowings from Arabic into modern European languages, Eng. "alcohol", "algebra", etc. As a fourth category you might add borrowing into European languages from other Semtic languages. Eng. camel doesn't come from AR. jamal, but comes via Latin and Greek from a NW Semitic language, probably Phoenician or Hebrew. -- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Robert R. Ratcliffe Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku Tokyo 114 Japan From manaster at umich.edu Sat Jan 30 15:45:43 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:45:43 EST Subject: Greenberg etc. In-Reply-To: <15695.917625530@pogo.isp.pitt.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Sally Thomason says: "I wouldn't deny that Joseph Greenberg is a historical linguist at all -- he did some historical linguistics in the past (for instance on aspects of Semitic, if I'm remembering right, and on the history of Bantu tones). But I would certainly deny that he has been doing historical linguistics recently; all he's been doing, at least as reflected by his publications, is inspecting wordlists and a few affixes for phonetic resemblances and grouping languages on that basis. That isn't what historical linguistics is about." I think is quite unfair to Greenberg, but that is not the main objection. My main objection is that I do not see what the basis is for Sally telling him or us what historical is or is not. All any of us can say, assuming we do historical linguistics at all, is what we think it is, and admit that there are major disagreements about much of it among people who actually do it. Sally further says: "Merritt Ruhlen, at least, explicitly distinguishes what he calls "classification" from historical linguistics, and says that he's doing classification. I don't believe Greenberg himself has explicitly said that he's doing classification rather than historical linguistics, but he's doing the same thing that Ruhlen, following him, is doing." This is not true. First, Greenberg HAS explicitly made exactly the same distinction as Ruhlen, but the distinction is not the straw man one Sally sets up between HISTORICAL LX and CLASSIFICATION but between two BRANCHES of historical linguistics: the one that does classification and the one that does reconstruction. I myself do not entirely agree with them, but it is certainly true that much of the work that involves reconstruction goes far beyond anything required to do classification. We do not need to agree on how many laryngeals Proto-IE had or even if it had any to agree that the IE lgs are related and that therefore SOME kind of Proto-IE existed. This is the whole distinction: showing that a given proto-lg must have existed and figuring out every last detail of its structure and lexicon. Obviously, the former is a much less stringent task than the latter, and people can do the former without caring about the latter. It is also very importan=t to obsever that traditionally historical lx texts and courses had very little to say about how classification work was and is done and that there is a very small number of linguists who do such work compared to the vast number who do work on the reconstruction of some proto-lg whose existence and basic outline have long been established. This is important because it means that most people who are historical linguists have no qualifications to address issues of classification. AMR From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Jan 30 15:46:59 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:46:59 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Sorry; I'm getting a bit behind with my mail. This is a response to several recent postings from Alexis Manaster Ramer and others. I myself have little experience of working on languages that are extinct and sparsely attested (and sometimes also unreliably recorded). But I have to say that I am puzzled to know how any secure conclusions at all can be reached on the basis of scanty evidence. If two extinct languages are very closely related, then I suppose the relationship might be conspicuous even in sparse data -- though I would always be worried about possible loan words. But, when the languages are not so closely related, I find it hard to understand how we can ever get beyond the stage attributed by Sally Thomason to Ives Goddard: we have a reasonable basis to suspect a relationship, but no more. As for Eric Hamp, we need not argue about his views, because he has recently proclaimed his own position with great clarity, in the following three-page article: Eric P. Hamp. 1998. `Some draft principles for classification'. In Joseph C. Salmons and Brian D. Joseph (eds), Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 13-15. This is an uncompromising statement which demands maximal rigor and brooks no departures. I endorse it, and I commend it to anyone who has not seen it. Hamp says in his first footnote that the statement was written in the late 1980s, "in the unfulfilled hope that the public press would prefer reasoned discourse and foundational criteria to quixotic and episodic speculation". Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Jan 30 15:49:57 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:49:57 EST Subject: Dictionary of HL Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Right. Apart from tidying up the cross-references, I have now finished writing my dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics. All being well (translation: if our @#$%&* computer system stays up and running), the book should go off to the publisher before the end of the first week of February. It takes 7-8 months to turn a manuscript into a published book, so I would hope to see the book out by the end of September, and possibly even by the end of August. It's being published by Edinburgh University Press. The book contains about 2400 entries, including a couple hundred that are merely cross-references (our terminology could be more unified). It is about 130,000 words long, which, inevitably, is 10,000 words over my contract limit. If the publisher bridles at this, I may have to do some cutting. I hope not. I have tried to include every significant term, classical and contemporary, that I have found used in the literature. I've made a particular point of including the terms used in textbooks of HL, many of which are idiosyncratic, such as `retrograde formation' for `back-formation' in one standard text. For the most part, I have refrained from coining new terms, but I have allowed myself to do so in cases in which I could find no term but thought that one was needed: hence the `Traugott progression', `Campbell's principle', `pitfalls of comparison', `Hamp's principles of comparison', the `Nichols progression', the `Pennsylvania model of IE', and a few others. Named "laws" are included whenever I could track them down. IE is easy, thanks to Oscar Collinge's well-known compilation; the others have taken more work. Sadly, I am still lacking in the named laws of Semitic, on which I could find little information. It's not possible to list all of the world's 300 or so recognized language families, but I've entered all of the most prominent ones, plus the major branches of the biggest ones. Every proposal of more remote relations known to me is also entered, apart from the obviously crankish ones, with summaries of the degree of acceptance currently received by each. And there are entries for the best-known isolates, as well as for most of the extinct languages of Europe. I don't know about you, but I can never remember just what `Eteo-Cretan' is, or what the difference is between North Picene and South Picene, without looking it up, and even a well-known standard reference book gets the first one wrong. Apart from hard-core historical linguistics, I've also covered the terms introduced by the sociolinguists into the study of language change, the terminology of dialectology and of linguistic geography (including population typology and the homeland problem), the terminology associated with pidgins, creoles and non-genetic languages generally, names for various kinds of word-formation, the specific terminology of philological work, the named mathematical approaches to HL, and the various attempts at linking our results with those of anthropologists, archeologists and geneticists. And I've also entered all of the symbols, abbreviations and Latin phrases used in linguistic and philological work, including a few that are not specific to us (I mean, none of these young whippersnappers seems to know what stands for). ;-) More seriously, I doubt that my students know what a dagger means next to a language name, or what means, or what a reconstruction like *t[h]aNu/i is supposed to denote, so all this stuff is in there. Under a few entries, such as `comparison' and `comparative method', I've permitted myself to write lengthy essays about procedure, methodology and evidence. As is probably well known by now, I'm a hard-liner in this area, and I endorse what I regard as maximal rigor on every point. I hope the result doesn't make some readers chew the tablecloth in frustration. ;-) And I've made a particular point of naming, entering and illustrating everything I can think of that can possibly go wrong in historical work, ranging from familiar problems like the beech-tree problem and indeterminacy to outrages like reaching down and using multiple incompatible comparisons. Oh, by the way, there is *no* entry for `phonetic resemblance'. Anybody think I should add one? ;-) I do, though, have entries for `lookalikes' and `Anklaenge'. I've tried hard to provide at least one genuine example of every term entered; this is the main reason I'm over my length limit. If I cut the examples, I could get under limit at once, but the book would be less useful. Everything from `breaking' to `exaptation' is easier for readers to understand if they can look at an example or two. So far as possible and reasonable, I've cited the source of all terms proposed in the comparatively recent literature, and I've done my best to provide further reading for the more important topics. The bibliography contains about 600 items, with a heavy bias toward recent work which is not as yet well represented in textbooks. If you were thinking of offering me some advice, but haven't gotten around to doing so, I can probably just about consider a few further additions or modifications in the next couple of days. Meanwhile, I'd like to express my gratitude to Dorothy for maintaining this list, and to all those dozens of people who have responded to my various queries with advice and information. As a result of all this assistance, the book will be *much* more complete and accurate than it would have been otherwise, and I am deeply grateful. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From evenstar at mail.utexas.edu Sat Jan 30 15:51:09 1999 From: evenstar at mail.utexas.edu (Shilpi M. Bhadra) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:51:09 EST Subject: Phonetic Res. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Arabic is not related to Indo-European. Arabic is in the Semitic family so it is related to Hebrew. English, French, and German have borrowed many words from Arabic (ie English algebra from Arabic al jabr) because of contact (Ottoman Empire, etc.) and trade. We know this because such items (called "loanwords" or "lexical adoptions") are not present in the older forms of German, French, and English (itself a member of the Germanic family). These loanwords show up after historical documentation of trade/contact etc,. with another culture and language. In order for a language to be genetically related the grammar (verbs, nouns, inflection, semantics, and structure have to show correspondences). Example from Indo-European "dog", singular. Inflection just means that the ending of the word determines whether it is the subject, object, indirect object, object of a preposition, agent, etc. The s is like grass, while the k is like in kitten. The example given below is 1 out of thousands of words that are cognate (related to each other), and their are 8 cases in Indo-European, which for sake of time and space, I'm not including here. Similarly the conjugation of the verbs system; numbers, terms for kinship (family members, friends) show consistency. These are generally closed lexical items, meaning usually one grioup will not borrow a term from another language group. Example: mater, "mother," is not a word you would usually borrow from someone else, because every language group has their own word for it. On the other hand on my own native modern Indian language - bus and computer - inventions of the English-speaking Americans or Europeans, were borrowed into my mother tongue, Bengali. Technological inventions, are the most popular loanword. Food is nowadays another. Spaghetti, macoroni, and such "English words," are all from Italian. (Even though Marco Polo brought Chinese noodles to Italy, where it was modified, so indirectly pasta owes it's parentage to the Chinese). So the picture is always more complicated then it seems. But some things have more certainty, evidence, and validity then others. Nominative (Subject Case) Hittite Greek Vedic Sanskrit Latin kuwas kuon suva kanis Accusative(Direct Object) kuwanan kuna svanam canem The reconstructed form by linguists and scholars for Proto-Indo-European (or Indo-European) is *k(u)wo(n), *kwonm -meaning no such form is actually attested, but based on phonology (sound correspondences) of daughter languages such as Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Old Irish (Avestan - an ancient grandfather to modern Persian), Gothic (the oldest form of Germanic found), Hittite (a language spoken 1800 BCE in what is modern day Turkey, Old Church Slavonic, and other identified Indo-European languages, they can reconstruct it. We know that Greek and Vedic Sanskrit are from about 1700-1500 BCE from Greek and Indian texts, while Latin is shown at about 500 BCE. None of these languages or cultures had contact with each other so they couldn't have borrowed from one another. Also the sound changes that govern from reconstructed PIE to Greek, Latin, Vedic, Sanskrit, and the like are consistent. If they borrowed words from each other then Indians would be saying cuwa for dog, or Romans sanis. Notice that most of the languages have an initial k sound, whereas Sanskrit has an s. This is an Indo-Iranian feature because Avestan shows this as well. That is one of the major rules. Latin centum "100," and Sanskrit satam "100," show this to be always true. PIE e,a, and o all fell to a in Sanskrit. There are lots of rules that govern the changes, presence or absence of certain, vowels, consonants, stress, etc that it would take a thousand pages or more to go over them in every language. Shilpi Bhadra University of Texas at Austin Classics/Humanites major evenstar at mail.utexas.edu At 11:40 AM 1/29/99 -0500, you wrote: >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >Hi, >I find the discussion on phonetic resemblance very stimulating. >Languages have been grouped on evidence of phonetic similarity; true. >But a large number of similarities are just coincidental or chance >resemblances. I can cite so many examples where Arabic seems to be very >close to English, French or German; does this mean that Arabic is >somehow related to the Indo-European family? >Ziad Kebbe. > Shilpi Misty Bhadra Classics/Humanities major evenstar at mail.utexas.edu 512-495-5586 From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Sat Jan 30 15:59:27 1999 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:59:27 EST Subject: about posting Message-ID: Dear colleagues, Recently things have gotten very intense and sometimes confusing at HISTLING Central. This is in part due to the fact that most of you are responding to a person privately AND copying your message to the list at the same time. This sometimes results in responses being posted before the original message shows up. The confusion escalates when I send a message back for revision and a response to it shows up before I get the rewritten version. Most of the time I keep things straight, but often our LISTSERV doesn't. Please help me out by not responding privately to a message and at the same time posting it to the list. Instead, post your message to the list only and let all the folks respond to it after it is broadcast. As of now, I will not post responses that have been sent both to the original sender and to the list. Thank you for your consideration, Dorothy Disterheft Moderator, HISTLING From manaster at umich.edu Sat Jan 30 19:12:42 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 14:12:42 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <36B2F7AC.6C1FC764@fs.tufs.ac.jp> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Robert Ratcliffe and Shilpi Bhadra are I am sure trying to be helpful, but it is surely disinformation to tell someone who is clearly a novice to the field that Semitic is not related to IE period (as per Bhadra) or at least not now known to be so related (as per Ratcliffe) instead of saying that (a) the vast majority of linguists have never studied the question at all, (b) of the small number who have, most probably think there is insufficient evidence for positing a relationship, but many think that there is, and many (I think many more) others that the evidence points to a fairly high probability of a relationship, but (c) among the much much smaller number who have studied the problem INTENSIVELY, the proportions seem to shift toward more support and less opposition of a relationship, but (d) no one has really done a census, so the proportions I suggested in (b) and (c) are anecdotal, (e) those who support or if dead did support a relationship include some leading specialists in IE and/or Semitic, e.g., the great IEnist Holger Pedersen, even if most of the leading specialists in each field have always either ignored the question or been against, (f) such "respectable" sources as Encyclopedia Britannica now mention the hypothesis of this relationship as a serious scientific proposal as do some encyclopedias of linguistics, and (g) such a complex answer is quite normal in any science for any number of questions, e.g., in primatology the question of whether, in addition to bonobo and human, there is just one or actually two other species (one or two chimp species if you will) in the genus Homo/Pan. I really fail to see why reasonable scholars keep trying to deny that opinions which they do not share on topics which they may not have studied in depth (I know of no published work by either poster on this topic) actually exist, instead of being content that at least for now theirs is the majority position. People who do not believe in transformations in syntax (like me) do not normally try to deny the existence of a man named Chomsky, I do not see why so many linguists try to deny the existence (now or before they died) of Pedersen, Dolgopolsky, Illich-Svitych, Bomhard, Moller, Starostin, or indeed my own. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sat Jan 30 19:17:11 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 14:17:11 EST Subject: Eric Hamp and linguistic classification In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote (among other things): > As for Eric Hamp, we need not argue about his views, because he has > recently proclaimed his own position with great clarity, in the > following three-page article: > > Eric P. Hamp. 1998. `Some draft principles for classification'. In > Joseph C. Salmons and Brian D. Joseph (eds), Nostratic: Sifting the > Evidence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 13-15. > > Hamp says in his first footnote that the statement was > written in the late 1980s, "in the unfulfilled hope that the public > press would prefer reasoned discourse and foundational criteria to > quixotic and episodic speculation". > It is important to compare this is with other works signed by Eric, such his paper in the Campbell/Mithun "Black Book", where he uncompromisingly condemns binary comparison and notes that linguistic classification in the case of IE in particular started out as he says with cases like fader : pater and not such (phonetically opaque and hence presumably dear to Larry's heart) examples as Albanian sy: Greek mati, such as his published work on the comparison of Chukchee-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut, such as his letter cosigned with myself to Scientific American and published therin which commends their popular treatment of the topic under discussion and in particular calls for more (and not, as Larry seems to want, less) open and unbiased discussion of in particular the Nostratic hypothesis, and such as his still-unpublished but widely-known and still-held (I checked last year) proposal for Hattic bein related to IE, etc. I find it bewildering that Larry suggests that we need not argue, i.e., presumably should ignore, my citations of parts of the vast Hamp corpus which he finds inconvenient and which he keeps refusing to even acknowledge, although I have cited some of them here more than once and in print on various occasions. AMR From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Jan 30 19:18:47 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 14:18:47 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster Ramer writes: [snip quote of me claiming that comparative linguistics is hard] > While I respect Larry and we usually agree about a lot of stuff, this is > just plain wrong, and I think it is a cop-out typical of the people who > like to criticize work on language classification but who rarely do it > themselves and who also seem to be reluctant to discussing specific > examples such as those I have repeatedly cited. [snip] > What now follows is a crystal-clear example not only of an argument which > is not too large but also of one which I have repeatedly cited as showing > that Larry (and Rich and Sally) are quite wrong in their claims about how > language relatedness actually gets established, perhaps because, again, it > is not a topic they work on very much. . > GODDARD'S (1979) ENTIRE SET OF COMPARISONS AND ENTIRE ARGUMENT FOR THE > "COMECRUDAN" LANGUAGE FAMILY (COMPOSED OF MAMULIQUE, GARZA, COMECRUDO), > ACCEPTED BY CAMPBELL (1996 and passim). > > > Mamulique Garza Comecrudo > > sun atl ai al > moon kan an eskan > water aha(?) axe apanekla > road -- aie aaul > man (kessem) knarxe na > woman kem kem kem > sky -- apiero apel > > Goddard's entire argument for this relationship follows: > > The case for relating Garza and Comecrudo seems strong; the > agreement in the words for 'sun' and 'road' is particularly striking and > shows a consistent phonological pattern suggestive of an historical sound > law. The sparse Mamulique data compare well with Garza and Comecrudo as > far as they go. > > I cannot emphasize this too strongly. This is the ENTIRE argument, given > by Goddard and fully endorsed by Campbell, two of the most vociferous > advocates of the position that linguistic relatedness demands > morphological and not just lexical comparisons and that correspondences > and not just phonetic similarities are necessary. OK; this is interesting. I'll put my cards on the table: no way on earth do these data constitute proof of genetic relatedness among these three languages, or even anything close to it. At the *very best*, these data suggest that there might be something worth pursuing -- assuming there exist further data with which to do the pursuing. Goddard and Campbell have a big advantage over me here: they are both specialists in North American languages. Consequently, they are able to draw upon a vast amount of background knowledge which is not available to me: where these languages were spoken, how reliable the sources are, what the local patterns of borrowing are like, and so on. When talking to one another, they can take this background knowledge for granted, just as I can do when I'm talking to my fellow specialists. But an outsider, as I am here, needs more. Six words? Just six words? That's it? To begin with, how can we even be sure that the cited words belong to the languages they're assigned to? Is that certain? Is it established, for example, that the Mamulique words were obtained from a native speaker, and not from a Comecrudo speaker who was bilingual in Mamulique? Second, these are presumably the best data available for supporting a relationship. Yet, oddly, while the other words are only vaguely similar, at best, the word for 'woman' is identical in all three languages. Very strange. How can we be sure that this is not merely a loan word, from whatever source, which has passed into all three languages? Are there grounds for rejecting that suggestion? If so, what are they? Third, the words for 'moon' suggest a loss of initial /k/ in Garza only. But the words for 'man' suggest a loss of initial /k/ in Comecrudo only. Yet the words for 'woman' suggest a loss of initial /k/ in no language at all. And this is supposed to point to implicit sound laws. I could go on, but that's enough. If Goddard and Campbell are impressed by these sparse data, then they must have access to background knowledge denied to me. I am not impressed at all, and I cannot regard these data as evidence of anything at all, beyond a suggestion that a closer look at these languages might well be justified -- assuming further data are available. If somebody sent me comparable data in support of a claim that, say, Basque, Zulu and Ainu were related, I probably wouldn't even bother to reply. In case I have failed to make myself clear, let me reiterate: there is no evidence here for any interesting conclusion at all. The probability is high that we are looking at nothing more than a few chance resemblances plus the odd loan word. Something more might be decidable if we had more data, but it seems we don't. Now, most often, when I see stuff in this vein, I am deeply suspicious of the bona fides of the presenters, because I have plenty of experience showing that zealous lumpers select and edit their data in unscrupulous ways. In this case, I have no such suspicions: I have the greatest respect for both Goddard and Campbell, and in fact I know Campbell personally. That eliminates one big potential worry. But the fact remains: on the basis of these data, the probability that these three languages are genetically related is only mildly greater than chance. Finally, before anything gets personal, let me add that I also have great respect for that prodigious polymath Alexis, but this time I think he is wrong to present these sparse data as evidence for anything. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Jan 30 19:20:19 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 14:20:19 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > Mamulique Garza Comecrudo > >sun atl ai al >moon kan an eskan >water aha(?) axe apanekla >road -- aie aaul >man (kessem) knarxe na >woman kem kem kem >sky -- apiero apel > > [...] > >(A) The "historical sound law" Goddard alludes to is never stated. He is, >of course, talking about the relation between ai and al and that between >aie and aaul. But there is no single sound law that can be invoked here. >Presumably (I have forgotten to ask him), he is talking about the >relationship between Garza "i" and Comecrudo "l", but there surely a >problem given that Comecrudo "l" also "corresponds" to Garza "r" (as in >apiero : apel). Not necessarily. The correspondence might be between apel and api(j)-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 02:24:16 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:24:16 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: <373b4616.1707211774@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > > Mamulique Garza Comecrudo > > > >sun atl ai al > >moon kan an eskan > >water aha(?) axe apanekla > >road -- aie aaul > >man (kessem) knarxe na > >woman kem kem kem > >sky -- apiero apel > > > > [...] > > > >(A) The "historical sound law" Goddard alludes to is never stated. He is, > >of course, talking about the relation between ai and al and that between > >aie and aaul. But there is no single sound law that can be invoked here. > >Presumably (I have forgotten to ask him), he is talking about the > >relationship between Garza "i" and Comecrudo "l", but there surely a > >problem given that Comecrudo "l" also "corresponds" to Garza "r" (as in > >apiero : apel). > > Not necessarily. The correspondence might be between apel and > api(j)-. That is a priori true, but we can be quite sure that Goddard did not have this in mind. So my basic remains: as far as he himself knew, he had not formulated explicitly ANY sound laws and the one he hints at seems to have a major counterexample. And of course the more important methodological point is that he does not even try to account for the other sound laws that would be needed or for the morphology, in particular for what the -panekla part of apanekla is. As it happens, I have accounted for that, and more generally, IF one accepts my results (which Ives so far does not), then several of the things which he assumed without much evidence if any do turn out to be correct. The more you accept of my analysis of the larger Pakawan family of which Comecrudan is a part and the more you look at sources for Comecrudo other than the one Ives did (he actually ignored most of what we know of this language for the purposes of the Comecrudan comparison), the more he is seen to be right. But that is exactly my point. Goddard (like Trask, Thomason, Campbell and, on his off days, Hamp) are entirely wrong in their methodological pronouncements, according to which this whole Comecrudan proposal would have be laughed to scorn or "shouted down" (to use Campbell's words re Greenberg) or simply ignored (as most people still do Nostratic and Pakawan and many other proposals). But when Goddard did this little bit of classificatory work (as far as I know, though I could be wrong, his sole substantive contribution to this area of research), he was right, much as Hamp was right about the history of IE studies in 1979 and was almost certainly right to support and expand Swadesh's comparison of Eskimo-Aleutian with Chukchee-Kamchatkan. AMR From faber at haskins.yale.edu Sun Jan 31 02:27:55 1999 From: faber at haskins.yale.edu (Alice Faber) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:27:55 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: Alexis Manaster-Ramer disingenuously summarizes work on potential Semitic/Indo-European relationships: > (a) the vast majority of linguists have never studied > the question at all, True > (b) of the small number who have, most probably think > there is insufficient evidence for positing a relationship, > but many think that there is, and > many (I think many more) others that the evidence > points to a fairly high probability of > a relationship, but > (c) among the much much smaller number who have > studied the problem INTENSIVELY, the proportions > seem to shift toward more support and less opposition > of a relationship, but > (d) no one has really done a census, so the proportions > I suggested in (b) and (c) are anecdotal, > (e) those who support or if dead did support a > relationship include some leading specialists in > IE and/or Semitic, e.g., the great IEnist Holger > Pedersen, even if most of the leading specialists > in each field have always either ignored the question > or been against, Point (e) is where I have a problem. For those who don't know me, I've done considerable work on the subgrouping of the Semitic languages, and dabbled in extra-Semitic comparisons. What Alexis is totally omitting in the above is any mention of the Afro-Asiatic family, of which Semitic comprises one group. The other language groups in Afro-Asiatic are Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic. Among scholars working on these languages, there is some disagreement about detail, such as the validity of the Omotic branch, possible sub-groupings within Afro-Asiatic, whether specific languages belong in, say, Cushitic, or in a neighboring, perhaps unrelated, African language family. The existence of an Afro-Asiatic stock, however, isn't in doubt. I have no doubt that Afro-Asiatic is related to other language stocks of comparable depth. Indo-European may be one of them. However, any attempt to relate *Semitic* to Indo-European that doesn't take Afro-Asiatic into account simply isn't worth considering seriously. If there are Semitic forms or structures that aren't widely attested in Afro-Asiatic but that show up in Indo-European, insisting that these bespeak a genetic link between Semitic and Indo-European also requires explaining away the evidence supporting an Afro-Asiatic language family. My understanding of most larger affiliations for Semitic is that are in fact filiations for Afro-Asiatic and not merely Semitic, but it's worth making that explicit. Furthermore, and now I'm speculating wildly, if I were seriously interested in linking Afro-Asiatic with other language stocks, Indo-European, or, indeed, any other Eurasian language stock, is *not* where I would look first. Rather, I would look seriously at Nilo-Saharan. I fear that at least some of the interest, especially from non-specialists, in relating Semitic and Indo-European is motivated by a notion of "Judeo-Christian cultural tradition" that may, itself, not be supported by the historical record. Alice Faber From johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu Sun Jan 31 02:29:05 1999 From: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu (Johanna Nichols) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:29:05 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances, etc. In-Reply-To: <373b4616.1707211774@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- An important statistical point. If this list > >> Mamulique Garza Comecrudo >> >>sun atl ai al >>moon kan an eskan >>water aha(?) axe apanekla >>road -- aie aaul >>man (kessem) knarxe na >>woman kem kem kem >>sky -- apiero apel >> were the entirety of our data on those three languages, we would be justified in considering relatedness to be probable. For each of the seven glosses, at least two and often all three of the languages have resemblant forms; for each of the languages, each word resembles one or both of those of the other languages. Even if we reduce the phonetic resemblance to the binary distinction between initial "k" vs. initial "a", or even initial C vs. initial V, I suspect that the number of matches would exceed what is expected by chance. Problem is (if I recall the article correctly), this isn't the entirety of our data. It's the seven most nearly resemblant glosses that could be picked out of a larger list. That is, it's all and only the positive evidence. It is that statistical consideration, and not the closeness of the phonetic resemblances or the regularity of correspondences, that makes this data set poor evidence for relatedness. Here's a simpler analog. What are the chances that if you toss a coin six times you will get heads all six times? Very small. What are the chances that, if you toss the coin a couple hundred times, somewhere in the record of those tosses there will be six successive heads? Excellent, because this is a search for positive evidence with no attention to the number of failures. (Do I recall correctly that only these three languages were compared in Goddard's original article? In that case the evidence, though weak because selected from a longer list of forms, is still stronger than the evidence usually offered in multilateral comparison, where the searcher in addition gets to choose from a larger set of languages. If we were to add Navajo and Ket data to the larger wordlist, we could easily find seven sets in which at least one of Mamulique, Garza, Comecrudo, Ket, and Navajo resembled at least one of the others even more closely than most of the resemblances in the three-language set above. None of the people involved in this discussion is advocating that approach; I'm just pointing out that, in principle, a closed set of three languages is a firmer basis for comparison than a larger set offering more options in comparison.) >>From wordlists as small and unreliable as the three above we know so little about the languages that there's little point in debating whether the resemblances are phonetically close, whether correspondences are regular, etc. Words consist of more than sounds. For all we know, these could be gender-prefixing languages in which inanimates have /a-/ and animates have /k-/. In that case the phonetics is immaterial; it's the morphemes that yield the resemblance. We have no idea what these forms represent, but if this were the entirety of our data we could suspect relatedness without positing an analysis (morphological or phonological). That would be an example of relatedness justifiably hypothesized from lexical material on the basis of something other than phonetic resemblance. Johanna Nichols Professor Department of Slavic Languages Mailcode 2979 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Phone: (1) (510) 642-1097 (direct) (1) (510) 642-2979 (messages) Fax: (1) (510) 642-6220 (departmental) From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Jan 31 02:29:52 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:29:52 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask wrote: >> Mamulique Garza Comecrudo >> >> moon kan an eskan >> man (kessem) knarxe na >> woman kem kem kem > >[..] > >Third, the words for 'moon' suggest a loss of initial /k/ in Garza only. But >the words for 'man' suggest a loss of initial /k/ in Comecrudo only. Yet the >words for 'woman' suggest a loss of initial /k/ in no language at all. And >this is supposed to point to implicit sound laws. That's a rather unfair, or shall we say pessimistic, analysis of the data. A more optimistic analysis (and I do believe a more realistic one) would be to reconstruct *kan (with k- maintained in Comecrudo after prefix es-), *kna- (cf. English *kn- > n- and *kV- > k-) and *gem (or *kh ~ *k instead of *k ~ *g). Still, Larry is right that in the absence of additional data it's impossible to decide between the pessimistic and the optimistic analyses. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Sun Jan 31 02:39:05 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:39:05 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alice Faber wrote: > > I have no doubt that Afro-Asiatic is related to other language stocks of > comparable depth. Indo-European may be one of them. However, any attempt to > relate *Semitic* to Indo-European that doesn't take Afro-Asiatic into account > simply isn't worth considering seriously. If there are Semitic forms or > structures that aren't widely attested in Afro-Asiatic but that show up in > Indo-European, insisting that these bespeak a genetic link between Semitic and > Indo-European also requires explaining away the evidence supporting an > Afro-Asiatic language family. My understanding of most larger affiliations for > Semitic is that are in fact filiations for Afro-Asiatic and not merely > Semitic, but it's worth making that explicit. It seems to me that the only thing necesary for this possible paradox to go away, would be to change the model of language change. Mammals have two parents each. All we have to do is allow the possibility of language families to have two parents (or even more) and then create a branching graph instead of a simple tree. It would be more accurate and we would not have to accept the simple model of reality for reality. Instead we would fit the model to the more complex reality. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From sally at thomason.org Sun Jan 31 19:52:21 1999 From: sally at thomason.org (Sally Thomason) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 14:52:21 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:24:16 EST." Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster Ramer refers to Goddard's Comecrudan proposal as "this little bit of classificatory work" and says that this is, as far as he [MR] knows, Goddard's "sole substantive contribution to this area of research". If by "this area of research" MR means "classificatory work" in general, his claim is startling. Goddard's 1975 article "Algonquian, Wiyot, and Yurok: Proving a Distant Genetic Relationship" (in a Festschrift for C.F. Voegelin), though of course not the first or only proposal of that grouping, is the most substantive and convincing, and is certainly a well-known contribution to the literature on long-distance relationships. It's worth remembering that the Comecrudan example first came up because MR suggested it as an example of a genetic relationship posited by a highly respected historical linguist on the basis of phonetic resemblances alone. My point in mentioning some of the details of Goddard's proposal was not to endorse it particularly -- I agree with Larry Trask that there isn't enough data for serious hypothesis testing (though we should also remember that Goddard *postulated* the relationship; he did not say that he had established one) -- but to point out that Goddard emphasizes the recurring correspondence as a crucial bit of evidence. That is quite different from mere phonetic resemblance. For the record, in his 1979 article on languages of South Texas and the Lower Rio Grande, Goddard doesn't give an exact indication of the amount of data available for Comecrudo -- he cites an early "vocabulary of 148 entries" (1829) and refers to a "more extensive body of material" collected later. But he does give figures for the other two languages in his postulated family: a 21-word vocabulary for Garza (1828), whose speakers were already "largely acculturated and all spoke Spanish" (p. 371) and a 22-entry vocabulary for Mamulique. So the database is sparse indeed, as Goddard notes. Sally Thomason sally at thomason.org From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp Sun Jan 31 19:54:27 1999 From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 14:54:27 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > ----------------------------Original > message---------------------------- > Robert Ratcliffe and Shilpi Bhadra are I am sure trying > to be helpful, but it is surely disinformation to tell > someone who is clearly a novice to the field that > Semitic is not related to IE period (as per Bhadra) > or at least not now known to be so related (as per > Ratcliffe) instead of saying that > (a) the vast majority of linguists have never studied > the question at all, I thought my original response was fair enough, but as one who has studied the question (I've published on comparative Afroasiatic and compartive Semitic issues and I was a Classicist once) I'll elaborate: Arabic is a member of the Semitic family, which is itself a branch of a 'super-family' or 'phylum' termed Afroasiatic. No further genetic connections are now known. > (b) of the small number who have, most probably think > there is insufficient evidence for positing a relationship, > but many think that there is, and > many (I think many more) others that the evidence > points to a fairly high probability of > a relationship, but As I said in my post there is evidence for a HISTORICAL relationship between Semitic and IE, but not a genetic one-- through contact. > (c) among the much much smaller number who have > studied the problem INTENSIVELY, the proportions > seem to shift toward more support and less opposition > of a relationship, but I would put Joseph Greenberg in the class of those who have studied the problem intensively, certainly he knows Afroasiatic as well as anyone, and I believe he excludes Afas from Nostratic. Another intensive student of the problem is Saul Levin ("Semitic and IE: the principal etymologies"). I beleive his overall position is agnostic, but he certainly establishes a contact basis for many of the similarities. > (d) no one has really done a census, so the proportions > I suggested in (b) and (c) are anecdotal, > (e) those who support or if dead did support a > relationship include some leading specialists in > IE and/or Semitic, e.g., the great IEnist Holger > Pedersen, even if most of the leading specialists > in each field have always either ignored the question > or been against, I think it is premature to look for a relationship here until we have a more thorough reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic. Semitic is the branch of Afas which has been most closely in contact with IE for the longest period. As long as the comparison is with Semitic only without considering the Afas context, there is no way to know whether the similarities are genetic or simply reflect an ancient ME Sprachbund. > I really fail to see why reasonable scholars keep > trying to deny that opinions which they do not > share on topics which they may not have studied > in depth (I know of no published work by either > poster on this topic) actually exist, instead of > being content that at least for now theirs is > the majority position. > > I do not see why so many linguists try to deny the existence > (now or before they died) > of Pedersen, Dolgopolsky, Illich-Svitych, Bomhard, > Moller, Starostin, or indeed my own. I didn't mean to slight anyone, but if you remember the poster asked about *phonetic similarities between words in Arabic and Modern European languages*. Even if these languages are genetically related at great time depth it is unlikely to be apparent from phonetic similarities. (I think we would all agree about that, wouldn't we?) My post was mainly a warning to be aware of other sources for similarites among languages. -- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Robert R. Ratcliffe Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku Tokyo 114 Japan From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Jan 31 19:55:47 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 14:55:47 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > > Mamulique Garza Comecrudo > > > > sun atl ai al > > moon kan an eskan > > water aha(?) axe apanekla > > road -- aie aaul > > man (kessem) knarxe na > > woman kem kem kem > > sky -- apiero apel > > > Second, these are presumably the best data available for supporting a > relationship. Yet, oddly, while the other words are only vaguely > similar, at best, the word for 'woman' is identical in all three > languages. Very strange. How can we be sure that this is not merely > a loan word, from whatever source, which has passed into all three > languages? Obviously borrowed from Sumerian geme 'woman' :) Seriously, if the Sumerian is coincidence, how can the others be put forth as evidence of genetic relationship? But thanks for the data. I can use the MOON word as evidence for a protoword KENE 'sun' that I am putting together. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jan 31 19:57:23 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 14:57:23 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Not for the first time, Alexis M R has raised a troubling question of terminology. When we say that languages A and B are related, we mean that a genetic link between them has been established to general satisfaction -- though I am, of course, begging the question of what constitutes "general satisfaction". But, when this state of affairs does not obtain, things get awkward. We commonly say that A and B are not related, but Alexis has, quite properly, pointed out that this wording can easily give outsiders the wrong impression, by implying that a link between A and B has been disproved -- an impossible conclusion. So, as Alexis argues, we really ought to be more careful and say something like "no link between A and B has at present been shown to exist". But this precise wording is long and cumbersome, and it's just too much of a mouthful to use over and over again. When I talk to linguists, I have no hesitation in saying "A and B are not related", since I assume that any linguist will know what I mean -- though Alexis has objected to this, too, in an earlier posting. When talking to non-linguists or to beginning students, I try to be more careful, but even so I often retreat to the wording "not discoverably related". Others use "not relatable". But both of these, if taken literally, would appear to imply that no relationship can ever be discovered -- exactly the thing that's bothering Alexis. So what should we say? Damned if I know. I can think of no wording which is brief enough to be used constantly and accurate enough to satisfy the most fastidious among us. Maybe we ought to stage a competition to find a suitable form of words. As for Semitic and IE, I am puzzled that this issue continues to attract such attention. Of Greenberg's four African families, Afro-Asiatic is the only one that appears to command universal assent -- or, at least, I can't name a single linguist who queries it or rejects it, in spite of the fact that no generally accepted reconstruction of Proto-AA exists at present. That being so, and Semitic being accepted by all as a branch of AA, why should people be expending so much energy on trying to link Semitic to IE? In my view, if a feature of Semitic cannot be shown to have been present in Proto-AA, then it is simply not available for any external comparisons -- except by someone who denies the Semitic-AA link, of course. Of course, I did confess that I was a hard-liner on these matters. ;-) Over to you, Alexis. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From diriyeam at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA Sun Jan 31 20:12:38 1999 From: diriyeam at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA (Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:12:38 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >At 02:12 PM 1/30/1999 EST, you wrote: >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >Robert Ratcliffe and Shilpi Bhadra are I am sure trying >to be helpful, but it is surely disinformation to tell >someone who is clearly a novice to the field that >Semitic is not related to IE period (as per Bhadra) >or at least not now known to be so related (as per >Ratcliffe) instead of saying that >AMR Why would it be disinformation? There is the hypothesis, now being banded by some, of AA being related to IE, Dravidian, among others, leading to, I suppose, to "proto-world." That is at the pro-levels and is just a floated hypothesis. But if someone says Semitic or Cushitic or any of the other branches of AA is not related to IE, I think that is a valid point. Yes, Semitic or any of the AA branches has nothing to do with IE. What is there to show that Semitic is related to AA? What reconstruction is there? Chance ressemblances are found in all languages; I can give a slew from Somali that look related to English; ex. lug <>leg; san<>nose (by metathesis); il<>eye; lur<>lure; naag<>nag; etc. Giving yourself a semantic leeway and searching through a toolbox of phonetic processes, it is amazing what patterns we can imagine. On another level, I do not see even the reason, except an ideological one, the same one that puts Egyptology in oriental studies, to have an interest in Semitic by itself in comparison to IE. The Semitic group is just a small part of the AA languages. The homeland of AA is in Africa by any measure, somewhere in northeastern Africa. The Asian Semitic group (there is an African Semitic group---Amharic, etc.) went with African tribespeople who crossed the Red Sea to the Asian side. Over there, they met the IE speakers, Persians, etc. whom they influenced and were influenced in turn. But for a long time, they were rather inconspicuous herders of sheep and goats who stayed in the deserts of the Asiatic side of the Red Sea, a terrain similar to where they came. , , |\_/| o_______ooO_( O O )_Ooo____________________________________ | \_/ | | | | From the land of AySitu and AwZaar, Ba and Ka; | | and the Hor | | Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi | | diriyeam at magellan.umontreal.ca | | http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Louvre/2521/diriye.html | | (homepage) | | http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Louvre/2521/somali.html | | (The Somali language page) | o----------------------------------------------------------o From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 20:15:07 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:15:07 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <99013015561724@haskins.yale.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Alice Faber wrote (inter alia) > Alexis Manaster-Ramer disingenuously summarizes work on potential > Semitic/Indo-European relationships: > I really hate that qualifier 'disingenuously'. I thought I was so 'ingenious'. > > (a) the vast majority of linguists have never studied > > the question at all, > > True > Finally, somebody I respect and who I think everybody respects admits this fundamental point. > > (e) those who support or if dead did support a > > relationship include some leading specialists in > > IE and/or Semitic, e.g., the great IEnist Holger > > Pedersen, even if most of the leading specialists > > in each field have always either ignored the question > > or been against, > > Point (e) is where I have a problem. For those who don't know me... There is no question in my mind that Dr. Faber is a really well-known and (although this is an independent point) truly exceptionally wonderful historical linguist, both in and out of Semitic. > What Alexis is totally omitting ... is any > mention of the Afro-Asiatic family, of which Semitic comprises one group. The > other language groups in Afro-Asiatic are Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, > and Omotic. [snip] > My understanding of most larger affiliations for > Semitic is that are in fact filiations for Afro-Asiatic and not merely > Semitic, but it's worth making that explicit. > Of course, Alice is right, but I just did not want to make my posting an advertisement for Nostratic. Of course, too, since I have somehow become one of the main advocates of taking Nostratic seriously in recent years, I agree fully. For those few people who do not know this, the Nostratic theory, so named by Pedersen (whom I mentioned in the post Alice is responding to), holds (in most of its versions, but not all) that IE, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Uralic, and some otherlanguage families (about which there is some room for disagreements) form a bigger family, called Nostratic (some other names have also been proposed). > Furthermore, and now I'm speculating wildly, if I were seriously > interested in > linking Afro-Asiatic with other language stocks, Indo-European, or, indeed, > any other Eurasian language stock, is *not* where I would look first. Rather, > I would look seriously at Nilo-Saharan. This could well be right, but historically Nilo-Saharan was all but unknown to the pioneers of Nostratic.. As it happens, I also know next nothing about it, so for the time being, I cannot try to test Alice's hypothesis. But the question is not I dont think a really that important. It is quite often the case that we put together language families in a way that later turns out to require revision. When Armenian was recognized as Indo-European, people took it to be a part of the Iranian group of languages. That turned to be wrong, but it does not mean that Armenian is therefore any more or less IE. It does not matter where you start so much as where you end up. > I fear that at least some of the > interest, especially from non-specialists, in relating Semitic and > Indo-European is motivated by a notion of "Judeo-Christian cultural > tradition" that may, itself, not be supported by the historical record. > I dont think this attribution is true in the case of the principal Nostratic scholars such as Pedersen or Illich-Svitych or Dolgopolsky or Bomhard etc. It certainly is not something true of me. And I don't know if all this matters. Chomsky's view of about the innateness of linguistic capacities may have been influenced by his views about human equality-or vice versa, but that does not have any bearing on whether he is right or wrong. Alexis From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 20:16:50 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:16:50 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <36B3AEC0.5D155375@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote (inter alia): > > Those who have been on Altainet know that I have not > agreed with Alexis on a number of issues so if I write > this in support it is certainly not due to 'buddyism'. This is certinly true. I fear my responses to Dr. Hubey on other lists have bordered on rude. It is very kind of Mark to rise about that. [snip] > Most linguists do not seem to study anything at all, > but merely memorize somethings they read and then assert them > everywhere they go and expect everyone to bow down and kiss > their feet. I do think that linguists have the same relationship to language that physicists do to the physical universe, and that we should be listened to in our area as much as they are in theirs. This indeed has been my main bone of contention with Mark, who is one of the many nonlinguists who seem to feel that they know much more about lg than we do. > There is no such thing as "proof by assertion". > Contrary to what some of the more ignorant members of this > profession claim (and write in their books), there is also > no such thing as "proof by repetetion". That's true, but even in the natural sciences we find people behaving as though there were. > > Linguists like economists, sociologists and psychologists > before them will have to learn to wield the tools of science, > mostly logic and probability theory and reason cogently. I disagree in the sense that I think linguistics is in most regards much more scientific than the other three fields mentioned. Moreover, I believe that, when the real history of Western science is written, everyone will see that linguistics has been the source of some very important ideas. More generally, it is not by any means true that the natural sciences have always been ahead of the social/ humanistic ones. The whole idea of evolution originated with Vico in history/social science, first became really scientific in linguistics, only then (and in part thence) in geology and biology, and much later in physics. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 20:17:28 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:17:28 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances, etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I will not now respond to the people who have been kind enough to respond to my posting on Comecrudan. Rather, I will provide the info several of them requested first. For one of these lgs, Comecrudo, we have loads of data, but for Garza and Mamulique all we have is what follows: Idiome Garza [Garza Language] Notes fournies par le chef de cette nation [Notes furnished by that nation's chief] le soleil [sun] ai la lune [moon] an les e'toiles [stars] ma^tajo l'eau [water] aje chemin [path] aie homme [man] knarje femme [woman] kem petit garc,on [boy] amoso petite fille [girl] amasije pierre [stone] ouajue Ebano [ebony] oueia Dieu [God] (crossed out: mue') Alkiliale chevreuil [deer] (crossed out: akial) mue' rivie`re [river (crossed out: oueia) akial un bois (monte) [woods] (crossed out: Teminapam) ouiae les Comanches Teminapam Lipans idm [ditto] Rio Bravo Auejo-ajuejue Rio San Juan Apiame (1) ciel [sky] apiero rancheria [rancheria] ouamam cheval [horse] apiope (1) Quelques uns le nomment Ajuejue [Some call it Ajuejue]. For Mamulique, there are two versions of the same word list. Iia. First of Two Sets of Mamulique data (p.23) Langue des Indige`nes Carissos [Language of the Carisso Natives] qui habitaient les environs de l'hacienda [who lived in the neighborhood of the hacienda] de Mammulique ds le Nouveau-Leon [Mammulique in Nuevo Leo'n] lorsque nous passames en 1828 [when we passed by in 1828] Dieu [God] Mancoyad soleil [sun] atl e'toiles [stars] comchate lune [moon] can me`re [mother] quemen fils [son] ueno chevreuil [deer] uneis, ou oues arc [bow] quiyemen fle`che [arrow] tatepe couteau [knife] uecuen homme [man] (Erasure)quessem femme [woman] quem Donne-moi de l'eau [Give me water] Aha mojo cuejemed Je prends [I take] Nejuchi Le soleil se le`ve [The sun rises] Atl ape talem Moi [me] Napel Je vais [I go] Apela tu vas [you go] Nas il va [he goes] Lepema Ceui-la` va [That one goes] Ehuete Lepema Que faites-vous?[ What are y'all doing?] Napel cuauste Qu'est-ce [What is this?] Zecst Iib. Second Version of the Mamulique Corpus (p. 28) Indige`nes [Natives] Langue des Carrissos, petite tribu que nous recontrames aux environs de l'hacienda de Mamulique dans le Nouveau-Leon. [Language of the Carrisso, a small tribe which we encountered in the neighbourhood of the Mamulique hacienda in Nuevo Leon] Francais Carriso Dieu [God] Mancoyao homme [man] Quessem soleil [sun] atl me`re [mother] quemen ou` [or] kem fils [son] beno lune [moon] can e'toiles [stars] comchate cerf ou` chevreuil [stag or deer] uneis arc [bow] quiyemen fle`che [arrow] tatepe couteau [knife] unecen Je, moi [I, me] napel tu [you] nas (Crossed out: Lepema)Vas [You go] Lepema celui-la` [that one] ehuete va [goes] lepema prends [take] nejuchi Voyez mon journal [See my journal] AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 20:19:16 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:19:16 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances, etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I so rarely agree with anything Johanna says and vice versa (in THIS area at least, for I like most of her work in other areas of linguistics very much and indeed admire it) that I am tickled that she has made some of the very points I was going to make later, but much better than I would have (of course, we may disagree about some issues, as I will point out below). I esp. appreciate Johanna's support given that I have been pretty ruthless (and in her view unfair) in my critiques of her on various lists and in print. Alexis On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Johanna Nichols wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > An important statistical point. If this list > > > > >> Mamulique Garza Comecrudo > >> > >>sun atl ai al > >>moon kan an eskan > >>water aha(?) axe apanekla > >>road -- aie aaul > >>man (kessem) knarxe na > >>woman kem kem kem > >>sky -- apiero apel > >> > > were the entirety of our data on those three languages, we would be > justified in considering relatedness to be probable. For each of the seven > glosses, at least two and often all three of the languages have resemblant > forms; for each of the languages, each word resembles one or both of those > of the other languages. > This is THE most important point, although absolute numbers cannot be completely ignored (one of our small disagreements). > Even if we reduce the phonetic resemblance to the binary distinction > between initial "k" vs. initial "a", or even initial C vs. initial V, I > suspect that the number of matches would exceed what is expected by chance. > The problem is that the chance vs. greater-than-expected-by-chance business is not all that helpful, because (a) borrowings also exhibit patterns of correspondence that could not have arisen by chance, and (b) I continue to maintain that it makes no sense to use a priori probabilities. I have written on these points in various places. > Problem is (if I recall the article correctly), this isn't the entirety of > our data. It's the seven most nearly resemblant glosses that could be > picked out of a larger list. That is, it's all and only the positive > evidence. True, but that the total amount of data for Mamulqieu and Garza is maybeonly two or three times what we have here. For Comecrudo, we have LOTS iof data. But still we have so little data for M and G that this is surely more than enough to make a strong case, just like Ives says. Please note that the same thing happens all the time with lgs that are represented by a few words in some newly dug-up or deciphered inscription. > > (Do I recall correctly that only these three languages were compared in > Goddard's original article? Yes and no. He also tries to show that Comecrudo is NOT related to Cotoname, although I claim they are, and so on. > In that case the evidence, though weak because > selected from a longer list of forms, is still stronger than the evidence > usually offered in multilateral comparison... This is really a side issue, but it seems to me that Johanna is just repeating the usual disinformation about so-called multilaterla comparison. Please see Baxter and MR's revier of Ringe 1992 in Diachronica and my forthcoming "Uses and abuses of math in lx" (I can email either or both to anyone who wants them) on the correct mathematical treatment of so-called multilateral comparison. > From wordlists as small and unreliable as the three above we know so little > about the languages that there's little point in debating whether the > resemblances are phonetically close, whether correspondences are regular, > etc. >Words consist of more than sounds. [snip] > In that case the phonetics is immaterial; it's the morphemes that > yield the resemblance. [snip] > That would be an > example of relatedness justifiably hypothesized from lexical material on > the basis of something other than phonetic resemblance. > Precisely the point I made several times here and elsewhere. When people classify languages, they often compare morphological patterns without establishing REGULAR sound correspondences, just on impressionistic ideas that the sounds look similar enough. IE was established in this way, more or less, as a matter of fact. I think Niger-Kordofanian is an even clearer example. > For all we know, these could be > gender-prefixing languages in which inanimates have /a-/ and animates have > /k-/. Actually, we DO know, because Comecrudo is quite well known as are more distnatly related lgs. And this is not so. But the general point is exactly right. Thank you, Johanna. From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 20:23:13 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:23:13 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <36B3C336.4DCDA8F5@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- There may be cases where we would like to say this. Eastern Armenian Romany is the classic example, although recent surveys of the topic tend to focus on other examples (Mitchif, Copper Island Aleut, etc.). The W. European Jewish language known as Loshnekoudesh (apparently also once used in at least one Christian village in Bavaria) and distinct from Yiddish (it is in fact a mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew in the way that EAR is a mix of Romany and Armenian, Mitchif of French and Cree, etc.) is one that I don't think is EVER cited, but it happens to be the only of these which I have studied in some detail, so I thought I'd put in a plug. But this has nothing whaterv to do with the fact that within the Nostratic theory, Semitic is not a sister of IE but rather a daughter of Afro-Asiatic, which in turn is a sister of IE. According to Sergei Starostin, who I disagree with on more things than not but who I nevertheless think is surely one of the top two or three names in comparative, and especially classificatory, linguistics now alive, AA is not a daughter of Nostratic but a sister. Of course, as I pointed out earlier, the Nostratic theory in ANY form is far from universally accepted even among the small number of linguists who have the qualifications to judge it. More broadly, it has been derided or dismissed (and occasionally even substantively criticized) by many who do not, but I do not know whether it would be true to say, that among those who do not have the requisite background but nevertheless do hold an opinion, most are for or against. I think the nays are probably more numerous, but I am not sure. A. On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > > It seems to me that the only thing necesary for this possible paradox > to go away, would be to change the model of language change. Mammals > have two parents each. All we have to do is allow the possibility of > language families to have two parents (or even more) and then create > a branching graph instead of a simple tree. It would be more accurate > and we would not have to accept the simple model of reality for reality. > Instead we would fit the model to the more complex reality. > > > -- > Best Regards, > Mark > -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= > hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey > =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= > From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 23:32:31 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:32:31 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <36B45949.93BD8404@fs.tufs.ac.jp> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote: > > I thought my original response was fair enough, but as one who has > studied the question (I've published on comparative Afroasiatic and > compartive Semitic issues and I was a Classicist once) I'll elaborate: > Arabic is a member of the Semitic family, which is itself a branch of a > 'super-family' or 'phylum' termed Afroasiatic. No further genetic > connections are now known. The Afro-Asiatic connection is itself widely question by people who work within Semitic and by one important figure in comparative linguistics, Gerhard Doerfer. Of course, they are crazy to take this view, but their existence does show that it is not wise to identify truth with universal acceptance of a proposition. The proposition that Afro-Asiatic and hence Semitic IS related to Indo-European is held by many fewer scholars, and rejected by many more, than the thesis that Semitic is part of Afro-Asiatic. Nonetheless, both the Afro-Asiatic and the Nostratic hypothesis are legitimate linguistic theories held by enough competent scholars to be true or at least probable so that it is in my view disinformation to respond to the question of whether Semitic to related to IE by stating the former as a fact(without admiting the existence of contrary opinions) and not even mentioning the latter at all. My worthy opponent has every right to reject Nostratic, although he has not cited any evidence that he has the qualifications to judge this theory on its merits or that he has even read the relevant literature, but he has no right whatever to pretend that I, for example, do not exist. > As I said in my post there is evidence for a HISTORICAL relationship > between Semitic and IE, but not a genetic one-- through contact. There is well-known literature on BOTH points. As matter of fact some of the best work on contacts between the twain was done by people who also think they are (distantly) related, but apparently not everybody reads the literature. > > I would put Joseph Greenberg in the class of those who have studied the > problem intensively, certainly he knows Afroasiatic as well as anyone, > and I believe he excludes Afas from Nostratic. Another intensive student > of the problem is Saul Levin ("Semitic and IE: the principal > etymologies"). I beleive his overall position is agnostic, but he > certainly establishes a contact basis for many of the similarities. Of course, Greenberg excludes AA from his version of Nostratic, which he calls by another name, but anyone who has read Greenberg also knows that Greenberg believes that AA and Nostratic are themselves distnatly related. Moreover, I do not deny that many linguists reject the AA-IE connection. I deal with them, in print, all the time: Ringe, Hamp, Serebrennikov, Doerfer, and many others certainly exist(ed). It is MY existence that I would like acknowledged, and that of Pedersen, Illich-Svitych, Dolgopolsky, Bomhard, et al. > > I think it is premature to look for a relationship here until we have a > more thorough reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic. You may feel that way, but you have no right to pretend that there are not scholars who not only"look for a relationship" but think they have found one. The very formulation of this sentence is unfair. We are not talking about an idea that has just been broached but one which is almost as old as the idea of AA itself. > Semitic is the branch > of Afas which has been most closely in contact with IE for the longest > period. As long as the comparison is with Semitic only without > considering the Afas context, there is no way to know whether the > similarities are genetic or simply reflect an ancient ME Sprachbund. > No Nostratic scholar does this and to suggest that they (we?) do is another piece of disinformation. In fact, Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky were among the pioneers of modern AA comp. ling., with major contributions in Chadic and Cushitic, respectively, while at the same time being the cofounders of modern Nostratic studies. But you keep writing as though you are unaware of or would like to ignore the existnece of the existence of these scholars, and others like me. > > I do not see why so many linguists try to deny the existence > > (now or before they died) > > of Pedersen, Dolgopolsky, Illich-Svitych, Bomhard, > > Moller, Starostin, or indeed my own. > > I didn't mean to slight anyone, but if you remember the poster asked > about *phonetic similarities between words in Arabic and Modern European > languages*. Even if these languages are genetically related at great > time depth it is unlikely to be apparent from phonetic similarities. (I > think we would all agree about that, wouldn't we?) Of course, we agree, but it is still unbelievable that anybody would continue to defend the idea of teaching people about AA without any mention of Nostratic. Moreover, as noted, you misrepresent Greenberg's views and still do not seem to want to acknowledge that Illich-Svitych or Dolgopolsky or Bomhard or Pedersen or I or any number of others I could have named have (had) ANY views at all. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 23:33:05 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:33:05 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Robert Whiting wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > > > > > > Mamulique Garza Comecrudo > > > > > > woman kem kem kem > > Obviously borrowed from Sumerian geme 'woman' :) > > Seriously, if the Sumerian is coincidence, how can the others be put > forth as evidence of genetic relationship? > Now here is a good question for a scholar I admire very much. And the answer is simple, and it follows from what Johanna Nichols so elegantly explained earlier. The more coincidences we find, the less likely they are to be coincidences. If you could find Sumerian matches for all these words, then you would have a point. As it is, you do not. Alexis From tvn at cis.uni-muenchen.de Sun Jan 31 23:34:03 1999 From: tvn at cis.uni-muenchen.de (Theo Vennemann) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:34:03 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alice Faber wrote on 30 Jan. 1999: >If there are Semitic forms or >structures that aren't widely attested in Afro-Asiatic but that show up in >Indo-European, insisting that these bespeak a genetic link between Semitic and >Indo-European also requires explaining away the evidence supporting an >Afro-Asiatic language family. My understanding of most larger affiliations for >Semitic is that are in fact filiations for Afro-Asiatic and not merely >Semitic, but it's worth making that explicit. Since the similarities are overwhelmingly between Indo-European and Semitic rather than between Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic as a whole (or Proto-Afro- Asiatic), they do not owe their origin to genetic relatedness of Indo-European and Semitic but to language contact between Indo-European languages and Semit- ic langiages (or--Prof. Trask may be listenig--to chance). Contacts with Indo-European may have included those branches of Afro-Asiatic that stand close to Semitic, especially Aegyptian and Berber. To the extent that related languages may share certain properties, it is not always trivial to deter- mine the donor langiage, so that the designation Hamito-Semitic (as in Gensler's dissertation) remains useful. An example would be the VSO syntax of Insular Celtic. Theo Vennemann 31 January 1999 From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 23:36:10 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:36:10 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Not for the first time, Alexis M R has raised a troubling question of > terminology. I don't know if I should be pleased or not. But it IS true that I do sometimes raise questions of terminology. However, I more often raise issues not of terminology but of the substance, methodology, or (a sure sign of moral turpitude) history of linguistics. And I don't think I raised any question of terminology here at all. > > When we say that languages A and B are related, we mean that a genetic > link between them has been established to general satisfaction -- though > I am, of course, begging the question of what constitutes "general > satisfaction". Yes, you are begging one of the central questions, and ignoring the other (which is just WHO constitutes the generality that must be satisfied). People who have no credentials in the relevant fields for example seem to me to be excluded for that set, yet it also seems to me that they are the dominant force that I am having to contend with. > > But, when this state of affairs does not obtain, things get awkward. > We commonly say that A and B are not related, but Alexis has, quite > properly, pointed out that this wording can easily give outsiders the > wrong impression, by implying that a link between A and B has been > disproved -- an impossible conclusion. > That was NOT my point at all. My point is that if someone who is clearly not a linguist asks 'Does deep structure exist?' the only fair answer is that this has (had?) long been a controversial question. Ditto as to whether Semitic and IE are related. > So, as Alexis argues, we really ought to be more careful and say > something like "no link between A and B has at present been shown to > exist". But this precise wording is long and cumbersome, and it's just > too much of a mouthful to use over and over again. This is not all my point again. I am not concerned with how we should describe the relationships of Zuni to any other languages, this being to my mind a case where essentially nothing is known (although it would be disinformation not to point out that there have attempts to relate it to Penutian, by Newman, Ameridn generally, by Greenberg,etc., and I would not like commit that act of disinformation). I am concerned with the fact that people are pretending that the Nostratic theory either does not exist or has been discredited. > > When I talk to linguists, I have no hesitation in saying "A and B are > not related", since I assume that any linguist will know what I mean -- > though Alexis has objected to this, too, in an earlier posting. I do, but mostly because we say these things precisely as a way of spreading disinformation, even among linguists. We rarely have occasion to talk about the fact that Polish does not have a special relationship to Chinese to the exclusion of the rest of IE and Sino-Tibetan. If we did, then (and only then) would it make sense to say 'Polish is not related to Chinese'. In any other context, it is impermissible. > When > talking to non-linguists or to beginning students, I try to be more > careful, but even so I often retreat to the wording "not discoverably > related". Others use "not relatable". But both of these, if taken > literally, would appear to imply that no relationship can ever be > discovered -- exactly the thing that's bothering Alexis. Again, that is NOT my concern here. > So what should we say? We should tell them the truth, which is that the question is controversial. THIS is what is bothering Alexis, that even honorable and competent scholars like Larry cannot bring themselves to sayTHAT simple truth, that it is CONTROVERSIAL (everybody together now: CONTROVERSIAL) whether, for example, AA is related to IE. Now was that so hard? > As for Semitic and IE, I am puzzled that this issue continues to attract > such attention. Of Greenberg's four African families, Afro-Asiatic is > the only one that appears to command universal assent -- or, at least, I > can't name a single linguist who queries it or rejects it.. I can and you know that, because I have named him in various postings in discussions you were involved in (and in print, but who has time to read!?). Gerhard Doerfer is certainly a better known name in hist ling than yours or mine, and he did for many years claim precisely that Semitic is not related to Cushitic, he then seemed a couple of yearsago to take it back (to my great relief), but I have reason to believe he in fact did not mean to take it back and still holds that opinion. But I am not 100% sure. >That being so, and Semitic being accepted by all as a branch > of AA, why should people be expending so much energy on trying to link > Semitic to IE? In my view, if a feature of Semitic cannot be shown to > have been present in Proto-AA, then it is simply not available for any > external comparisons -- except by someone who denies the Semitic-AA > link, of course. There ARE people who compare IE to Semitic directly, of course, but I have not been talking about them precisely because they discredit themselves by not taking AA into account. But it is not a priori impossible that the intenal subgrouping of Nostratic that we are asssuming here is wrong. Maybe Semitic is more closely related to IE than to the rest of AA. A PRIORI possible. I do not particularly think that it is likely and I dont think it has ever been considered, but I am not even sure of that. On the other hand, could Semitic with Egyptian and Berber be more closely related to IE than to Cushitic? Not nearly as crazy perhaps. But none of this is relevant to "what bothers Alexis". I just would like people to be able to say that one word 'controversial'. I am not a native speaker of English and I can say it just fine. Those of you who are should have no trouble. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 23:37:00 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:37:00 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19990131101813.007b38c0@magellan.umontreal.ca> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > > >At 02:12 PM 1/30/1999 EST, you wrote: > >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > >Robert Ratcliffe and Shilpi Bhadra are I am sure trying > >to be helpful, but it is surely disinformation to tell > >someone who is clearly a novice to the field that > >Semitic is not related to IE period (as per Bhadra) > >or at least not now known to be so related (as per > >Ratcliffe) instead of saying that {snip} > > > Why would it be disinformation? Because many competent scholars have published important evidnce that they ARE related. > There is the hypothesis, now being banded > by some, of AA being related to IE, Dravidian, among others, leading to, I > suppose, to "proto-world." That is at the pro-levels and is just a floated > hypothesis. You are presumably referring to the Nostratic hypothesis, and engaging in more disinformation by saying that this has any connection to "proto-world". This is a confusion not even made by thebetter popular journalists who have written on this, much less any responsible scholar, and represents an attempt at creating guilt by association where there is not in fact even any association to speak of (except for Greenberg and Shevoroshkin maybe). > But if someone says Semitic or Cushitic or any of the other > branches of AA is not related to IE, I think that is a valid point. Not if AA is itself related to IE. > Yes, > Semitic or any of the AA branches has nothing to do with IE. What is there > to show that Semitic is related to AA? What reconstruction is there? Chance > ressemblances are found in all languages; I can give a slew from Somali > that look related to English; ex. lug <>leg; san<>nose (by metathesis); > il<>eye; lur<>lure; naag<>nag; etc. Giving yourself a semantic leeway and > searching through a toolbox of phonetic processes, it is amazing what > patterns we can imagine. > This is not a competent critique of the Nostratic hypothesis, I dont think. Or are you actually now saying that Semitic is not even part of AA? > On another level, I do not see even the reason, except an ideological one, > the same one that puts Egyptology in oriental studies, to have an interest > in Semitic by itself in comparison to IE. Agreed, but I do not have such an interest. >The Semitic group is just a small > part of the AA languages. True, but this does not contradict the fact that many competent scholars think that AA is part of Nostratic. [snip] From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 23:39:32 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:39:32 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: <5948.917755049@pogo.isp.pitt.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Sally Thomason wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > Alexis Manaster Ramer refers to Goddard's Comecrudan proposal > as "this little bit of classificatory work" and says that this is, > as far as he [MR] knows, Goddard's "sole substantive contribution > to this area of research". If by "this area of research" MR means > "classificatory work" in general, his claim is startling. Goddard's > 1975 article "Algonquian, Wiyot, and Yurok: Proving a Distant > Genetic Relationship" (in a Festschrift for C.F. Voegelin), though > of course not the first or only proposal of that grouping, is the > most substantive and convincing, and is certainly a well-known > contribution to the literature on long-distance relationships. I meant an original contribution, that is, one proposing a family which had been previously proposed and strongly argued (Algic was by Sapir) AND generally accepted (as Algic has been ever since Haas's paper on the subject). Ives is one of my intellectual heroes, though I think he is wrong on some few issues of methodology which I have spelled out in print and right on others (and the 1975 paper is one I have cited in this contex, I am sure). I am sorry Sally has misunderstood what I meant. My fault of course. So, unless I am mistaken and Sally would surely have pointed it out if I were, Ives' one and only published proposal for a new linguistic family is the Comecrudan one. And it is one I fully accept. Indeed one of those many contributions of Ives that make him my hero. > It's worth remembering that the Comecrudan example first came up > because MR suggested it as an example of a genetic > relationship posited by a highly respected historical > linguist on the basis of phonetic resemblances alone. Precisely, though not the only such example I dont think, it is perhaps the clearest such example there is. And it would lose all force if I did not admire Ives as I do. > My > point in mentioning some of the details of Goddard's proposal > was not to endorse it particularly -- I agree with Larry > Trask that there isn't enough data for serious hypothesis > testing (though we should also remember that Goddard > *postulated* the relationship; he did not say that he had > established one) That's a quibble. He says there is a strong case. Further, I did not talk just of Goddard. I said 'Goddard and Campbell', and I think Campbell clearly takes Comecrudan as established. > -- but to point out that Goddard emphasizes > the recurring correspondence as a crucial bit of evidence. > That is quite different from mere phonetic resemblance. Ives does not indicate that the correspondence (which he does not identify, which occurs in two examples if THAT is the one had in mind and seems to be contradicted by another one) is crucial. He mentions it in passing. And I dont believe that Campbell even mentions it, though I could, for once, be wrong. > > For the record, in his 1979 article on languages of South > Texas and the Lower Rio Grande, Goddard doesn't give an exact > indication of the amount of data available for Comecrudo -- > he cites an early "vocabulary of 148 entries" (1829) and > refers to a "more extensive body of material" collected > later. But he does give figures for the other two languages > in his postulated family: a 21-word vocabulary for Garza (1828), > whose speakers were already "largely acculturated and all spoke > Spanish" (p. 371) and a 22-entry vocabulary for Mamulique. So > the database is sparse indeed, as Goddard notes. > Indeed, but what is the implication of "For the record"? Is it again that I did something wrong? AMR From aristar at linguistlist.org Mon Jan 4 22:49:44 1999 From: aristar at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar) Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1999 17:49:44 EST Subject: Some new web pages for HISTLING Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Colleagues, I've just received this information from Anthony Aristar (of the Linguist List); it may be of interest. Dorothy Disterheft from Anthony Aristar: We've just put up a web-page which will allow people to subscribe via the web to those lists we archive, and to search them as well. We hope it'll make it a lot easier for people to find histling, and to interact with the listserv, since we've linked this to our main page. The URL is: http://linguistlist.org/list-archives.html The form for interacting with the Listserv might be useful for those subscribers who never quite figure out how to get the Listserv to do what they want. The URL for this is: http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-histling.html Have a Happy New Year! Anthony From d_anderson at indo-european.org Sat Jan 9 00:30:58 1999 From: d_anderson at indo-european.org (Deborah W. Anderson) Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1999 19:30:58 EST Subject: New Issue of IE Bulletin Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- A new issue of the INDO-EUROPEAN STUDIES BULLETIN (formerly "IE Newsletter") has appeared. It contains news, book reviews, listings of new books, upcoming conferences and summer schools, new electronic resources for IE, IE books available for review in Language as well as essays. Contents of Vol. 8, No. 1, November/December 1998 Article: Rex Wallace, "Recent Research on Sabellian Inscriptions" News and Brief Communications Conference Reports: Colloque International: "Gaulois et celtique continental" (Joe Eska) Seventeenth East Coast IE Conference (Andrew Garrett) Aspects of Bilingualism in the Ancient World (Mark Janse) Book Reviews: Sound Law and Analogy, ed. A. Lubotsky (Brent Vine) Baltistik, ed. A. Bammesberger (Henning Andersen) Albanian-English Dictionary, ed. L. Newmark (Martin Huld) The Bronze Age and Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, ed. V. Mair (Karlene Jones-Bley) List of New Electronic Resources for IE List of Upcoming Conferences and Summer Schools List of New Books List of Books for Review (for the journal Language). The Bulletin is officially affiliated with the Indo-European Studies Program at UCLA. Contribution levels (which pay for this bi-annual newsletter and support IE activities) are $10 for students, $20 for others ($25 for those outside the continental U.S.). Checks should be made payable in US$ to "FAIES/UCLA Foundation" and sent to: FAIES, 2143 Kelton Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90025. Credit cards are also accepted. Eurochecks are not being accepted at this time. Back issues are also available. For a listing of contents of back issues, please see: http://www.indo-european.org/page6.html. For further information, please contact: dwanders at socrates.berkeley.edu From Stockwel at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sat Jan 16 20:46:36 1999 From: Stockwel at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (Robert Stockwell) Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 15:46:36 EST Subject: SHEL-1 Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Conference Announcement Studies in the History of the English Language: SHEL-1 Place: UCLA Date: May 28-30, 2000 First Session: Friday Evening Plenary Lecture Second and Third Sessions: Saturday Morning and Afternoon Conference Banquet and Second Plenary: Saturday Evening Fourth Session: Sunday Morning Purpose and Objectives: In Europe the biennial conferences known as ICEHL (International Conference on English Historical Linguistics) have served the field of English Language Studies extremely well, giving the field both focus and recognition that it almost certainly would not have achieved otherwise. These conferences have taken place at major English Language research centers over the past twenty years, each conference organized and managed by the faculty of the conference site: Durham, Odense, Sheffield, Amsterdam, Cambridge, Helsinki, Valencia, Edinburgh, Poznan, Manchester. In North America, despite the presence of many major scholars in the field, Historical English Linguistics -- the History of the English Language told in the light of contemporary linguistic sophistication -- has not emerged with the same kind of recognizable personality. Many scholars who do this kind of work are to a significant extent servants also of other fields such as general linguistics, English medieval studies, American dialectology, applied linguistics and teacher training. By organizing SHEL, what we hope to do is begin to provide the same kind of focus for English Historical Linguistics in North America as the focus achieved in Europe by the ICEHL series, in North America for Germanic Linguistics by GLAC (Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference), for American Dialectology by the American Dialect Society, for Social Dialectology by NWAVE, and of course for General Linguistics by the LSA. We are not in competition with any of these series or organizations; we believe, however, that a weekend meeting dedicated entirely to linguistic issues in the History of English will be an energizing and useful academic experience. We begin modestly: no organization, just a conference. Neither the timing nor the choice of UCLA as the first venue are accidental; in early June of the year 2000 Robert Stockwell will reach a major anniversary and has agreed to provide the first plenary talk in lieu of a 'retirement' lecture. Anne Curzan is offering to organize and host the next meeting in Seattle. We invite preliminary expressions of interest, including working titles of the paper you would like to present, to be sent to: Professor Donka Minkova Department of English, UCLA 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90095 Expressions of interest and working titles can also be sent to the following e-mail addresses: Minkova at humnet.ucla.edu or Stockwel at humnet.ucla.edu or ACurzan at u.washington.edu Our preliminary plan is to allow all participants one-half hour for presentation, with an additional ten minutes of discussion followed by a break before the next paper. One page abstracts in three copies, unidentified except by the cover sheet, should be sent to the organizers by January 15, 2000. These will be taken as submissions for anonymous review. While we wish to separate, very clearly, the research aspects, which we consider our primary focus, and the pedagogical aspects, we recognize that most of the likely participants are engaged professionally in the teaching of courses on the history of English. Anne Curzan has therefore proposed to organize a workshop on some aspect of the pedagogical concerns of the participants. Prospective participants should contact ACurzan at u.washington.edu. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jan 19 16:07:19 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 11:07:19 EST Subject: Q: Yakhontov's principle Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I have a very inexplicit reference to an article in Russian by Yakhontov (rest of name unknown). In this, the author reportedly argues that the Swadesh 100-word list can be split into two sublists, one of 35 words and the other of 65 words, in such a way that the proportion of cognates shared in the 35-word list is always greater than the proportion shared in the 65-word list, when the languages involved are related. Can anybody provide the full reference? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From vovin at hawaii.edu Wed Jan 20 13:02:15 1999 From: vovin at hawaii.edu (Alexander Vovin) Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 08:02:15 EST Subject: Q: Yakhontov's principle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry, The article by Sergei Ievgen'evich Iakhontov, Professor of Chinese in St. Petersburg State University, as far as I know, was never published. It was circulating, though, widely in late 80s in Russia, as a kind of handout. Iakhontov devised his own 100 word list, based on Swadesh's list (I believe he changed around 10 words or so). I believe you can find this list in Sergei Starostin's "Altaiskaia problema i proiskhozhdenie iaponskogo iazyka" (Moscow, Nauka (Glavnaia redaktsiia vostochnoi literatury), 1991). The rest is true: Iakhontov argued that if two or more languages are related, than the percentage of cognates within 35 list that contains more stable words must be higher than percentage of cognates within less stable 65 list. Hope this helps, Sasha ======================================= Alexander Vovin Associate Professor of Japanese Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures 382 Moore Hall 1890 East-West Road University of Hawaii at Manoa Honolulu, HI 96822 vovin at hawaii.edu fax (808)956-9515 (o.) t.(808)956-6881 (o.) On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I have a very inexplicit reference to an article in Russian by Yakhontov > (rest of name unknown). In this, the author reportedly argues that the > Swadesh 100-word list can be split into two sublists, one of 35 words > and the other of 65 words, in such a way that the proportion of cognates > shared in the 35-word list is always greater than the proportion shared > in the 65-word list, when the languages involved are related. > > Can anybody provide the full reference? > > > Larry Trask > COGS > University of Sussex > Brighton BN1 9QH > UK > > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk > From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Jan 21 20:41:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 15:41:08 EST Subject: Sum: Yakhontov's principle Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The other day I posted a query about a certain principle imputed to Yakhontov. I've received several illuminating responses. Sergei Yakhontov (or Iakhontov) is a distinguished Russian Sinicist, now occupying a chair at St. Petersburg University. Around 40 years ago, he published some classic papers on Old Chinese. Since then, he has rarely published anything at all, and he disseminates his work via lectures, mimeographs and personal letters. But he is alive and well, and one of my respondents rang him up. He has a major interest in the languages of East Asia, and also a big interest in Swadesh-style lexicostatistics. He has attempted to modify and improve Swadesh's 100-word list, partly in order to eliminate words which he considers too culture-specific to be generally useful, and he's devised a modified list with about ten different words. Further, he has divided his list into two sublists, of 35 and of 65 words, with the shorter list containing the words he regards as most resistant to replacement. Of these sublists, he has made some claims. My respondents cite two very different claims, and I am presuming that Yakhontov has in fact espoused both. Claim 1: If two languages are genetically related, then the proportion of cognates in the 35-word list will always be higher than the proportion in the 65-word list. I am told that this claim has been verified by checking against a number of languages known to be related. Interesting, if substantiated. Claim 2: If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list is higher than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word list, then this is evidence that the languages are related. This second claim I have big problems with. I myself do not believe that phonetic resemblances are of any significance at all in comparative linguistics, at least in the absence of a rigorous statistical underpinning. Given the current conspicuous disagreements among the linguists working on statistical approaches to comparison, and the plain absence of any statistical approach that is generally regarded as valid and effective, there can be no such underpinning at present. A published summary of this work can be found here: Sergei Starostin (1991), Altajskaja Problema i Proiskhozhdenie Japonskogo Jazyka, Moscow: Nauka, pp. 59-60. This book was reviewed by Bernard Comrie in Language 69. I am told also that Yakhontov himself published a relevant paper in a volume released in 1997, edited by Alexander Ogloblin, and called `Indonesia, Malaysia, Phillipiny'. Just for interest, here is Yakhontov's 35-word list, passed on to me by one respondent, and taken from Starostin: wind, water, louse, eye, year give, two, know, tooth, name stone, bone, blood, who, moon new, nose, fire, one, full horn, hand, fish, dog, sun salt, thou, die, ear, tail what, this, I, tongue, egg My thanks to Ralf-Stefan Georg, Leonhard G. Herzenberg, Alexis Manaster Ramer, Sergei Starostin, and Alexander Vovin. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jan 22 14:22:38 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 09:22:38 EST Subject: Sum: Yakhontov's principle Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Alexander Vovin wrote: > Larry, > > Hmmm... The following puzzles me: > > >Claim 2: If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list > >is higher than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word > >list, then this is evidence that the languages are related. > > >This second claim I have big problems with. I myself do not believe > >that phonetic resemblances are of any significance at all in comparative > >linguistics, at least in the absence of a rigorous statistical > >underpinning. Given the current conspicuous disagreements among the > >linguists working on statistical approaches to comparison, and the plain > >absence of any statistical approach that is generally regarded as valid > >and effective, there can be no such underpinning at present. > > I also have a big problem with this claim, and to the best of my > memory, I do not recollect it to be present in the Iakhontov's handout > that I had before, although he might have added it later. Is that > something more recent? I don't know. This second claim appears to be imputed to Yakhontov by Starostin in the relevant passage in Starostin's book. But the wording is not very explicit, so perhaps this is Starostin's own addition to Yakhontov's ideas. All this started with an open exchange of letters between Starostin and me in the pages of the American journal Mother Tongue. In his second letter, Starostin explicitly attributed only the first claim to Yakhontov, but then went on to invoke the second claim as though it were the same claim, a maneuver for which I chided him at the time. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From vovin at hawaii.edu Fri Jan 22 14:22:21 1999 From: vovin at hawaii.edu (Alexander Vovin) Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 09:22:21 EST Subject: Sum: Yakhontov's principle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry, Hmmm... The following puzzles me: >Claim 2: If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list >is higher than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word >list, then this is evidence that the languages are related. >This second claim I have big problems with. I myself do not believe >that phonetic resemblances are of any significance at all in comparative >linguistics, at least in the absence of a rigorous statistical >underpinning. Given the current conspicuous disagreements among the >linguists working on statistical approaches to comparison, and the plain >absence of any statistical approach that is generally regarded as valid >and effective, there can be no such underpinning at present. I also have a big problem with this claim, and to the best of my memory, I do not recollect it to be present in the Iakhontov's handout that I had before, although he might have added it later. Is that something more recent? Sasha ======================================= Alexander Vovin Associate Professor of Japanese Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures 382 Moore Hall 1890 East-West Road University of Hawaii at Manoa Honolulu, HI 96822 vovin at hawaii.edu fax (808)956-9515 (o.) t.(808)956-6881 (o.) On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > The other day I posted a query about a certain principle imputed to > Yakhontov. I've received several illuminating responses. > > Sergei Yakhontov (or Iakhontov) is a distinguished Russian Sinicist, now > occupying a chair at St. Petersburg University. Around 40 years ago, he > published some classic papers on Old Chinese. Since then, he has rarely > published anything at all, and he disseminates his work via lectures, > mimeographs and personal letters. But he is alive and well, and one of > my respondents rang him up. > > He has a major interest in the languages of East Asia, and also a big > interest in Swadesh-style lexicostatistics. He has attempted to modify > and improve Swadesh's 100-word list, partly in order to eliminate words > which he considers too culture-specific to be generally useful, and he's > devised a modified list with about ten different words. > > Further, he has divided his list into two sublists, of 35 and of 65 > words, with the shorter list containing the words he regards as most > resistant to replacement. Of these sublists, he has made some claims. > My respondents cite two very different claims, and I am presuming that > Yakhontov has in fact espoused both. > > Claim 1: If two languages are genetically related, then the proportion > of cognates in the 35-word list will always be higher than the > proportion in the 65-word list. > > I am told that this claim has been verified by checking against a number > of languages known to be related. Interesting, if substantiated. > > Claim 2: If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list > is higher than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word > list, then this is evidence that the languages are related. > > This second claim I have big problems with. I myself do not believe > that phonetic resemblances are of any significance at all in comparative > linguistics, at least in the absence of a rigorous statistical > underpinning. Given the current conspicuous disagreements among the > linguists working on statistical approaches to comparison, and the plain > absence of any statistical approach that is generally regarded as valid > and effective, there can be no such underpinning at present. > > A published summary of this work can be found here: > > Sergei Starostin (1991), Altajskaja Problema i Proiskhozhdenie > Japonskogo Jazyka, Moscow: Nauka, pp. 59-60. > > This book was reviewed by Bernard Comrie in Language 69. > > I am told also that Yakhontov himself published a relevant paper in a > volume released in 1997, edited by Alexander Ogloblin, and called > `Indonesia, Malaysia, Phillipiny'. > > Just for interest, here is Yakhontov's 35-word list, passed on to me by > one respondent, and taken from Starostin: > > wind, water, louse, eye, year > give, two, know, tooth, name > stone, bone, blood, who, moon > new, nose, fire, one, full > horn, hand, fish, dog, sun > salt, thou, die, ear, tail > what, this, I, tongue, egg > > My thanks to Ralf-Stefan Georg, Leonhard G. Herzenberg, Alexis Manaster > Ramer, Sergei Starostin, and Alexander Vovin. > > > Larry Trask > COGS > University of Sussex > Brighton BN1 9QH > UK > > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk > From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Sun Jan 24 17:26:57 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1999 12:26:57 EST Subject: Sum: Yakhontov's principle Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Alexander Vovin wrote: > > > Larry, > > > > Hmmm... The following puzzles me: > > > > >Claim 2: If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list > > >is higher than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word > > >list, then this is evidence that the languages are related. > > > > >This second claim I have big problems with. I myself do not believe > > >that phonetic resemblances are of any significance at all in comparative > > >linguistics, at least in the absence of a rigorous statistical > > >underpinning. Given the current conspicuous disagreements among the I always wonder what people by "phonetic resemblance" because sometimes things like this don't make sense to me. How is phonetic resemblance measured? Resemblance/Similarity is related to distance/difference. We can always measure or mentally use a scale from 0 to 1 in this case. For example, if the two words are identical the distance between them (i.e. difference) is zero. That means resemblance is 1 meaning maximum resemblance. I fail to see how regular sound change can fail to create a phonetic resemblance because they are functions of each other. It is distressing to find someone who has studied chemistry or chemical engineering to fail to make clear what exactly he is opposing. IT would be possible to create distance measures in which some results of regular sound change would register a very large distance but at that point the complexity would probably preclude any humans from registering the sound changes as regular. I posted a list to sci.lang and several groups to demonstrate this effect "live" but somehow its purpose seems to have been completely missed. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jan 25 14:54:07 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 09:54:07 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <36A95606.8460D996@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 24 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: [on phonetic resemblances] > I always wonder what people by "phonetic resemblance" because sometimes > things like this don't make sense to me. How is phonetic resemblance > measured? In most cases, it is not. As I have pointed out on various lists, phonetic resemblances play no part in standard comparative linguistics, which is based entirely upon patterns. Therefore it is pointless to try to define the notion `phonetic resemblance'. Why should we want to define a concept we don't use and can't see any value in? The exception lies in certain statistical approaches. Some (but not all) statistical approaches *do* make use of phonetic similarities. Therefore, the proponents of such approaches are obliged to provide rigorous definitions of what will be counted as a phonetic resemblance -- and also, of course, as a semantic match. Responsible workers do this, so that readers may have a chance to evaluate their work. The difficulty with much of the work called `multilateral comparison' is that it depends crucially upon the identification of both phonetic and semantic resemblances, and yet no criteria are ever advanced for identifying these. Or, if criteria *are* advanced, these are subsequently ignored. > Resemblance/Similarity is related to distance/difference. We > can always measure or mentally use a scale from 0 to 1 in this case. > For example, if the two words are identical the distance between them > (i.e. difference) is zero. That means resemblance is 1 meaning maximum > resemblance. Oh, no. Of course, the case of identity is trivial. But, as soon as we start looking at non-identical forms, the problem rapidly becomes far more difficult. There is a Website which lists the number-names from one to twn in over 2400 languages around the globe. It's here: http://www.tezcat.com/~markrose/numbers.shtml Take a look at the names for, say, `five' in a collection of languages. The semantics is rigidly controlled, so we can forget that. Now try to decide which words for `five' are phonetically similar and to what degree. I promise you, you will not find it easy to come up with a system that satisfies anybody but you. > I fail to see how regular sound change can fail to create a phonetic > resemblance because they are functions of each other. Not really. First, even regular changes can accumulate in layers of such depth that their combined effect produces an output in which the original regularity is difficult, or even impossible, to discern. Second, not all sound changes are regular. Third, sound change is not the only kind of change operating: lexical replacement, semantic shift, grammaticalization, and other changes are cutting across the language all the time. So, even if an ancestral word had undergone a series of perfectly regular changes, there is no guarantee that the word will still be a word, that it will still have its original meaning (or *any* recognizable meaning), or that it will still be in the language at all. > It is distressing to find someone who has studied chemistry or chemical > engineering to fail to make clear what exactly he is opposing. Would an ostensive definition do? ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From manaster at umich.edu Tue Jan 26 21:59:35 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 16:59:35 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry writes: "As I have pointed out on various lists, phonetic resemblances play no part in standard comparative linguistics, which is based entirely upon patterns." I don't think this is quite true. Perhaps it SHOULD be, but in fact, as Eric Hamp pointed out c. 1976, Indo-European lx got started by comparing sets where there IS transparent similarity like Gk. pate:r : Skt. pita: long before it discovered the patterns Larry refers to and moreover the patterns discovered first were again those involving phonetically similar segments. "Weird" correspondences like Armenian erk- for initial *dw- or z for *bhy were discovered much later. I think that the same is true in the case of other language families, e.g., Uto-Aztecan, Semitic, etc. And people who seem to practice standard comparative ling, and in fact claim to be its defenders, do appeal to phonetic similarity. E.g., Campbell in his critique of my proposal of a Pakawan language family does so repeatedly. It is not entirely clear to me whether this is as it should be. Nor whether it is possible to establish a language family strictly on the basis of "patterns" without phonetic similarities. In theory, it should be possible. But I don't think I know of any examples where this has been done. Alexis MR From hubeyh at Montclair.edu Wed Jan 27 00:59:07 1999 From: hubeyh at Montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey) Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 19:59:07 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Larry writes: > > "As I have pointed out on various lists, > phonetic resemblances play no part in standard comparative linguistics, > which is based entirely upon patterns." > > I don't think this is quite true. Perhaps it SHOULD be, but ... > It is not entirely clear to me whether this is as it should > be. Nor whether it is possible to establish a language > family strictly on the basis of "patterns" without > phonetic similarities. In theory, it should be possible. > But I don't think I know of any examples where this has > been done. To show that the statement by Larry Trask is untrue all that is necessary is to show at least one case in which the phonetic resemblance plays an important part. Here is a case: Language A Language B ---------- ---------- mother mother father father sister sister ..... hand hand finger finger .... .... one one two two ... ... Phonetic similarity on a scale between 0 and 1 is 1. Phonetic distance on the same scale is 0 meaning that they are identical. Genetic distance similarly is 0 pointing out the obvious fact that it is the same language. Nobody, I assume, would argue that any language is not related to itself genetically. I hope this news is not too disturbing, and neither the tone nor the content is deemed to be below that of normal discourse of such august company. -- M. Hubey Email: hubeyh at Montclair.edu Backup:hubeyh at alpha.montclair.edu WWW Page: http://www.csam.montclair.edu/Faculty/Hubey.html From alderson at netcom.com Wed Jan 27 10:34:16 1999 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 05:34:16 EST Subject: Searchable archives Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Thanks to the generosity of the moderators of the LINGUIST list, postings to the current incarnations of the Indo-European and Nostratic mailing lists will be available in searchable archives. The archives will be available at the following URL: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/ In addition, the previous postings will be made available in these archives after a bit of manual editing to add the required headers. This announcement is going out to the Indo-European, Nostratic, Historical Linguistics, and Linguist mailing lists; I apologize to those who thereby see it more than once. If you know of colleagues who would be interested but who do not subscribe to any of these lists, please feel free to forward this announcement to them. Rich Alderson From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Jan 27 10:38:09 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 05:38:09 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Tue, 26 Jan 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Larry writes: > > "As I have pointed out on various lists, > phonetic resemblances play no part in standard comparative linguistics, > which is based entirely upon patterns." > > I don't think this is quite true. Perhaps it SHOULD be, but > in fact, as Eric Hamp pointed out c. 1976, Indo-European > lx got started by comparing sets where there IS transparent > similarity like Gk. pate:r : Skt. pita: long before it > discovered the patterns Larry refers to and moreover > the patterns discovered first were again those involving > phonetically similar segments. "Weird" correspondences > like Armenian erk- for initial *dw- or z for *bhy were > discovered much later. I think that the same is true > in the case of other language families, e.g., Uto-Aztecan, > Semitic, etc. Yes, I am happy to concede this. Obvious phonetic resemblances have frequently -- probably even usually -- attracted the attention of linguists to language families whose members are rather closely related. But I know of no case in which a genetic link has been demonstrated on the basis of phonetic resemblances, nor can I conceive of a way of doing this other than a rigorously statistical one. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Jan 27 11:23:47 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 06:23:47 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > Obvious phonetic resemblances have > frequently -- probably even usually -- attracted the attention of > linguists to language families whose members are rather closely related. > But I know of no case in which a genetic link has been demonstrated on > the basis of phonetic resemblances, nor can I conceive of a way of doing > this other than a rigorously statistical one. Indeed, but can one imagine a statistical procedure which would take account of phonetic resemblance due to lexical borrowing? This takes us back to the point raised before on this list. There is no algorithm for demonstrating relationship on the basis of word lists. Phonetic resemblance may suggest a hypothesis, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to confirm (or its absence, to refute) it. Max Wheeler ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From manaster at umich.edu Wed Jan 27 18:37:40 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 13:37:40 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Examples: Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Indo-European, Shoshonean (later subsumed under Uto-Aztecan), Semitic, Malayo-Polynesian, Samoyedic, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic (for these last five see the paper by Sidwell and myself in JSFOu on Strahlenberg). I am not as sure but I think the same is true for Athapaskan, Algonquian (parts of it anyway), and many other of the Native American language families that are universally recognized. Finally, a particularly clear example is the Comecrudan language family proposed by Goddard 1979 and embraced by Campbell and as far as I can see universally accepted (in my scheme, of course, it is part of a larger Pakawan family). The small number of attested forms precludes any meaningful talk of regular sound correspondences since these would have to have one example each. Alexis On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > > Obvious phonetic resemblances have > frequently -- probably even usually -- attracted the attention of > linguists to language families whose members are rather closely related. > But I know of no case in which a genetic link has been demonstrated on > the basis of phonetic resemblances, nor can I conceive of a way of doing > this other than a rigorously statistical one. > > > Larry Trask > COGS > University of Sussex > Brighton BN1 9QH > UK > > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk > > From alderson at netcom.com Thu Jan 28 01:21:47 1999 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 20:21:47 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: (message from Alexis Manaster-Ramer on Wed, 27 Jan 1999 13:37:40 EST) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- To challenge Larry Trask's assertion that linguistic relationships are not *demonstrated* by phonetic resemblances, although they may suggest hypotheses, Alexis Manaster-Ramer lists the following: >Examples: Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Indo-European, Shoshonean (later subsumed >under Uto-Aztecan), Semitic, Malayo-Polynesian, Samoyedic, Finno-Ugric, >Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic Let's examine these for a moment. For sentimental reasons, I'll start with Indo-European. Sir Wm. Jones may have noted a "phonetic resemblance" among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin which piqued his curiosity, but we all know upon what evidence he drew his conclusions: The "affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar" of the three languages. Romance was simply "known" to be a family, given the historical knowledge that all these languages were somehow "corrupt" forms of Latin--not merely in the phonology but in the morphology. Similarly, tradition held that the Hebrew and Arabic languages were spoken by descendants of the two sons of Abraham, so the similarities in morphology and phonology were simply accepted. I believe--I admit I have not read the 1752 monograph--that it was morphology rather than phonology that convinced a Hungarian diplomat that the Finnish language was related to his own, though he likely noticed the phenomenon of vowel harmony first. I sincerely doubt that any of the accepted families in the list of examples are accepted because of similarities in the non-grammatical lexicon alone, or were posited only because of such similarities. While early writings may not share the rigour of our current discipline, it was clearly "grammar"--that is, morphology both inflectional and derivational--that was the deciding factor in the success of these hypotheses of relationship. Rich Alderson From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Thu Jan 28 01:25:49 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 20:25:49 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask wrote: > > Yes, I am happy to concede this. Obvious phonetic resemblances have > frequently -- probably even usually -- attracted the attention of > linguists to language families whose members are rather closely related. > But I know of no case in which a genetic link has been demonstrated on > the basis of phonetic resemblances, nor can I conceive of a way of doing > this other than a rigorously statistical one. I gave an example of the usage of phonetic resemblance. Here is another; CAse 2: Language A Language B ----------- ----------- haeend haend aam arm ... ... Language A is supposed be represent the typical Southern drawl of English. Obviously phonetic distances between pairs of words in language A and language B in this case are not zero but "small". That means obviously that there is phonetic resemblance. Furthermore, the semantic distances between the pairs of words is either zero or small meaning that either the southern dialect or the northern one might have additional slang meanings the other does not have. Thus we have a case of small phonetic distances and small semantic distances. This is how we know that the languages are dialects. Case 3: Language A Language B ---------- ---------- mother mutter father vater .... ...... one ein ... ... two drei ... ... The semantic distances are small (or zero) but probably larger than that of Case 2. The phonetic distances are larger than that of CAse 2. Yet these distances are smaller than that of say comparison of Malay to English. This is how we know that these languages are members of a subfamily, in this case Germanic. This is also the procedure we use to create other subfamilies such as Italic, Celtic, Slavic, etc. Case 4: Language A Language B ---------- ----------- one ras, adin two dva ... ..... brother brat ... ... Chances are the phonetic distances are larger than case 3, and semantic distances can be the same as case 2 or larger. Case 5:..... CAse 6:....... ---------------------------------------------------------- In all of these it is precisely the correlation of phonetic distances and semantic distances that are use to posit family relationships. The conclusion is that precisely the opposite of what Larry Trask says is true, namely that historical linguistics is about nothing else except the computation of correlation of phonetic and semantic distances. Of course, the word "resemblance" like "similarity" is nothing more than the inverse of distance. What Larry means by "rigorous statistics" is not clear to me. After all, the present families posited are nothing more than heuristic(heuristic) computations of the distances (phonetic and semantic) and a heuristic correlation of the said distances. And probability theory (and statistics) is nothing more than the same common sense except with explicit computation. However, where heuristics fails, explicit computation (i.e. prob theory and statistics) does not fail. It's time to move to the next stage of historical linguistics. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Thu Jan 28 13:19:46 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 08:19:46 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Max W Wheeler wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > > But I know of no case in which a genetic link has been demonstrated on > > the basis of phonetic resemblances, nor can I conceive of a way of doing > > this other than a rigorously statistical one. > > Indeed, but can one imagine a statistical procedure which would take > account of phonetic resemblance due to lexical borrowing? > > This takes us back to the point raised before on this list. There is no > algorithm for demonstrating relationship on the basis of word lists. > Phonetic resemblance may suggest a hypothesis, but it is neither > necessary nor sufficient to confirm (or its absence, to refute) it. Indeed there is no proof outside of mathematics. Even physics cannot "prove" that the sun will rise tomorrow. It's just that its probability is so high that we accept it. The same goes with other "laws" of physics like F=man, pV=nRT, etc. What separates physical sciences from social sciences is the great uncertainty and great complexity of the social sciences. The uncertainty comes from the complexity. Since we don't know the laws, we cannot predict anything and it looks extremely difficult, and it is. Some accept this to mean that it can't be done, but I don't. > Max Wheeler -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu Thu Jan 28 13:20:49 1999 From: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu (Johanna Nichols) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 08:20:49 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <199901272339.PAA15365@netcom.com> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I would like to add a comment to Rich Alderson's comment (below). Slavic is another family which was never discovered by a linguist. The ethnonym 'Slav(ic)', its use to refer to the Slavic languages as a family, and awareness of their historical unity, are all contributions of traditional Slavic wisdom. They entered western linguistics, as far as I can tell, through the work of Leibniz and his contemporaries, who used (writing in Latin) the terms 'Slavi' and 'lingua slavonica' to refer to the Slavs, the Slavic languages, and the Slavic language family, borrowing the term and its meaning from Slavic languages. This is from my paper 'The comparative method as heuristic', in Mark Durie and Malcolm Ross, eds., The Comparative Method Reviewed (Oxford UP, 1996), which discusses criteria for relatedness in traditional comparative method. I agree with Rich's assessment of Jones's evidence for IE. Johanna Nichols >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >To challenge Larry Trask's assertion that linguistic relationships are not >*demonstrated* by phonetic resemblances, although they may suggest hypotheses, >Alexis Manaster-Ramer lists the following: > >>Examples: Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Indo-European, Shoshonean (later >>subsumed >>under Uto-Aztecan), Semitic, Malayo-Polynesian, Samoyedic, Finno-Ugric, >>Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic > >Let's examine these for a moment. > >For sentimental reasons, I'll start with Indo-European. Sir Wm. Jones may >have >noted a "phonetic resemblance" among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin which piqued >his curiosity, but we all know upon what evidence he drew his conclusions: The >"affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar" of the >three >languages. > >Romance was simply "known" to be a family, given the historical knowledge that >all these languages were somehow "corrupt" forms of Latin--not merely in the >phonology but in the morphology. Similarly, tradition held that the >Hebrew and >Arabic languages were spoken by descendants of the two sons of Abraham, so the >similarities in morphology and phonology were simply accepted. > >I believe--I admit I have not read the 1752 monograph--that it was morphology >rather than phonology that convinced a Hungarian diplomat that the Finnish >language was related to his own, though he likely noticed the phenomenon of >vowel harmony first. > >I sincerely doubt that any of the accepted families in the list of >examples are >accepted because of similarities in the non-grammatical lexicon alone, or were >posited only because of such similarities. While early writings may not share >the rigour of our current discipline, it was clearly "grammar"--that is, >morphology both inflectional and derivational--that was the deciding factor in >the success of these hypotheses of relationship. > > Rich Alderson * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Johanna Nichols Professor Department of Slavic Languages Mailcode 2979 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Phone: (1) (510) 642-1097 (direct) (1) (510) 642-2979 (messages) Fax: (1) (510) 642-6220 (departmental) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * From lsa at lsadc.org Thu Jan 28 20:23:10 1999 From: lsa at lsadc.org (LSA) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:23:10 EST Subject: December LSA Bulletin Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Please Post The December 1998 LSA Bulletin is now available on the LSA web site: www.lsadc.org From manaster at umich.edu Thu Jan 28 20:22:54 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:22:54 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <199901272339.PAA15365@netcom.com> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I see we have a failure to communicate. I was assuming that the question was whether to demonstrate language relatedness we need to have first established definite regular sound correspondences (as Trask seems to believe) or not (as I believe). Rich and Johanna appear to be dealing with a different question, namely, whether to establish relatedness we need to look at lexical or morphological items. This is an entirely separate question from the one I was addressing. It is indeed the case that some of the lg families I mentioned were established largely on the basis of morphological comparisons, but that was not the issue. My point is that, when comparing morphemes and morpheme sequences (whether lexical or grammatical) it is posible to (a) insist on regular sound correspondences or (b) look at phonetic similarities (as I will discuss another day, there are other possibilities besides), and I maintain that many generally recognized lg families were established using approaches of the latter type-- or some mixture of approaches but not pure (a). Rich and Johanna also say something about Romance and Slavic and Semitic being "obvious" even to nonlinguists, but this misses the point that many connections which nonlinguists take as "obvious" have turned out to be wrong. I know many people who think English is related to French in virtue of words like chef, place, etc., but they are wrong. It is thus still a significant question for lx how one decides about the correctness of even the obvious classifications. Back to the real issue. Another example just came to mind: Jeff Leer argues that Tlingit is related to Athapaskan (as I think everybody now agrees) but there is a lack of regular correspondences, which he tries to explain as a result of Tlingit itself being a mix of several quite different (Pre-)Tlingit dialects. AMR PS. The question of whether there are lg families which were established on the basis of purely lexical comparisons is also an interesting one but I will postpone discussing that one too. On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, Richard M. Alderson III wrote (and Johanna Nichols promptly endorsed his statement): > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > To challenge Larry Trask's assertion that linguistic relationships are not > *demonstrated* by phonetic resemblances, although they may suggest hypotheses, > Alexis Manaster-Ramer lists the following: > >Examples: Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Indo-European, Shoshonean (later subsumed > >under Uto-Aztecan), Semitic, Malayo-Polynesian, Samoyedic, Finno-Ugric, > >Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic > > Let's examine these for a moment. > > For sentimental reasons, I'll start with Indo-European. Sir Wm. Jones may have > noted a "phonetic resemblance" among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin which piqued > his curiosity, but we all know upon what evidence he drew his conclusions: The > "affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar" of the three > languages. > > Romance was simply "known" to be a family, given the historical knowledge that > all these languages were somehow "corrupt" forms of Latin--not merely in the > phonology but in the morphology. Similarly, tradition held that the Hebrew and > Arabic languages were spoken by descendants of the two sons of Abraham, so the > similarities in morphology and phonology were simply accepted. > > I believe--I admit I have not read the 1752 monograph--that it was morphology > rather than phonology that convinced a Hungarian diplomat that the Finnish > language was related to his own, though he likely noticed the phenomenon of > vowel harmony first. > > I sincerely doubt that any of the accepted families in the list of examples are > accepted because of similarities in the non-grammatical lexicon alone, or were > posited only because of such similarities. While early writings may not share > the rigour of our current discipline, it was clearly "grammar"--that is, > morphology both inflectional and derivational--that was the deciding factor in > the success of these hypotheses of relationship. > > Rich Alderson > From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Jan 28 20:22:13 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:22:13 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <36AFAD66.E46FE694@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: [snip of comparisons of English with English, German, Russian] > In all of these it is precisely the correlation of phonetic distances > and semantic distances that are use to posit family relationships. No; not at all. To begin with, you can *posit* a family relationship on the basis of anything you like, and people do this all the time. Positing is cheap, easy and generally not very interesting. The hard bit is to *demonstrate* a relationship beyond reasonable doubt. And this can't be done merely by appealing to phonological resemblances: it has to be done in a more principled manner. > The conclusion is that precisely the opposite of what Larry Trask says > is true, namely that historical linguistics is about nothing else except > the computation of correlation of phonetic and semantic distances. This is not what I said. I never spoke of the computation of anything. The classical methods of demonstrating a linguistic relationship do not involve anything that could reasonably be called `computation'. > Of course, the word "resemblance" like "similarity" is nothing more > than the inverse of distance. > What Larry means by "rigorous statistics" is not clear to me. I mean the expression to apply to something which does not at present exist. Though vigorous efforts are being made in some quarters, at present we do not have a reliable and generally accepted statistical technique which can identify otherwise obscure genetic relationships. I hope we will have such techniques one day, but we don't have them now. > After all, the present families posited are nothing more than > heuristic(heuristic) computations of the distances (phonetic and > semantic) and a heuristic correlation of the said distances. I think you are confusing the identification of families with the problem of subgrouping the languages they contain. What is described here is of some relevance to subgrouping, but not to the identification of families. In fact, it is perfectly possible to prove a language family without being able to provide an acceptable family tree (subgrouping). Semitic is a classic example of this, but there are many others, such as Austronesian, Austro-Asiatic, and, for that matter, Indo-European. > And probability theory (and statistics) is nothing more than the > same common sense except with explicit computation. Hardly. Probability theory is a triumph over common sense, not an elaboration of it. As has been demonstrated countless times, human estimates of probability are woefully inadequate. Most of you will already know that old chestnut, the shared-birthday problem. How many arbitrary people do you have to assemble in one room before the probability that two of them celebrate their birthday on the same date becomes greater than 50%? Ask this of *anybody* who is untrained in probability, and you will get a large answer: typically 183 or something even bigger. But the correct answer is 23. Most people, relying on their common sense, will refuse to believe this until it's explained to them, and some will refuse to believe it even then. And I won't even get started again on Marilyn and the Goats. ;-) > However, where heuristics fails, explicit computation (i.e. prob > theory and statistics) does not fail. It's time to move to the next > stage of historical linguistics. After you, Mr. Hubey. ;-) Actually, probability has not failed in comparative linguistics. But, so far, at least, it has not proved possible to develop probabilistic approaches to identifying families which work. If you'd like to propose an explicit procedure which *does* work, there are plenty of linguistics journals which will be happy to publish it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From sally at thomason.org Thu Jan 28 20:21:58 1999 From: sally at thomason.org (Sally Thomason) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:21:58 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 28 Jan 1999 08:20:49 EST." Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask and Rich Alderson and a few others are doing a great job of explaining why phonetic resemblances are not considered by historical linguists to be either necessary or sufficient to establish genetic relationships, but so far not much emphasis has been placed on the skewing that can result from language contacts of various kinds. It's not just the problem of ordinary borrowing -- which, in some contact situations, can penetrate into the basic vocabulary: ca. 7% in a Swadesh list for English, for instance, including words like "animal", which is as close to its French (or Latin) source as in Hubey's ironic same-language examples. In addition, though, you get the very strong phonetic resemblances in mixed languages, which for most historical linguists (I think) don't meet the standard criteria for genetic relatedness. It's only where both lexicon and grammar show systematic correspondences throughout that the languages under comparison fit the model of descent with modification from a single parent language. Compare English with Tok Pisin, for instance, and you'll see very strong phonetic resemblances throughout the vocabularies, but you'll find extremely unlike grammatical structures. Or compare Michif with Cree and/or French, where almost all the verbs will match Cree precisely and almost all the nouns will be identical to French; or the Media Lengua, where the entire vocabulary is Spanish but the grammar is Quechua; or Mednyj Aleut, in which most of the vocabulary is Aleut but the entire finite verb morphology is Russian; etc. Only a systematic comparison of vocabulary *and grammar* will reveal the mismatches in most of these cases -- Michif is the only exception, and there even the most fervent believer in the resemblance-is-all-you-need school will realize that to classify it genetically you'd have to toss a coin to decide whether nouns or verbs win. -- Sally Thomason sally at thomason.org ********************************************************************** PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING CHANGE OF ADDRESS: Old address: sally at isp.pitt.edu New address: sally at thomason.org USE THE NEW ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY IF YOU HAVE AN ALIAS FOR ME, CHANGE IT NOW. THIS CHANGE IS PERMANENT. ********************************************************************** From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk Thu Jan 28 20:21:37 1999 From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:21:37 EST Subject: resemblances and Romance In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >Slavic is another family which was never discovered by a linguist. >>Romance was simply "known" to be a family, given the historical knowledge that >>all these languages were somehow "corrupt" forms of Latin--not merely in the >>phonology but in the morphology. Yes. Rebecca Posner has given a great deal of thought to the question of whether we would know that Romance languages were Romance if we didn't have the historical evidence of their derivation from Latin; in particular, whether the Romance creoles would be recognized as such without the historical evidence of colonization by Romance-speakers. I don't entirely understand her answer, though; maybe some other Romanist on this list can? RW From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Jan 28 20:20:58 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:20:58 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <36AFC737.571AF3F8@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > > Indeed there is no proof outside of mathematics. Even physics cannot > "prove" that the sun will rise tomorrow. It's just that its > probability is so high that we accept it. The same goes with other > "laws" of physics like F=man, pV=nRT, etc. What separates physical > sciences from social sciences is the great uncertainty and great > complexity of the social sciences. The uncertainty comes from the > complexity. Since we don't know the laws, we cannot predict anything > and it looks extremely difficult, and it is. Some accept this to > mean that it can't be done, but I don't. Indeed, and for that very reason I carefully avoided the words "prove" and "proof" in my posting. I spoke of "confirming" or "refuting" a hypothesis. You may say I went too far in saying "refute"; "fails to confirm" might be more accurate. But at the point where one's doing that sort of hypothesis testing, phonetic resemblance is neither here nor there. Systematic correspondence, above the chance level, is what we're after. Max Wheeler ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Fri Jan 29 12:50:21 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 07:50:21 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Sally Thomason wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > Larry Trask and Rich Alderson and a few others are doing a > great job of explaining why phonetic resemblances are not considered > by historical linguists to be either necessary or sufficient to > establish genetic relationships, but so far not much emphasis has I, of course, disagree completely. It is based on nothing more than phonetic and semantic "resemblance". In order not to have useless arguments, I will use the technical term "distance" from now on. Instead of writing things everyone misunderstands, I will instead wait for someone to show the genetic relationships of two language via some examples, and then I will demonstrate why that is about nothing more than phonetic and semantic distance. > including words like "animal", which is as close to its French (or > Latin) source as in Hubey's ironic same-language examples. In addition, Excuse me. That is not irony. It is common place in mathematics. A general statement has to hold. A person is obviously genetically and familially related to himself/herself. With a slight perturbation of the same language example, you can see immediately that dialects are based on small phonetic distances, family groupings on larger phonetic distances, and so on. It is trivial to demonstrate that it is so. > though, you get the very strong phonetic resemblances in mixed > languages, which for most historical linguists (I think) don't meet > the standard criteria for genetic relatedness. It's only where > both lexicon and grammar show systematic correspondences throughout > that the languages under comparison fit the model of descent with > modification from a single parent language. That is immaterial. The fact is that certain words have been struck from the list. I posted the constraints before; 1. There must be a "matching" of M words 2. These "matches" must come from a specific set {a,b,c.....} 3. Some words that are close phonetically to the set {A,B,C,...} are void 4 The "matching" words must match semantically within a tolerance of x units. 5. The matching words must match phonologically within a tolerance of y units. #1. Nobody knows what M has to be. If anyone knows, please post it. #2. The specific set is usually Swadesh's list, because it is a formalization of the ideas inherent in this concept. The general version of it is that, some words are technological words and should not count, therefore the words must come from some restricted set. There is general agreement on this. #3. This is the infant-babble argument and it is wrong. I will explain why later. #4. This is the part in which there is confusion presently. I am more than happy to show why in every case which any linguist claims that the concepts of phonetic and semantic distance IS NOT being used, it is in fact, exactly that which is in use and nothing else. #5. This is the part that comparative linguistics still leaves flaky and in which it it easy to show that the same concept is used. > Compare English with Tok Pisin, for instance, and you'll see > very strong phonetic resemblances throughout the vocabularies, but That is rule number 2. The fact is that the specific set of words is not the ones. IT says nothing about the fact that phonetic distance is not being used. It is being used, but another rule determines that some words cannot be used. > etc. Only a systematic comparison of vocabulary *and grammar* will 1. systematic comparison has to allow for phonetic distances of words which are said to be technological and hence should be disallowed so it is not systematic phonetic distances that are used, only the phonetic distances from a specific set of words. 2. The grammar part is trickier. I would leave it for later because it is much more difficult than vocabulary. I don't mean that I want to disallow it. No, it is not really much more difficult than the other. But we should probably do things one step at a time. > exception, and there even the most fervent believer in the > resemblance-is-all-you-need school will realize that to classify it > genetically you'd have to toss a coin to decide whether nouns or verbs > win. You are using "phonetic resemblance" in a way that is not clear. I think what you want to say is something else because I do not see it the same way and I tried to show how the concept of resemblance and similarity is related to distance and how it is used in other fields, and even made it rigourously mathematical. YOu mean to say something else, but it is not clear to me. (It really is, but maybe not clear to others :-)). I have listed the general rules which are in use, even if they are foggy. PS. The concepts "systematic", "resemblance", "grammar" etc have usages which can (and does) lead to great problems. The only solution that has been found in the rigourous sciences it to create precise definitions. I did so with phonetic distance. An analogical one can be made in semantics, and should be made, but there are no takers. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Fri Jan 29 12:51:28 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 07:51:28 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Max W Wheeler wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > > > > > Indeed there is no proof outside of mathematics. Even physics cannot > > "prove" that the sun will rise tomorrow. It's just that its > > probability is so high that we accept it. The same goes with other > > "laws" of physics like F=man, pV=nRT, etc. What separates physical > > sciences from social sciences is the great uncertainty and great > > complexity of the social sciences. The uncertainty comes from the > > complexity. Since we don't know the laws, we cannot predict anything > > and it looks extremely difficult, and it is. Some accept this to > > mean that it can't be done, but I don't. > > Indeed, and for that very reason I carefully avoided the words "prove" > and "proof" in my posting. I spoke of "confirming" or "refuting" a > hypothesis. You may say I went too far in saying "refute"; "fails to > confirm" might be more accurate. But at the point where one's doing that > sort of hypothesis testing, phonetic resemblance is neither here nor > there. Systematic correspondence, above the chance level, is what we're > after. Actually you brought up something even more interesting. This problem of what is science has been and still is being debated by many thinkers, philosophers, epistemologists, Ai researchers, etc. of the past and present. From what I know of works by people like Chalmers, Feyerabend, Popper (the few that stand out), the historical development went something like this: 1. Baconian: the usual data,hypothesis,theory,experiment, proof cycle. 2. Debate over induction (abduction in some cases) and why there can be no proof. This led to "verificationism" i.e. experiment verifies the theory. 3. Debated over verificationism leads to confirmationism because verification still is based on finite number of data and is still induction. 4. More debates: an experiment cannot confirm either, because it still leads to the same problem of induction. 5. Falsificationism: this is the last stop championed by Popper. There can be nothing else except falsification of general statements. No theory can be proven, verified, confirmed, etc. It can only be falsified. So a theory with lots of good predictions (confirmation really informally) is assumed to be true until proven false. So, as far as historical linguistics goes, there is no proof of geneticity, only degrees of belief. The systematic correspondance of course is another way of saying that the odds of it being due to chance is virtually nil. But the data that is being interpreted and evaluated is based on nothing more than "phonetic distance" (whose inverse is informally called resemblance or similarity). > Max Wheeler > > ___________________________________________________________________________ > > Max W. Wheeler > School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences > University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK > Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 > ___________________________________________________________________________ -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jan 29 21:52:18 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 16:52:18 EST Subject: Marilyn and the Goats (not) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mark Hubey has asked me, on this list, to explain the celebrated (and funny) problem of Marilyn and the Goats. Since it's not relevant to the list, I have replied to him privately. If anybody else wants to hear the problem, let me know. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From sally at thomason.org Fri Jan 29 21:50:02 1999 From: sally at thomason.org (Sally Thomason) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 16:50:02 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 28 Jan 1999 19:24:20 EST." Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- re Alexis Manaster Ramer's comments: I wouldn't deny that Joseph Greenberg is a historical linguist at all -- he did some historical linguistics in the past (for instance on aspects of Semitic, if I'm remembering right, and on the history of Bantu tones). But I would certainly deny that he has been doing historical linguistics recently; all he's been doing, at least as reflected by his publications, is inspecting wordlists and a few affixes for phonetic resemblances and grouping languages on that basis. That isn't what historical linguistics is about. (Merritt Ruhlen, at least, explicitly distinguishes what he calls "classification" from historical linguistics, and says that he's doing classification. I don't believe Greenberg himself has explicitly said that he's doing classification rather than historical linguistics, but he's doing the same thing that Ruhlen, following him, is doing.) The problem with Comecrudan is that there's so little data available for *any* comparison. Goddard's proposal is actually quite cautious: "There is a basis, then, for postulating a Comecrudan family consisting of Comecrudo, Garza, and Mamulique..." (1979:380, in Campbell & Mithun, eds., The Languages of Native America). He clearly isn't claiming that the family is fully established. But what's most relevant for Manaster Ramer's comment is that Goddard does not, repeat not, postulate the family on the basis of resemblances alone; in fact, in the same passage he argues strongly for *rejecting* certain groupings based on similarities (on the grounds that the words are too similar and therefore most likely due to borrowing). Here's the crucial sentence about Comecrudan: "The case for relating Garza and Comecrudo seems strong; the agreement in the words for `sun' and `road' is particularly striking and shows a consistent phonological pattern suggestive of an historical sound law" (Goddard 1979:380). -- that is: a recurring sound correspondence. He then goes on to say that "The sparse Mamulique data compare well with Garza and Comecrudo as far as they go." And that's the postulated family. The reason he only discusses lexical items is that that's all the data there is -- wordlists. Campbell, in his 1997 book, accepts Goddard's classification; he doesn't say anything to suggest that he has carried out an independent analysis. And finally, as Larry Trask and others have pointed out, spotting phonetic resemblances in lexical items is a common stimulus to a systematic investigation of the possibility that two or more languages are related. So of course I wouldn't quarrel with Hamp's statement that comparison typically begins with items that are phonetically similar. The whole point is that no one who is doing historical linguistics would claim that that's enough to establish genetic relationship. Greenberg & Ruhlen do claim that; but their view is, to put it mildly, not popular among historical linguists (including the Russian Nostraticists, who, as Manaster Ramer and others have insisted, should not be lumped...no pun intended...with Greenberg & Ruhlen in their methodology). -- Sally Thomason sally at thomason.org From manaster at umich.edu Fri Jan 29 21:48:56 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 16:48:56 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <199901291244.HAA24093@redheat.rs.itd.umich.edu> Message-ID: This is from Alexis Manaster Ramer -- > >Sally Thomason says in part: > > > >"Larry Trask and Rich Alderson and a few others are doing a > >great job of explaining why phonetic resemblances are not considered > >by historical linguists to be either necessary or sufficient to > >establish genetic relationships," > > > >I would like to emend that to say "by some but not all historical > >linguists and by many but again not all linguists who do little if any > >historical linguistics but like to comment on it". > > > >Since Sally and I disagree about many things, but I think >> she will accept that Joseph Greenberg, Eric Hamp, >> Ives Goddard, Lyle Campbell, and I are all historical >> linguists. Now, it is obvious that Greenberg and I >> do not agree with her genealization. > >Moreover, as I have pointed out, Ives Goddard and > >Lyle Campbell, argue for a Comecrudan > >language family strictly on the basis of > >phonetic similarities (among lexical items only, > without any morphological comparisons at all!), > I also noted that Eric Hamp, one of the > >two or three most distinguished historical linguists > >alive, has argued quite specifically that language > >comparison typically begins with items that are > >phonetically similar, even if it does not end > >there. This was in 1976. To be sure, more recently >> he has made statements much like Sally's generalization, >> but I think that that was just in the heat of battle, >> as it were. > > > >AMR > > > From mkebbe at ksu.edu.sa Fri Jan 29 16:40:34 1999 From: mkebbe at ksu.edu.sa (Mohammed Z. Kebbe) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 11:40:34 EST Subject: Phonetic Res. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Hi, I find the discussion on phonetic resemblance very stimulating. Languages have been grouped on evidence of phonetic similarity; true. But a large number of similarities are just coincidental or chance resemblances. I can cite so many examples where Arabic seems to be very close to English, French or German; does this mean that Arabic is somehow related to the Indo-European family? Ziad Kebbe. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jan 29 16:35:51 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 11:35:51 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances In-Reply-To: <36B13A19.E2EC5FE4@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > Instead of writing things everyone misunderstands, I will instead > wait for someone to show the genetic relationships of two language > via some examples, and then I will demonstrate why that is about > nothing more than phonetic and semantic distance. A demonstration that languages are related is far too large to post on an electronic list. To see such a demonstration, you must consult the specialist literature, and you must be prepared to devote quite a bit of time and effort to understanding the evidence. And the final presupposition is quite false. For the 87th time, linguistic relationships are not demonstrated in terms of "phonetic and semantic distances". This is a common misperception among non-linguists, and it is the reason I am constantly being approached by cranks who believe they have "proved" a relation between Basque and Irish, or Basque and Slavic, or Basque and Avar, or some damn thing in that vein. They do this because they mistakenly believe that linguistic relationship are based upon resemblances -- or, in your terms, small phonetic and semantic distances. But this is merely the mire that our illustrious predecessors crawled out of 200 years ago. > With a slight perturbation of the same language example, you can see > immediately that dialects are based on small phonetic distances, > family groupings on larger phonetic distances, and so on. It is > trivial to demonstrate that it is so. Very interesting. It is blatantly, howlingly false that "dialects" and "family groupings" are based upon degrees of "phonetic distance", as you can learn by reading any elementary textbook of historical linguistics. But you declare that your methods are readily able to prove this falsehood. So what conclusion should we draw about your methods? To begin with, the words `dialect' and `language' cannot even be defined in purely linguistic terms. The distinction is made, almost always somewhat arbitrarily, on the basis of a body of evidence, some of which is linguistic, but much of which is non-linguistic -- social, political, cultural, historical. Moreover, "phonetic differences" are characteristic of different *accents*, not of different dialects. In the US tradition, an accent is commonly regarded as just one aspect of a dialect. In the British tradition, however, an accent is regarded as something quite distinct from a dialect. These different decisions largely reflect the different states of affairs in the two countries. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From manaster at umich.edu Sat Jan 30 15:20:06 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:20:06 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask writes: "A demonstration that languages are related is far too large to post on an electronic list. To see such a demonstration, you must consult the specialist literature, and you must be prepared to devote quite a bit of time and effort to understanding the evidence." While I respect Larry and we usually agree about a lot of stuff, this is just plain wrong, and I think it is a cop-out typical of the people who like to criticize work on language classification but who rarely do it themselves and who also seem to be reluctant to discussing specific examples such as those I have repeatedly cited. What now follows is a crystal-clear example not only of an argument which is not too large but also of one which I have repeatedly cited as showing that Larry (and Rich and Sally) are quite wrong in their claims about how language relatedness actually gets established, perhaps because, again, it is not a topic they work on very much. Other examples of language- relatedness arguments which probably could easily be accommodated on this or any list include Swadesh and Hamp's work on the relatedness of Chukchee-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleutian, Hamp's work on the relatedness of Indo-European and Hattic, etc. Please note the name Hamp!! (On the other hand, these two arguments do not exemplify my broader points about phonetic similarity and lexical comparison). GODDARD'S (1979) ENTIRE SET OF COMPARISONS AND ENTIRE ARGUMENT FOR THE "COMECRUDAN" LANGUAGE FAMILY (COMPOSED OF MAMULIQUE, GARZA, COMECRUDO), ACCEPTED BY CAMPBELL (1996 and passim). Mamulique Garza Comecrudo sun atl ai al moon kan an eskan water aha(?) axe apanekla road -- aie aaul man (kessem) knarxe na woman kem kem kem sky -- apiero apel Goddard's entire argument for this relationship follows: The case for relating Garza and Comecrudo seems strong; the agreement in the words for 'sun' and 'road' is particularly striking and shows a consistent phonological pattern suggestive of an historical sound law. The sparse Mamulique data compare well with Garza and Comecrudo as far as they go. I cannot emphasize this too strongly. This is the ENTIRE argument, given by Goddard and fully endorsed by Campbell, two of the most vociferous advocates of the position that linguistic relatedness demands morphological and not just lexical comparisons and that correspondences and not just phonetic similarities are necessary. Note further: (A) The "historical sound law" Goddard alludes to is never stated. He is, of course, talking about the relation between ai and al and that between aie and aaul. But there is no single sound law that can be invoked here. Presumably (I have forgotten to ask him), he is talking about the relationship between Garza "i" and Comecrudo "l", but there surely a problem given that Comecrudo "l" also "corresponds" to Garza "r" (as in apiero : apel). (B) The reason Goddard puts a question mark next to Mamulique aha 'water' is that this is not attested as such. All we have is the sentence aha moxo cuexemad 'give me water', but there is no evidence that 'water' here is aha and not moxo or cuexemad. In reality, I have shown (but Campbell laughs this off) that cuexemad is the verb here, whose stem (*cuexe) is cognate with words meaning 'to drink' in related languages, so that the true translation was presumably 'cause- to-drink' rather than 'give'. So 'water' has to be either aha or moxo. (C) The reason Mamulique kessem is parenthesized by Goddard is presumably because he does not consider it cognate with the other forms form 'man'. This is correct, as shown by languages which have distinct cognates for the two etyma. References: Campbell, Lyle 1996 Coahuiltecan: A Closer Look. Anthropological Linguistics, 38.4:620-634. Goddard, Ives 1979 The Languages of South Texas and the Lower Rio Grande. _In_ The Languages of North America: Historical and Comparative Assessment, edited by Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, 355-389. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. See also: Manaster Ramer, Alexis 1996a Sapir's Classifications: Coahuiltecan. Anthropological Linguistics 38.1:1-37. 1996b. Sapir's Classifications: Haida and the Other Na-Dene Languages. Anthropological Linguistics 38.2:179-215. From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp Sat Jan 30 15:22:51 1999 From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:22:51 EST Subject: Phonetic Res. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mohammed Z. Kebbe wrote: > ----------------------------Original > message---------------------------- > Hi, > I find the discussion on phonetic resemblance very stimulating. > Languages have been grouped on evidence of phonetic similarity; true. > But a large number of similarities are just coincidental or chance > resemblances. I can cite so many examples where Arabic seems to be > very > close to English, French or German; does this mean that Arabic is > somehow related to the Indo-European family? > Ziad Kebbe. Very happy to hear someone talking about Arabic on histling. The short answer is that Arabic and IE are not related GENETICALLY, as far as our current knowledge goes. But they are related historically, since Arabic and its ancestors have been in contact with IE languages for thousands of years. I'd have to see your list of examples to decide what might be what. But I suspect the similarities have one of three explanations: 1) there is a small set of ancient agricultural terms which are shared by many ancient Semitic and ancient IE langauges: Ar. Haql/ Lat. ager, "field", Ar. qarn, Lat. corn "horn" 2) there are borrowings into Arabic proper from Latin, Greek, or Persian Ar. SiraT/Lat (via) strata, 3) there are borrowings from Arabic into modern European languages, Eng. "alcohol", "algebra", etc. As a fourth category you might add borrowing into European languages from other Semtic languages. Eng. camel doesn't come from AR. jamal, but comes via Latin and Greek from a NW Semitic language, probably Phoenician or Hebrew. -- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Robert R. Ratcliffe Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku Tokyo 114 Japan From manaster at umich.edu Sat Jan 30 15:45:43 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:45:43 EST Subject: Greenberg etc. In-Reply-To: <15695.917625530@pogo.isp.pitt.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Sally Thomason says: "I wouldn't deny that Joseph Greenberg is a historical linguist at all -- he did some historical linguistics in the past (for instance on aspects of Semitic, if I'm remembering right, and on the history of Bantu tones). But I would certainly deny that he has been doing historical linguistics recently; all he's been doing, at least as reflected by his publications, is inspecting wordlists and a few affixes for phonetic resemblances and grouping languages on that basis. That isn't what historical linguistics is about." I think is quite unfair to Greenberg, but that is not the main objection. My main objection is that I do not see what the basis is for Sally telling him or us what historical is or is not. All any of us can say, assuming we do historical linguistics at all, is what we think it is, and admit that there are major disagreements about much of it among people who actually do it. Sally further says: "Merritt Ruhlen, at least, explicitly distinguishes what he calls "classification" from historical linguistics, and says that he's doing classification. I don't believe Greenberg himself has explicitly said that he's doing classification rather than historical linguistics, but he's doing the same thing that Ruhlen, following him, is doing." This is not true. First, Greenberg HAS explicitly made exactly the same distinction as Ruhlen, but the distinction is not the straw man one Sally sets up between HISTORICAL LX and CLASSIFICATION but between two BRANCHES of historical linguistics: the one that does classification and the one that does reconstruction. I myself do not entirely agree with them, but it is certainly true that much of the work that involves reconstruction goes far beyond anything required to do classification. We do not need to agree on how many laryngeals Proto-IE had or even if it had any to agree that the IE lgs are related and that therefore SOME kind of Proto-IE existed. This is the whole distinction: showing that a given proto-lg must have existed and figuring out every last detail of its structure and lexicon. Obviously, the former is a much less stringent task than the latter, and people can do the former without caring about the latter. It is also very importan=t to obsever that traditionally historical lx texts and courses had very little to say about how classification work was and is done and that there is a very small number of linguists who do such work compared to the vast number who do work on the reconstruction of some proto-lg whose existence and basic outline have long been established. This is important because it means that most people who are historical linguists have no qualifications to address issues of classification. AMR From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Jan 30 15:46:59 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:46:59 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Sorry; I'm getting a bit behind with my mail. This is a response to several recent postings from Alexis Manaster Ramer and others. I myself have little experience of working on languages that are extinct and sparsely attested (and sometimes also unreliably recorded). But I have to say that I am puzzled to know how any secure conclusions at all can be reached on the basis of scanty evidence. If two extinct languages are very closely related, then I suppose the relationship might be conspicuous even in sparse data -- though I would always be worried about possible loan words. But, when the languages are not so closely related, I find it hard to understand how we can ever get beyond the stage attributed by Sally Thomason to Ives Goddard: we have a reasonable basis to suspect a relationship, but no more. As for Eric Hamp, we need not argue about his views, because he has recently proclaimed his own position with great clarity, in the following three-page article: Eric P. Hamp. 1998. `Some draft principles for classification'. In Joseph C. Salmons and Brian D. Joseph (eds), Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 13-15. This is an uncompromising statement which demands maximal rigor and brooks no departures. I endorse it, and I commend it to anyone who has not seen it. Hamp says in his first footnote that the statement was written in the late 1980s, "in the unfulfilled hope that the public press would prefer reasoned discourse and foundational criteria to quixotic and episodic speculation". Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Jan 30 15:49:57 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:49:57 EST Subject: Dictionary of HL Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Right. Apart from tidying up the cross-references, I have now finished writing my dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics. All being well (translation: if our @#$%&* computer system stays up and running), the book should go off to the publisher before the end of the first week of February. It takes 7-8 months to turn a manuscript into a published book, so I would hope to see the book out by the end of September, and possibly even by the end of August. It's being published by Edinburgh University Press. The book contains about 2400 entries, including a couple hundred that are merely cross-references (our terminology could be more unified). It is about 130,000 words long, which, inevitably, is 10,000 words over my contract limit. If the publisher bridles at this, I may have to do some cutting. I hope not. I have tried to include every significant term, classical and contemporary, that I have found used in the literature. I've made a particular point of including the terms used in textbooks of HL, many of which are idiosyncratic, such as `retrograde formation' for `back-formation' in one standard text. For the most part, I have refrained from coining new terms, but I have allowed myself to do so in cases in which I could find no term but thought that one was needed: hence the `Traugott progression', `Campbell's principle', `pitfalls of comparison', `Hamp's principles of comparison', the `Nichols progression', the `Pennsylvania model of IE', and a few others. Named "laws" are included whenever I could track them down. IE is easy, thanks to Oscar Collinge's well-known compilation; the others have taken more work. Sadly, I am still lacking in the named laws of Semitic, on which I could find little information. It's not possible to list all of the world's 300 or so recognized language families, but I've entered all of the most prominent ones, plus the major branches of the biggest ones. Every proposal of more remote relations known to me is also entered, apart from the obviously crankish ones, with summaries of the degree of acceptance currently received by each. And there are entries for the best-known isolates, as well as for most of the extinct languages of Europe. I don't know about you, but I can never remember just what `Eteo-Cretan' is, or what the difference is between North Picene and South Picene, without looking it up, and even a well-known standard reference book gets the first one wrong. Apart from hard-core historical linguistics, I've also covered the terms introduced by the sociolinguists into the study of language change, the terminology of dialectology and of linguistic geography (including population typology and the homeland problem), the terminology associated with pidgins, creoles and non-genetic languages generally, names for various kinds of word-formation, the specific terminology of philological work, the named mathematical approaches to HL, and the various attempts at linking our results with those of anthropologists, archeologists and geneticists. And I've also entered all of the symbols, abbreviations and Latin phrases used in linguistic and philological work, including a few that are not specific to us (I mean, none of these young whippersnappers seems to know what stands for). ;-) More seriously, I doubt that my students know what a dagger means next to a language name, or what means, or what a reconstruction like *t[h]aNu/i is supposed to denote, so all this stuff is in there. Under a few entries, such as `comparison' and `comparative method', I've permitted myself to write lengthy essays about procedure, methodology and evidence. As is probably well known by now, I'm a hard-liner in this area, and I endorse what I regard as maximal rigor on every point. I hope the result doesn't make some readers chew the tablecloth in frustration. ;-) And I've made a particular point of naming, entering and illustrating everything I can think of that can possibly go wrong in historical work, ranging from familiar problems like the beech-tree problem and indeterminacy to outrages like reaching down and using multiple incompatible comparisons. Oh, by the way, there is *no* entry for `phonetic resemblance'. Anybody think I should add one? ;-) I do, though, have entries for `lookalikes' and `Anklaenge'. I've tried hard to provide at least one genuine example of every term entered; this is the main reason I'm over my length limit. If I cut the examples, I could get under limit at once, but the book would be less useful. Everything from `breaking' to `exaptation' is easier for readers to understand if they can look at an example or two. So far as possible and reasonable, I've cited the source of all terms proposed in the comparatively recent literature, and I've done my best to provide further reading for the more important topics. The bibliography contains about 600 items, with a heavy bias toward recent work which is not as yet well represented in textbooks. If you were thinking of offering me some advice, but haven't gotten around to doing so, I can probably just about consider a few further additions or modifications in the next couple of days. Meanwhile, I'd like to express my gratitude to Dorothy for maintaining this list, and to all those dozens of people who have responded to my various queries with advice and information. As a result of all this assistance, the book will be *much* more complete and accurate than it would have been otherwise, and I am deeply grateful. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From evenstar at mail.utexas.edu Sat Jan 30 15:51:09 1999 From: evenstar at mail.utexas.edu (Shilpi M. Bhadra) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:51:09 EST Subject: Phonetic Res. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Arabic is not related to Indo-European. Arabic is in the Semitic family so it is related to Hebrew. English, French, and German have borrowed many words from Arabic (ie English algebra from Arabic al jabr) because of contact (Ottoman Empire, etc.) and trade. We know this because such items (called "loanwords" or "lexical adoptions") are not present in the older forms of German, French, and English (itself a member of the Germanic family). These loanwords show up after historical documentation of trade/contact etc,. with another culture and language. In order for a language to be genetically related the grammar (verbs, nouns, inflection, semantics, and structure have to show correspondences). Example from Indo-European "dog", singular. Inflection just means that the ending of the word determines whether it is the subject, object, indirect object, object of a preposition, agent, etc. The s is like grass, while the k is like in kitten. The example given below is 1 out of thousands of words that are cognate (related to each other), and their are 8 cases in Indo-European, which for sake of time and space, I'm not including here. Similarly the conjugation of the verbs system; numbers, terms for kinship (family members, friends) show consistency. These are generally closed lexical items, meaning usually one grioup will not borrow a term from another language group. Example: mater, "mother," is not a word you would usually borrow from someone else, because every language group has their own word for it. On the other hand on my own native modern Indian language - bus and computer - inventions of the English-speaking Americans or Europeans, were borrowed into my mother tongue, Bengali. Technological inventions, are the most popular loanword. Food is nowadays another. Spaghetti, macoroni, and such "English words," are all from Italian. (Even though Marco Polo brought Chinese noodles to Italy, where it was modified, so indirectly pasta owes it's parentage to the Chinese). So the picture is always more complicated then it seems. But some things have more certainty, evidence, and validity then others. Nominative (Subject Case) Hittite Greek Vedic Sanskrit Latin kuwas kuon suva kanis Accusative(Direct Object) kuwanan kuna svanam canem The reconstructed form by linguists and scholars for Proto-Indo-European (or Indo-European) is *k(u)wo(n), *kwonm -meaning no such form is actually attested, but based on phonology (sound correspondences) of daughter languages such as Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Old Irish (Avestan - an ancient grandfather to modern Persian), Gothic (the oldest form of Germanic found), Hittite (a language spoken 1800 BCE in what is modern day Turkey, Old Church Slavonic, and other identified Indo-European languages, they can reconstruct it. We know that Greek and Vedic Sanskrit are from about 1700-1500 BCE from Greek and Indian texts, while Latin is shown at about 500 BCE. None of these languages or cultures had contact with each other so they couldn't have borrowed from one another. Also the sound changes that govern from reconstructed PIE to Greek, Latin, Vedic, Sanskrit, and the like are consistent. If they borrowed words from each other then Indians would be saying cuwa for dog, or Romans sanis. Notice that most of the languages have an initial k sound, whereas Sanskrit has an s. This is an Indo-Iranian feature because Avestan shows this as well. That is one of the major rules. Latin centum "100," and Sanskrit satam "100," show this to be always true. PIE e,a, and o all fell to a in Sanskrit. There are lots of rules that govern the changes, presence or absence of certain, vowels, consonants, stress, etc that it would take a thousand pages or more to go over them in every language. Shilpi Bhadra University of Texas at Austin Classics/Humanites major evenstar at mail.utexas.edu At 11:40 AM 1/29/99 -0500, you wrote: >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >Hi, >I find the discussion on phonetic resemblance very stimulating. >Languages have been grouped on evidence of phonetic similarity; true. >But a large number of similarities are just coincidental or chance >resemblances. I can cite so many examples where Arabic seems to be very >close to English, French or German; does this mean that Arabic is >somehow related to the Indo-European family? >Ziad Kebbe. > Shilpi Misty Bhadra Classics/Humanities major evenstar at mail.utexas.edu 512-495-5586 From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Sat Jan 30 15:59:27 1999 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:59:27 EST Subject: about posting Message-ID: Dear colleagues, Recently things have gotten very intense and sometimes confusing at HISTLING Central. This is in part due to the fact that most of you are responding to a person privately AND copying your message to the list at the same time. This sometimes results in responses being posted before the original message shows up. The confusion escalates when I send a message back for revision and a response to it shows up before I get the rewritten version. Most of the time I keep things straight, but often our LISTSERV doesn't. Please help me out by not responding privately to a message and at the same time posting it to the list. Instead, post your message to the list only and let all the folks respond to it after it is broadcast. As of now, I will not post responses that have been sent both to the original sender and to the list. Thank you for your consideration, Dorothy Disterheft Moderator, HISTLING From manaster at umich.edu Sat Jan 30 19:12:42 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 14:12:42 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <36B2F7AC.6C1FC764@fs.tufs.ac.jp> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Robert Ratcliffe and Shilpi Bhadra are I am sure trying to be helpful, but it is surely disinformation to tell someone who is clearly a novice to the field that Semitic is not related to IE period (as per Bhadra) or at least not now known to be so related (as per Ratcliffe) instead of saying that (a) the vast majority of linguists have never studied the question at all, (b) of the small number who have, most probably think there is insufficient evidence for positing a relationship, but many think that there is, and many (I think many more) others that the evidence points to a fairly high probability of a relationship, but (c) among the much much smaller number who have studied the problem INTENSIVELY, the proportions seem to shift toward more support and less opposition of a relationship, but (d) no one has really done a census, so the proportions I suggested in (b) and (c) are anecdotal, (e) those who support or if dead did support a relationship include some leading specialists in IE and/or Semitic, e.g., the great IEnist Holger Pedersen, even if most of the leading specialists in each field have always either ignored the question or been against, (f) such "respectable" sources as Encyclopedia Britannica now mention the hypothesis of this relationship as a serious scientific proposal as do some encyclopedias of linguistics, and (g) such a complex answer is quite normal in any science for any number of questions, e.g., in primatology the question of whether, in addition to bonobo and human, there is just one or actually two other species (one or two chimp species if you will) in the genus Homo/Pan. I really fail to see why reasonable scholars keep trying to deny that opinions which they do not share on topics which they may not have studied in depth (I know of no published work by either poster on this topic) actually exist, instead of being content that at least for now theirs is the majority position. People who do not believe in transformations in syntax (like me) do not normally try to deny the existence of a man named Chomsky, I do not see why so many linguists try to deny the existence (now or before they died) of Pedersen, Dolgopolsky, Illich-Svitych, Bomhard, Moller, Starostin, or indeed my own. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sat Jan 30 19:17:11 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 14:17:11 EST Subject: Eric Hamp and linguistic classification In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote (among other things): > As for Eric Hamp, we need not argue about his views, because he has > recently proclaimed his own position with great clarity, in the > following three-page article: > > Eric P. Hamp. 1998. `Some draft principles for classification'. In > Joseph C. Salmons and Brian D. Joseph (eds), Nostratic: Sifting the > Evidence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 13-15. > > Hamp says in his first footnote that the statement was > written in the late 1980s, "in the unfulfilled hope that the public > press would prefer reasoned discourse and foundational criteria to > quixotic and episodic speculation". > It is important to compare this is with other works signed by Eric, such his paper in the Campbell/Mithun "Black Book", where he uncompromisingly condemns binary comparison and notes that linguistic classification in the case of IE in particular started out as he says with cases like fader : pater and not such (phonetically opaque and hence presumably dear to Larry's heart) examples as Albanian sy: Greek mati, such as his published work on the comparison of Chukchee-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut, such as his letter cosigned with myself to Scientific American and published therin which commends their popular treatment of the topic under discussion and in particular calls for more (and not, as Larry seems to want, less) open and unbiased discussion of in particular the Nostratic hypothesis, and such as his still-unpublished but widely-known and still-held (I checked last year) proposal for Hattic bein related to IE, etc. I find it bewildering that Larry suggests that we need not argue, i.e., presumably should ignore, my citations of parts of the vast Hamp corpus which he finds inconvenient and which he keeps refusing to even acknowledge, although I have cited some of them here more than once and in print on various occasions. AMR From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Jan 30 19:18:47 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 14:18:47 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster Ramer writes: [snip quote of me claiming that comparative linguistics is hard] > While I respect Larry and we usually agree about a lot of stuff, this is > just plain wrong, and I think it is a cop-out typical of the people who > like to criticize work on language classification but who rarely do it > themselves and who also seem to be reluctant to discussing specific > examples such as those I have repeatedly cited. [snip] > What now follows is a crystal-clear example not only of an argument which > is not too large but also of one which I have repeatedly cited as showing > that Larry (and Rich and Sally) are quite wrong in their claims about how > language relatedness actually gets established, perhaps because, again, it > is not a topic they work on very much. . > GODDARD'S (1979) ENTIRE SET OF COMPARISONS AND ENTIRE ARGUMENT FOR THE > "COMECRUDAN" LANGUAGE FAMILY (COMPOSED OF MAMULIQUE, GARZA, COMECRUDO), > ACCEPTED BY CAMPBELL (1996 and passim). > > > Mamulique Garza Comecrudo > > sun atl ai al > moon kan an eskan > water aha(?) axe apanekla > road -- aie aaul > man (kessem) knarxe na > woman kem kem kem > sky -- apiero apel > > Goddard's entire argument for this relationship follows: > > The case for relating Garza and Comecrudo seems strong; the > agreement in the words for 'sun' and 'road' is particularly striking and > shows a consistent phonological pattern suggestive of an historical sound > law. The sparse Mamulique data compare well with Garza and Comecrudo as > far as they go. > > I cannot emphasize this too strongly. This is the ENTIRE argument, given > by Goddard and fully endorsed by Campbell, two of the most vociferous > advocates of the position that linguistic relatedness demands > morphological and not just lexical comparisons and that correspondences > and not just phonetic similarities are necessary. OK; this is interesting. I'll put my cards on the table: no way on earth do these data constitute proof of genetic relatedness among these three languages, or even anything close to it. At the *very best*, these data suggest that there might be something worth pursuing -- assuming there exist further data with which to do the pursuing. Goddard and Campbell have a big advantage over me here: they are both specialists in North American languages. Consequently, they are able to draw upon a vast amount of background knowledge which is not available to me: where these languages were spoken, how reliable the sources are, what the local patterns of borrowing are like, and so on. When talking to one another, they can take this background knowledge for granted, just as I can do when I'm talking to my fellow specialists. But an outsider, as I am here, needs more. Six words? Just six words? That's it? To begin with, how can we even be sure that the cited words belong to the languages they're assigned to? Is that certain? Is it established, for example, that the Mamulique words were obtained from a native speaker, and not from a Comecrudo speaker who was bilingual in Mamulique? Second, these are presumably the best data available for supporting a relationship. Yet, oddly, while the other words are only vaguely similar, at best, the word for 'woman' is identical in all three languages. Very strange. How can we be sure that this is not merely a loan word, from whatever source, which has passed into all three languages? Are there grounds for rejecting that suggestion? If so, what are they? Third, the words for 'moon' suggest a loss of initial /k/ in Garza only. But the words for 'man' suggest a loss of initial /k/ in Comecrudo only. Yet the words for 'woman' suggest a loss of initial /k/ in no language at all. And this is supposed to point to implicit sound laws. I could go on, but that's enough. If Goddard and Campbell are impressed by these sparse data, then they must have access to background knowledge denied to me. I am not impressed at all, and I cannot regard these data as evidence of anything at all, beyond a suggestion that a closer look at these languages might well be justified -- assuming further data are available. If somebody sent me comparable data in support of a claim that, say, Basque, Zulu and Ainu were related, I probably wouldn't even bother to reply. In case I have failed to make myself clear, let me reiterate: there is no evidence here for any interesting conclusion at all. The probability is high that we are looking at nothing more than a few chance resemblances plus the odd loan word. Something more might be decidable if we had more data, but it seems we don't. Now, most often, when I see stuff in this vein, I am deeply suspicious of the bona fides of the presenters, because I have plenty of experience showing that zealous lumpers select and edit their data in unscrupulous ways. In this case, I have no such suspicions: I have the greatest respect for both Goddard and Campbell, and in fact I know Campbell personally. That eliminates one big potential worry. But the fact remains: on the basis of these data, the probability that these three languages are genetically related is only mildly greater than chance. Finally, before anything gets personal, let me add that I also have great respect for that prodigious polymath Alexis, but this time I think he is wrong to present these sparse data as evidence for anything. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Jan 30 19:20:19 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 14:20:19 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > Mamulique Garza Comecrudo > >sun atl ai al >moon kan an eskan >water aha(?) axe apanekla >road -- aie aaul >man (kessem) knarxe na >woman kem kem kem >sky -- apiero apel > > [...] > >(A) The "historical sound law" Goddard alludes to is never stated. He is, >of course, talking about the relation between ai and al and that between >aie and aaul. But there is no single sound law that can be invoked here. >Presumably (I have forgotten to ask him), he is talking about the >relationship between Garza "i" and Comecrudo "l", but there surely a >problem given that Comecrudo "l" also "corresponds" to Garza "r" (as in >apiero : apel). Not necessarily. The correspondence might be between apel and api(j)-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 02:24:16 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:24:16 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: <373b4616.1707211774@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > > Mamulique Garza Comecrudo > > > >sun atl ai al > >moon kan an eskan > >water aha(?) axe apanekla > >road -- aie aaul > >man (kessem) knarxe na > >woman kem kem kem > >sky -- apiero apel > > > > [...] > > > >(A) The "historical sound law" Goddard alludes to is never stated. He is, > >of course, talking about the relation between ai and al and that between > >aie and aaul. But there is no single sound law that can be invoked here. > >Presumably (I have forgotten to ask him), he is talking about the > >relationship between Garza "i" and Comecrudo "l", but there surely a > >problem given that Comecrudo "l" also "corresponds" to Garza "r" (as in > >apiero : apel). > > Not necessarily. The correspondence might be between apel and > api(j)-. That is a priori true, but we can be quite sure that Goddard did not have this in mind. So my basic remains: as far as he himself knew, he had not formulated explicitly ANY sound laws and the one he hints at seems to have a major counterexample. And of course the more important methodological point is that he does not even try to account for the other sound laws that would be needed or for the morphology, in particular for what the -panekla part of apanekla is. As it happens, I have accounted for that, and more generally, IF one accepts my results (which Ives so far does not), then several of the things which he assumed without much evidence if any do turn out to be correct. The more you accept of my analysis of the larger Pakawan family of which Comecrudan is a part and the more you look at sources for Comecrudo other than the one Ives did (he actually ignored most of what we know of this language for the purposes of the Comecrudan comparison), the more he is seen to be right. But that is exactly my point. Goddard (like Trask, Thomason, Campbell and, on his off days, Hamp) are entirely wrong in their methodological pronouncements, according to which this whole Comecrudan proposal would have be laughed to scorn or "shouted down" (to use Campbell's words re Greenberg) or simply ignored (as most people still do Nostratic and Pakawan and many other proposals). But when Goddard did this little bit of classificatory work (as far as I know, though I could be wrong, his sole substantive contribution to this area of research), he was right, much as Hamp was right about the history of IE studies in 1979 and was almost certainly right to support and expand Swadesh's comparison of Eskimo-Aleutian with Chukchee-Kamchatkan. AMR From faber at haskins.yale.edu Sun Jan 31 02:27:55 1999 From: faber at haskins.yale.edu (Alice Faber) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:27:55 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: Alexis Manaster-Ramer disingenuously summarizes work on potential Semitic/Indo-European relationships: > (a) the vast majority of linguists have never studied > the question at all, True > (b) of the small number who have, most probably think > there is insufficient evidence for positing a relationship, > but many think that there is, and > many (I think many more) others that the evidence > points to a fairly high probability of > a relationship, but > (c) among the much much smaller number who have > studied the problem INTENSIVELY, the proportions > seem to shift toward more support and less opposition > of a relationship, but > (d) no one has really done a census, so the proportions > I suggested in (b) and (c) are anecdotal, > (e) those who support or if dead did support a > relationship include some leading specialists in > IE and/or Semitic, e.g., the great IEnist Holger > Pedersen, even if most of the leading specialists > in each field have always either ignored the question > or been against, Point (e) is where I have a problem. For those who don't know me, I've done considerable work on the subgrouping of the Semitic languages, and dabbled in extra-Semitic comparisons. What Alexis is totally omitting in the above is any mention of the Afro-Asiatic family, of which Semitic comprises one group. The other language groups in Afro-Asiatic are Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic. Among scholars working on these languages, there is some disagreement about detail, such as the validity of the Omotic branch, possible sub-groupings within Afro-Asiatic, whether specific languages belong in, say, Cushitic, or in a neighboring, perhaps unrelated, African language family. The existence of an Afro-Asiatic stock, however, isn't in doubt. I have no doubt that Afro-Asiatic is related to other language stocks of comparable depth. Indo-European may be one of them. However, any attempt to relate *Semitic* to Indo-European that doesn't take Afro-Asiatic into account simply isn't worth considering seriously. If there are Semitic forms or structures that aren't widely attested in Afro-Asiatic but that show up in Indo-European, insisting that these bespeak a genetic link between Semitic and Indo-European also requires explaining away the evidence supporting an Afro-Asiatic language family. My understanding of most larger affiliations for Semitic is that are in fact filiations for Afro-Asiatic and not merely Semitic, but it's worth making that explicit. Furthermore, and now I'm speculating wildly, if I were seriously interested in linking Afro-Asiatic with other language stocks, Indo-European, or, indeed, any other Eurasian language stock, is *not* where I would look first. Rather, I would look seriously at Nilo-Saharan. I fear that at least some of the interest, especially from non-specialists, in relating Semitic and Indo-European is motivated by a notion of "Judeo-Christian cultural tradition" that may, itself, not be supported by the historical record. Alice Faber From johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu Sun Jan 31 02:29:05 1999 From: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu (Johanna Nichols) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:29:05 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances, etc. In-Reply-To: <373b4616.1707211774@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- An important statistical point. If this list > >> Mamulique Garza Comecrudo >> >>sun atl ai al >>moon kan an eskan >>water aha(?) axe apanekla >>road -- aie aaul >>man (kessem) knarxe na >>woman kem kem kem >>sky -- apiero apel >> were the entirety of our data on those three languages, we would be justified in considering relatedness to be probable. For each of the seven glosses, at least two and often all three of the languages have resemblant forms; for each of the languages, each word resembles one or both of those of the other languages. Even if we reduce the phonetic resemblance to the binary distinction between initial "k" vs. initial "a", or even initial C vs. initial V, I suspect that the number of matches would exceed what is expected by chance. Problem is (if I recall the article correctly), this isn't the entirety of our data. It's the seven most nearly resemblant glosses that could be picked out of a larger list. That is, it's all and only the positive evidence. It is that statistical consideration, and not the closeness of the phonetic resemblances or the regularity of correspondences, that makes this data set poor evidence for relatedness. Here's a simpler analog. What are the chances that if you toss a coin six times you will get heads all six times? Very small. What are the chances that, if you toss the coin a couple hundred times, somewhere in the record of those tosses there will be six successive heads? Excellent, because this is a search for positive evidence with no attention to the number of failures. (Do I recall correctly that only these three languages were compared in Goddard's original article? In that case the evidence, though weak because selected from a longer list of forms, is still stronger than the evidence usually offered in multilateral comparison, where the searcher in addition gets to choose from a larger set of languages. If we were to add Navajo and Ket data to the larger wordlist, we could easily find seven sets in which at least one of Mamulique, Garza, Comecrudo, Ket, and Navajo resembled at least one of the others even more closely than most of the resemblances in the three-language set above. None of the people involved in this discussion is advocating that approach; I'm just pointing out that, in principle, a closed set of three languages is a firmer basis for comparison than a larger set offering more options in comparison.) >>From wordlists as small and unreliable as the three above we know so little about the languages that there's little point in debating whether the resemblances are phonetically close, whether correspondences are regular, etc. Words consist of more than sounds. For all we know, these could be gender-prefixing languages in which inanimates have /a-/ and animates have /k-/. In that case the phonetics is immaterial; it's the morphemes that yield the resemblance. We have no idea what these forms represent, but if this were the entirety of our data we could suspect relatedness without positing an analysis (morphological or phonological). That would be an example of relatedness justifiably hypothesized from lexical material on the basis of something other than phonetic resemblance. Johanna Nichols Professor Department of Slavic Languages Mailcode 2979 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Phone: (1) (510) 642-1097 (direct) (1) (510) 642-2979 (messages) Fax: (1) (510) 642-6220 (departmental) From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Jan 31 02:29:52 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:29:52 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask wrote: >> Mamulique Garza Comecrudo >> >> moon kan an eskan >> man (kessem) knarxe na >> woman kem kem kem > >[..] > >Third, the words for 'moon' suggest a loss of initial /k/ in Garza only. But >the words for 'man' suggest a loss of initial /k/ in Comecrudo only. Yet the >words for 'woman' suggest a loss of initial /k/ in no language at all. And >this is supposed to point to implicit sound laws. That's a rather unfair, or shall we say pessimistic, analysis of the data. A more optimistic analysis (and I do believe a more realistic one) would be to reconstruct *kan (with k- maintained in Comecrudo after prefix es-), *kna- (cf. English *kn- > n- and *kV- > k-) and *gem (or *kh ~ *k instead of *k ~ *g). Still, Larry is right that in the absence of additional data it's impossible to decide between the pessimistic and the optimistic analyses. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Sun Jan 31 02:39:05 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:39:05 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alice Faber wrote: > > I have no doubt that Afro-Asiatic is related to other language stocks of > comparable depth. Indo-European may be one of them. However, any attempt to > relate *Semitic* to Indo-European that doesn't take Afro-Asiatic into account > simply isn't worth considering seriously. If there are Semitic forms or > structures that aren't widely attested in Afro-Asiatic but that show up in > Indo-European, insisting that these bespeak a genetic link between Semitic and > Indo-European also requires explaining away the evidence supporting an > Afro-Asiatic language family. My understanding of most larger affiliations for > Semitic is that are in fact filiations for Afro-Asiatic and not merely > Semitic, but it's worth making that explicit. It seems to me that the only thing necesary for this possible paradox to go away, would be to change the model of language change. Mammals have two parents each. All we have to do is allow the possibility of language families to have two parents (or even more) and then create a branching graph instead of a simple tree. It would be more accurate and we would not have to accept the simple model of reality for reality. Instead we would fit the model to the more complex reality. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From sally at thomason.org Sun Jan 31 19:52:21 1999 From: sally at thomason.org (Sally Thomason) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 14:52:21 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 30 Jan 1999 21:24:16 EST." Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster Ramer refers to Goddard's Comecrudan proposal as "this little bit of classificatory work" and says that this is, as far as he [MR] knows, Goddard's "sole substantive contribution to this area of research". If by "this area of research" MR means "classificatory work" in general, his claim is startling. Goddard's 1975 article "Algonquian, Wiyot, and Yurok: Proving a Distant Genetic Relationship" (in a Festschrift for C.F. Voegelin), though of course not the first or only proposal of that grouping, is the most substantive and convincing, and is certainly a well-known contribution to the literature on long-distance relationships. It's worth remembering that the Comecrudan example first came up because MR suggested it as an example of a genetic relationship posited by a highly respected historical linguist on the basis of phonetic resemblances alone. My point in mentioning some of the details of Goddard's proposal was not to endorse it particularly -- I agree with Larry Trask that there isn't enough data for serious hypothesis testing (though we should also remember that Goddard *postulated* the relationship; he did not say that he had established one) -- but to point out that Goddard emphasizes the recurring correspondence as a crucial bit of evidence. That is quite different from mere phonetic resemblance. For the record, in his 1979 article on languages of South Texas and the Lower Rio Grande, Goddard doesn't give an exact indication of the amount of data available for Comecrudo -- he cites an early "vocabulary of 148 entries" (1829) and refers to a "more extensive body of material" collected later. But he does give figures for the other two languages in his postulated family: a 21-word vocabulary for Garza (1828), whose speakers were already "largely acculturated and all spoke Spanish" (p. 371) and a 22-entry vocabulary for Mamulique. So the database is sparse indeed, as Goddard notes. Sally Thomason sally at thomason.org From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp Sun Jan 31 19:54:27 1999 From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 14:54:27 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > ----------------------------Original > message---------------------------- > Robert Ratcliffe and Shilpi Bhadra are I am sure trying > to be helpful, but it is surely disinformation to tell > someone who is clearly a novice to the field that > Semitic is not related to IE period (as per Bhadra) > or at least not now known to be so related (as per > Ratcliffe) instead of saying that > (a) the vast majority of linguists have never studied > the question at all, I thought my original response was fair enough, but as one who has studied the question (I've published on comparative Afroasiatic and compartive Semitic issues and I was a Classicist once) I'll elaborate: Arabic is a member of the Semitic family, which is itself a branch of a 'super-family' or 'phylum' termed Afroasiatic. No further genetic connections are now known. > (b) of the small number who have, most probably think > there is insufficient evidence for positing a relationship, > but many think that there is, and > many (I think many more) others that the evidence > points to a fairly high probability of > a relationship, but As I said in my post there is evidence for a HISTORICAL relationship between Semitic and IE, but not a genetic one-- through contact. > (c) among the much much smaller number who have > studied the problem INTENSIVELY, the proportions > seem to shift toward more support and less opposition > of a relationship, but I would put Joseph Greenberg in the class of those who have studied the problem intensively, certainly he knows Afroasiatic as well as anyone, and I believe he excludes Afas from Nostratic. Another intensive student of the problem is Saul Levin ("Semitic and IE: the principal etymologies"). I beleive his overall position is agnostic, but he certainly establishes a contact basis for many of the similarities. > (d) no one has really done a census, so the proportions > I suggested in (b) and (c) are anecdotal, > (e) those who support or if dead did support a > relationship include some leading specialists in > IE and/or Semitic, e.g., the great IEnist Holger > Pedersen, even if most of the leading specialists > in each field have always either ignored the question > or been against, I think it is premature to look for a relationship here until we have a more thorough reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic. Semitic is the branch of Afas which has been most closely in contact with IE for the longest period. As long as the comparison is with Semitic only without considering the Afas context, there is no way to know whether the similarities are genetic or simply reflect an ancient ME Sprachbund. > I really fail to see why reasonable scholars keep > trying to deny that opinions which they do not > share on topics which they may not have studied > in depth (I know of no published work by either > poster on this topic) actually exist, instead of > being content that at least for now theirs is > the majority position. > > I do not see why so many linguists try to deny the existence > (now or before they died) > of Pedersen, Dolgopolsky, Illich-Svitych, Bomhard, > Moller, Starostin, or indeed my own. I didn't mean to slight anyone, but if you remember the poster asked about *phonetic similarities between words in Arabic and Modern European languages*. Even if these languages are genetically related at great time depth it is unlikely to be apparent from phonetic similarities. (I think we would all agree about that, wouldn't we?) My post was mainly a warning to be aware of other sources for similarites among languages. -- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Robert R. Ratcliffe Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku Tokyo 114 Japan From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Jan 31 19:55:47 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 14:55:47 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > > Mamulique Garza Comecrudo > > > > sun atl ai al > > moon kan an eskan > > water aha(?) axe apanekla > > road -- aie aaul > > man (kessem) knarxe na > > woman kem kem kem > > sky -- apiero apel > > > Second, these are presumably the best data available for supporting a > relationship. Yet, oddly, while the other words are only vaguely > similar, at best, the word for 'woman' is identical in all three > languages. Very strange. How can we be sure that this is not merely > a loan word, from whatever source, which has passed into all three > languages? Obviously borrowed from Sumerian geme 'woman' :) Seriously, if the Sumerian is coincidence, how can the others be put forth as evidence of genetic relationship? But thanks for the data. I can use the MOON word as evidence for a protoword KENE 'sun' that I am putting together. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jan 31 19:57:23 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 14:57:23 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Not for the first time, Alexis M R has raised a troubling question of terminology. When we say that languages A and B are related, we mean that a genetic link between them has been established to general satisfaction -- though I am, of course, begging the question of what constitutes "general satisfaction". But, when this state of affairs does not obtain, things get awkward. We commonly say that A and B are not related, but Alexis has, quite properly, pointed out that this wording can easily give outsiders the wrong impression, by implying that a link between A and B has been disproved -- an impossible conclusion. So, as Alexis argues, we really ought to be more careful and say something like "no link between A and B has at present been shown to exist". But this precise wording is long and cumbersome, and it's just too much of a mouthful to use over and over again. When I talk to linguists, I have no hesitation in saying "A and B are not related", since I assume that any linguist will know what I mean -- though Alexis has objected to this, too, in an earlier posting. When talking to non-linguists or to beginning students, I try to be more careful, but even so I often retreat to the wording "not discoverably related". Others use "not relatable". But both of these, if taken literally, would appear to imply that no relationship can ever be discovered -- exactly the thing that's bothering Alexis. So what should we say? Damned if I know. I can think of no wording which is brief enough to be used constantly and accurate enough to satisfy the most fastidious among us. Maybe we ought to stage a competition to find a suitable form of words. As for Semitic and IE, I am puzzled that this issue continues to attract such attention. Of Greenberg's four African families, Afro-Asiatic is the only one that appears to command universal assent -- or, at least, I can't name a single linguist who queries it or rejects it, in spite of the fact that no generally accepted reconstruction of Proto-AA exists at present. That being so, and Semitic being accepted by all as a branch of AA, why should people be expending so much energy on trying to link Semitic to IE? In my view, if a feature of Semitic cannot be shown to have been present in Proto-AA, then it is simply not available for any external comparisons -- except by someone who denies the Semitic-AA link, of course. Of course, I did confess that I was a hard-liner on these matters. ;-) Over to you, Alexis. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From diriyeam at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA Sun Jan 31 20:12:38 1999 From: diriyeam at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA (Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:12:38 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >At 02:12 PM 1/30/1999 EST, you wrote: >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >Robert Ratcliffe and Shilpi Bhadra are I am sure trying >to be helpful, but it is surely disinformation to tell >someone who is clearly a novice to the field that >Semitic is not related to IE period (as per Bhadra) >or at least not now known to be so related (as per >Ratcliffe) instead of saying that >AMR Why would it be disinformation? There is the hypothesis, now being banded by some, of AA being related to IE, Dravidian, among others, leading to, I suppose, to "proto-world." That is at the pro-levels and is just a floated hypothesis. But if someone says Semitic or Cushitic or any of the other branches of AA is not related to IE, I think that is a valid point. Yes, Semitic or any of the AA branches has nothing to do with IE. What is there to show that Semitic is related to AA? What reconstruction is there? Chance ressemblances are found in all languages; I can give a slew from Somali that look related to English; ex. lug <>leg; san<>nose (by metathesis); il<>eye; lur<>lure; naag<>nag; etc. Giving yourself a semantic leeway and searching through a toolbox of phonetic processes, it is amazing what patterns we can imagine. On another level, I do not see even the reason, except an ideological one, the same one that puts Egyptology in oriental studies, to have an interest in Semitic by itself in comparison to IE. The Semitic group is just a small part of the AA languages. The homeland of AA is in Africa by any measure, somewhere in northeastern Africa. The Asian Semitic group (there is an African Semitic group---Amharic, etc.) went with African tribespeople who crossed the Red Sea to the Asian side. Over there, they met the IE speakers, Persians, etc. whom they influenced and were influenced in turn. But for a long time, they were rather inconspicuous herders of sheep and goats who stayed in the deserts of the Asiatic side of the Red Sea, a terrain similar to where they came. , , |\_/| o_______ooO_( O O )_Ooo____________________________________ | \_/ | | | | From the land of AySitu and AwZaar, Ba and Ka; | | and the Hor | | Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi | | diriyeam at magellan.umontreal.ca | | http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Louvre/2521/diriye.html | | (homepage) | | http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Louvre/2521/somali.html | | (The Somali language page) | o----------------------------------------------------------o From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 20:15:07 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:15:07 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <99013015561724@haskins.yale.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Alice Faber wrote (inter alia) > Alexis Manaster-Ramer disingenuously summarizes work on potential > Semitic/Indo-European relationships: > I really hate that qualifier 'disingenuously'. I thought I was so 'ingenious'. > > (a) the vast majority of linguists have never studied > > the question at all, > > True > Finally, somebody I respect and who I think everybody respects admits this fundamental point. > > (e) those who support or if dead did support a > > relationship include some leading specialists in > > IE and/or Semitic, e.g., the great IEnist Holger > > Pedersen, even if most of the leading specialists > > in each field have always either ignored the question > > or been against, > > Point (e) is where I have a problem. For those who don't know me... There is no question in my mind that Dr. Faber is a really well-known and (although this is an independent point) truly exceptionally wonderful historical linguist, both in and out of Semitic. > What Alexis is totally omitting ... is any > mention of the Afro-Asiatic family, of which Semitic comprises one group. The > other language groups in Afro-Asiatic are Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, > and Omotic. [snip] > My understanding of most larger affiliations for > Semitic is that are in fact filiations for Afro-Asiatic and not merely > Semitic, but it's worth making that explicit. > Of course, Alice is right, but I just did not want to make my posting an advertisement for Nostratic. Of course, too, since I have somehow become one of the main advocates of taking Nostratic seriously in recent years, I agree fully. For those few people who do not know this, the Nostratic theory, so named by Pedersen (whom I mentioned in the post Alice is responding to), holds (in most of its versions, but not all) that IE, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Uralic, and some otherlanguage families (about which there is some room for disagreements) form a bigger family, called Nostratic (some other names have also been proposed). > Furthermore, and now I'm speculating wildly, if I were seriously > interested in > linking Afro-Asiatic with other language stocks, Indo-European, or, indeed, > any other Eurasian language stock, is *not* where I would look first. Rather, > I would look seriously at Nilo-Saharan. This could well be right, but historically Nilo-Saharan was all but unknown to the pioneers of Nostratic.. As it happens, I also know next nothing about it, so for the time being, I cannot try to test Alice's hypothesis. But the question is not I dont think a really that important. It is quite often the case that we put together language families in a way that later turns out to require revision. When Armenian was recognized as Indo-European, people took it to be a part of the Iranian group of languages. That turned to be wrong, but it does not mean that Armenian is therefore any more or less IE. It does not matter where you start so much as where you end up. > I fear that at least some of the > interest, especially from non-specialists, in relating Semitic and > Indo-European is motivated by a notion of "Judeo-Christian cultural > tradition" that may, itself, not be supported by the historical record. > I dont think this attribution is true in the case of the principal Nostratic scholars such as Pedersen or Illich-Svitych or Dolgopolsky or Bomhard etc. It certainly is not something true of me. And I don't know if all this matters. Chomsky's view of about the innateness of linguistic capacities may have been influenced by his views about human equality-or vice versa, but that does not have any bearing on whether he is right or wrong. Alexis From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 20:16:50 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:16:50 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <36B3AEC0.5D155375@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote (inter alia): > > Those who have been on Altainet know that I have not > agreed with Alexis on a number of issues so if I write > this in support it is certainly not due to 'buddyism'. This is certinly true. I fear my responses to Dr. Hubey on other lists have bordered on rude. It is very kind of Mark to rise about that. [snip] > Most linguists do not seem to study anything at all, > but merely memorize somethings they read and then assert them > everywhere they go and expect everyone to bow down and kiss > their feet. I do think that linguists have the same relationship to language that physicists do to the physical universe, and that we should be listened to in our area as much as they are in theirs. This indeed has been my main bone of contention with Mark, who is one of the many nonlinguists who seem to feel that they know much more about lg than we do. > There is no such thing as "proof by assertion". > Contrary to what some of the more ignorant members of this > profession claim (and write in their books), there is also > no such thing as "proof by repetetion". That's true, but even in the natural sciences we find people behaving as though there were. > > Linguists like economists, sociologists and psychologists > before them will have to learn to wield the tools of science, > mostly logic and probability theory and reason cogently. I disagree in the sense that I think linguistics is in most regards much more scientific than the other three fields mentioned. Moreover, I believe that, when the real history of Western science is written, everyone will see that linguistics has been the source of some very important ideas. More generally, it is not by any means true that the natural sciences have always been ahead of the social/ humanistic ones. The whole idea of evolution originated with Vico in history/social science, first became really scientific in linguistics, only then (and in part thence) in geology and biology, and much later in physics. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 20:17:28 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:17:28 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances, etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I will not now respond to the people who have been kind enough to respond to my posting on Comecrudan. Rather, I will provide the info several of them requested first. For one of these lgs, Comecrudo, we have loads of data, but for Garza and Mamulique all we have is what follows: Idiome Garza [Garza Language] Notes fournies par le chef de cette nation [Notes furnished by that nation's chief] le soleil [sun] ai la lune [moon] an les e'toiles [stars] ma^tajo l'eau [water] aje chemin [path] aie homme [man] knarje femme [woman] kem petit garc,on [boy] amoso petite fille [girl] amasije pierre [stone] ouajue Ebano [ebony] oueia Dieu [God] (crossed out: mue') Alkiliale chevreuil [deer] (crossed out: akial) mue' rivie`re [river (crossed out: oueia) akial un bois (monte) [woods] (crossed out: Teminapam) ouiae les Comanches Teminapam Lipans idm [ditto] Rio Bravo Auejo-ajuejue Rio San Juan Apiame (1) ciel [sky] apiero rancheria [rancheria] ouamam cheval [horse] apiope (1) Quelques uns le nomment Ajuejue [Some call it Ajuejue]. For Mamulique, there are two versions of the same word list. Iia. First of Two Sets of Mamulique data (p.23) Langue des Indige`nes Carissos [Language of the Carisso Natives] qui habitaient les environs de l'hacienda [who lived in the neighborhood of the hacienda] de Mammulique ds le Nouveau-Leon [Mammulique in Nuevo Leo'n] lorsque nous passames en 1828 [when we passed by in 1828] Dieu [God] Mancoyad soleil [sun] atl e'toiles [stars] comchate lune [moon] can me`re [mother] quemen fils [son] ueno chevreuil [deer] uneis, ou oues arc [bow] quiyemen fle`che [arrow] tatepe couteau [knife] uecuen homme [man] (Erasure)quessem femme [woman] quem Donne-moi de l'eau [Give me water] Aha mojo cuejemed Je prends [I take] Nejuchi Le soleil se le`ve [The sun rises] Atl ape talem Moi [me] Napel Je vais [I go] Apela tu vas [you go] Nas il va [he goes] Lepema Ceui-la` va [That one goes] Ehuete Lepema Que faites-vous?[ What are y'all doing?] Napel cuauste Qu'est-ce [What is this?] Zecst Iib. Second Version of the Mamulique Corpus (p. 28) Indige`nes [Natives] Langue des Carrissos, petite tribu que nous recontrames aux environs de l'hacienda de Mamulique dans le Nouveau-Leon. [Language of the Carrisso, a small tribe which we encountered in the neighbourhood of the Mamulique hacienda in Nuevo Leon] Francais Carriso Dieu [God] Mancoyao homme [man] Quessem soleil [sun] atl me`re [mother] quemen ou` [or] kem fils [son] beno lune [moon] can e'toiles [stars] comchate cerf ou` chevreuil [stag or deer] uneis arc [bow] quiyemen fle`che [arrow] tatepe couteau [knife] unecen Je, moi [I, me] napel tu [you] nas (Crossed out: Lepema)Vas [You go] Lepema celui-la` [that one] ehuete va [goes] lepema prends [take] nejuchi Voyez mon journal [See my journal] AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 20:19:16 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:19:16 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances, etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I so rarely agree with anything Johanna says and vice versa (in THIS area at least, for I like most of her work in other areas of linguistics very much and indeed admire it) that I am tickled that she has made some of the very points I was going to make later, but much better than I would have (of course, we may disagree about some issues, as I will point out below). I esp. appreciate Johanna's support given that I have been pretty ruthless (and in her view unfair) in my critiques of her on various lists and in print. Alexis On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Johanna Nichols wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > An important statistical point. If this list > > > > >> Mamulique Garza Comecrudo > >> > >>sun atl ai al > >>moon kan an eskan > >>water aha(?) axe apanekla > >>road -- aie aaul > >>man (kessem) knarxe na > >>woman kem kem kem > >>sky -- apiero apel > >> > > were the entirety of our data on those three languages, we would be > justified in considering relatedness to be probable. For each of the seven > glosses, at least two and often all three of the languages have resemblant > forms; for each of the languages, each word resembles one or both of those > of the other languages. > This is THE most important point, although absolute numbers cannot be completely ignored (one of our small disagreements). > Even if we reduce the phonetic resemblance to the binary distinction > between initial "k" vs. initial "a", or even initial C vs. initial V, I > suspect that the number of matches would exceed what is expected by chance. > The problem is that the chance vs. greater-than-expected-by-chance business is not all that helpful, because (a) borrowings also exhibit patterns of correspondence that could not have arisen by chance, and (b) I continue to maintain that it makes no sense to use a priori probabilities. I have written on these points in various places. > Problem is (if I recall the article correctly), this isn't the entirety of > our data. It's the seven most nearly resemblant glosses that could be > picked out of a larger list. That is, it's all and only the positive > evidence. True, but that the total amount of data for Mamulqieu and Garza is maybeonly two or three times what we have here. For Comecrudo, we have LOTS iof data. But still we have so little data for M and G that this is surely more than enough to make a strong case, just like Ives says. Please note that the same thing happens all the time with lgs that are represented by a few words in some newly dug-up or deciphered inscription. > > (Do I recall correctly that only these three languages were compared in > Goddard's original article? Yes and no. He also tries to show that Comecrudo is NOT related to Cotoname, although I claim they are, and so on. > In that case the evidence, though weak because > selected from a longer list of forms, is still stronger than the evidence > usually offered in multilateral comparison... This is really a side issue, but it seems to me that Johanna is just repeating the usual disinformation about so-called multilaterla comparison. Please see Baxter and MR's revier of Ringe 1992 in Diachronica and my forthcoming "Uses and abuses of math in lx" (I can email either or both to anyone who wants them) on the correct mathematical treatment of so-called multilateral comparison. > From wordlists as small and unreliable as the three above we know so little > about the languages that there's little point in debating whether the > resemblances are phonetically close, whether correspondences are regular, > etc. >Words consist of more than sounds. [snip] > In that case the phonetics is immaterial; it's the morphemes that > yield the resemblance. [snip] > That would be an > example of relatedness justifiably hypothesized from lexical material on > the basis of something other than phonetic resemblance. > Precisely the point I made several times here and elsewhere. When people classify languages, they often compare morphological patterns without establishing REGULAR sound correspondences, just on impressionistic ideas that the sounds look similar enough. IE was established in this way, more or less, as a matter of fact. I think Niger-Kordofanian is an even clearer example. > For all we know, these could be > gender-prefixing languages in which inanimates have /a-/ and animates have > /k-/. Actually, we DO know, because Comecrudo is quite well known as are more distnatly related lgs. And this is not so. But the general point is exactly right. Thank you, Johanna. From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 20:23:13 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:23:13 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <36B3C336.4DCDA8F5@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- There may be cases where we would like to say this. Eastern Armenian Romany is the classic example, although recent surveys of the topic tend to focus on other examples (Mitchif, Copper Island Aleut, etc.). The W. European Jewish language known as Loshnekoudesh (apparently also once used in at least one Christian village in Bavaria) and distinct from Yiddish (it is in fact a mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew in the way that EAR is a mix of Romany and Armenian, Mitchif of French and Cree, etc.) is one that I don't think is EVER cited, but it happens to be the only of these which I have studied in some detail, so I thought I'd put in a plug. But this has nothing whaterv to do with the fact that within the Nostratic theory, Semitic is not a sister of IE but rather a daughter of Afro-Asiatic, which in turn is a sister of IE. According to Sergei Starostin, who I disagree with on more things than not but who I nevertheless think is surely one of the top two or three names in comparative, and especially classificatory, linguistics now alive, AA is not a daughter of Nostratic but a sister. Of course, as I pointed out earlier, the Nostratic theory in ANY form is far from universally accepted even among the small number of linguists who have the qualifications to judge it. More broadly, it has been derided or dismissed (and occasionally even substantively criticized) by many who do not, but I do not know whether it would be true to say, that among those who do not have the requisite background but nevertheless do hold an opinion, most are for or against. I think the nays are probably more numerous, but I am not sure. A. On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > > It seems to me that the only thing necesary for this possible paradox > to go away, would be to change the model of language change. Mammals > have two parents each. All we have to do is allow the possibility of > language families to have two parents (or even more) and then create > a branching graph instead of a simple tree. It would be more accurate > and we would not have to accept the simple model of reality for reality. > Instead we would fit the model to the more complex reality. > > > -- > Best Regards, > Mark > -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= > hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey > =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= > From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 23:32:31 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:32:31 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <36B45949.93BD8404@fs.tufs.ac.jp> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote: > > I thought my original response was fair enough, but as one who has > studied the question (I've published on comparative Afroasiatic and > compartive Semitic issues and I was a Classicist once) I'll elaborate: > Arabic is a member of the Semitic family, which is itself a branch of a > 'super-family' or 'phylum' termed Afroasiatic. No further genetic > connections are now known. The Afro-Asiatic connection is itself widely question by people who work within Semitic and by one important figure in comparative linguistics, Gerhard Doerfer. Of course, they are crazy to take this view, but their existence does show that it is not wise to identify truth with universal acceptance of a proposition. The proposition that Afro-Asiatic and hence Semitic IS related to Indo-European is held by many fewer scholars, and rejected by many more, than the thesis that Semitic is part of Afro-Asiatic. Nonetheless, both the Afro-Asiatic and the Nostratic hypothesis are legitimate linguistic theories held by enough competent scholars to be true or at least probable so that it is in my view disinformation to respond to the question of whether Semitic to related to IE by stating the former as a fact(without admiting the existence of contrary opinions) and not even mentioning the latter at all. My worthy opponent has every right to reject Nostratic, although he has not cited any evidence that he has the qualifications to judge this theory on its merits or that he has even read the relevant literature, but he has no right whatever to pretend that I, for example, do not exist. > As I said in my post there is evidence for a HISTORICAL relationship > between Semitic and IE, but not a genetic one-- through contact. There is well-known literature on BOTH points. As matter of fact some of the best work on contacts between the twain was done by people who also think they are (distantly) related, but apparently not everybody reads the literature. > > I would put Joseph Greenberg in the class of those who have studied the > problem intensively, certainly he knows Afroasiatic as well as anyone, > and I believe he excludes Afas from Nostratic. Another intensive student > of the problem is Saul Levin ("Semitic and IE: the principal > etymologies"). I beleive his overall position is agnostic, but he > certainly establishes a contact basis for many of the similarities. Of course, Greenberg excludes AA from his version of Nostratic, which he calls by another name, but anyone who has read Greenberg also knows that Greenberg believes that AA and Nostratic are themselves distnatly related. Moreover, I do not deny that many linguists reject the AA-IE connection. I deal with them, in print, all the time: Ringe, Hamp, Serebrennikov, Doerfer, and many others certainly exist(ed). It is MY existence that I would like acknowledged, and that of Pedersen, Illich-Svitych, Dolgopolsky, Bomhard, et al. > > I think it is premature to look for a relationship here until we have a > more thorough reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic. You may feel that way, but you have no right to pretend that there are not scholars who not only"look for a relationship" but think they have found one. The very formulation of this sentence is unfair. We are not talking about an idea that has just been broached but one which is almost as old as the idea of AA itself. > Semitic is the branch > of Afas which has been most closely in contact with IE for the longest > period. As long as the comparison is with Semitic only without > considering the Afas context, there is no way to know whether the > similarities are genetic or simply reflect an ancient ME Sprachbund. > No Nostratic scholar does this and to suggest that they (we?) do is another piece of disinformation. In fact, Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky were among the pioneers of modern AA comp. ling., with major contributions in Chadic and Cushitic, respectively, while at the same time being the cofounders of modern Nostratic studies. But you keep writing as though you are unaware of or would like to ignore the existnece of the existence of these scholars, and others like me. > > I do not see why so many linguists try to deny the existence > > (now or before they died) > > of Pedersen, Dolgopolsky, Illich-Svitych, Bomhard, > > Moller, Starostin, or indeed my own. > > I didn't mean to slight anyone, but if you remember the poster asked > about *phonetic similarities between words in Arabic and Modern European > languages*. Even if these languages are genetically related at great > time depth it is unlikely to be apparent from phonetic similarities. (I > think we would all agree about that, wouldn't we?) Of course, we agree, but it is still unbelievable that anybody would continue to defend the idea of teaching people about AA without any mention of Nostratic. Moreover, as noted, you misrepresent Greenberg's views and still do not seem to want to acknowledge that Illich-Svitych or Dolgopolsky or Bomhard or Pedersen or I or any number of others I could have named have (had) ANY views at all. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 23:33:05 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:33:05 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Robert Whiting wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > > > > > > Mamulique Garza Comecrudo > > > > > > woman kem kem kem > > Obviously borrowed from Sumerian geme 'woman' :) > > Seriously, if the Sumerian is coincidence, how can the others be put > forth as evidence of genetic relationship? > Now here is a good question for a scholar I admire very much. And the answer is simple, and it follows from what Johanna Nichols so elegantly explained earlier. The more coincidences we find, the less likely they are to be coincidences. If you could find Sumerian matches for all these words, then you would have a point. As it is, you do not. Alexis From tvn at cis.uni-muenchen.de Sun Jan 31 23:34:03 1999 From: tvn at cis.uni-muenchen.de (Theo Vennemann) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:34:03 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alice Faber wrote on 30 Jan. 1999: >If there are Semitic forms or >structures that aren't widely attested in Afro-Asiatic but that show up in >Indo-European, insisting that these bespeak a genetic link between Semitic and >Indo-European also requires explaining away the evidence supporting an >Afro-Asiatic language family. My understanding of most larger affiliations for >Semitic is that are in fact filiations for Afro-Asiatic and not merely >Semitic, but it's worth making that explicit. Since the similarities are overwhelmingly between Indo-European and Semitic rather than between Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic as a whole (or Proto-Afro- Asiatic), they do not owe their origin to genetic relatedness of Indo-European and Semitic but to language contact between Indo-European languages and Semit- ic langiages (or--Prof. Trask may be listenig--to chance). Contacts with Indo-European may have included those branches of Afro-Asiatic that stand close to Semitic, especially Aegyptian and Berber. To the extent that related languages may share certain properties, it is not always trivial to deter- mine the donor langiage, so that the designation Hamito-Semitic (as in Gensler's dissertation) remains useful. An example would be the VSO syntax of Insular Celtic. Theo Vennemann 31 January 1999 From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 23:36:10 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:36:10 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Not for the first time, Alexis M R has raised a troubling question of > terminology. I don't know if I should be pleased or not. But it IS true that I do sometimes raise questions of terminology. However, I more often raise issues not of terminology but of the substance, methodology, or (a sure sign of moral turpitude) history of linguistics. And I don't think I raised any question of terminology here at all. > > When we say that languages A and B are related, we mean that a genetic > link between them has been established to general satisfaction -- though > I am, of course, begging the question of what constitutes "general > satisfaction". Yes, you are begging one of the central questions, and ignoring the other (which is just WHO constitutes the generality that must be satisfied). People who have no credentials in the relevant fields for example seem to me to be excluded for that set, yet it also seems to me that they are the dominant force that I am having to contend with. > > But, when this state of affairs does not obtain, things get awkward. > We commonly say that A and B are not related, but Alexis has, quite > properly, pointed out that this wording can easily give outsiders the > wrong impression, by implying that a link between A and B has been > disproved -- an impossible conclusion. > That was NOT my point at all. My point is that if someone who is clearly not a linguist asks 'Does deep structure exist?' the only fair answer is that this has (had?) long been a controversial question. Ditto as to whether Semitic and IE are related. > So, as Alexis argues, we really ought to be more careful and say > something like "no link between A and B has at present been shown to > exist". But this precise wording is long and cumbersome, and it's just > too much of a mouthful to use over and over again. This is not all my point again. I am not concerned with how we should describe the relationships of Zuni to any other languages, this being to my mind a case where essentially nothing is known (although it would be disinformation not to point out that there have attempts to relate it to Penutian, by Newman, Ameridn generally, by Greenberg,etc., and I would not like commit that act of disinformation). I am concerned with the fact that people are pretending that the Nostratic theory either does not exist or has been discredited. > > When I talk to linguists, I have no hesitation in saying "A and B are > not related", since I assume that any linguist will know what I mean -- > though Alexis has objected to this, too, in an earlier posting. I do, but mostly because we say these things precisely as a way of spreading disinformation, even among linguists. We rarely have occasion to talk about the fact that Polish does not have a special relationship to Chinese to the exclusion of the rest of IE and Sino-Tibetan. If we did, then (and only then) would it make sense to say 'Polish is not related to Chinese'. In any other context, it is impermissible. > When > talking to non-linguists or to beginning students, I try to be more > careful, but even so I often retreat to the wording "not discoverably > related". Others use "not relatable". But both of these, if taken > literally, would appear to imply that no relationship can ever be > discovered -- exactly the thing that's bothering Alexis. Again, that is NOT my concern here. > So what should we say? We should tell them the truth, which is that the question is controversial. THIS is what is bothering Alexis, that even honorable and competent scholars like Larry cannot bring themselves to sayTHAT simple truth, that it is CONTROVERSIAL (everybody together now: CONTROVERSIAL) whether, for example, AA is related to IE. Now was that so hard? > As for Semitic and IE, I am puzzled that this issue continues to attract > such attention. Of Greenberg's four African families, Afro-Asiatic is > the only one that appears to command universal assent -- or, at least, I > can't name a single linguist who queries it or rejects it.. I can and you know that, because I have named him in various postings in discussions you were involved in (and in print, but who has time to read!?). Gerhard Doerfer is certainly a better known name in hist ling than yours or mine, and he did for many years claim precisely that Semitic is not related to Cushitic, he then seemed a couple of yearsago to take it back (to my great relief), but I have reason to believe he in fact did not mean to take it back and still holds that opinion. But I am not 100% sure. >That being so, and Semitic being accepted by all as a branch > of AA, why should people be expending so much energy on trying to link > Semitic to IE? In my view, if a feature of Semitic cannot be shown to > have been present in Proto-AA, then it is simply not available for any > external comparisons -- except by someone who denies the Semitic-AA > link, of course. There ARE people who compare IE to Semitic directly, of course, but I have not been talking about them precisely because they discredit themselves by not taking AA into account. But it is not a priori impossible that the intenal subgrouping of Nostratic that we are asssuming here is wrong. Maybe Semitic is more closely related to IE than to the rest of AA. A PRIORI possible. I do not particularly think that it is likely and I dont think it has ever been considered, but I am not even sure of that. On the other hand, could Semitic with Egyptian and Berber be more closely related to IE than to Cushitic? Not nearly as crazy perhaps. But none of this is relevant to "what bothers Alexis". I just would like people to be able to say that one word 'controversial'. I am not a native speaker of English and I can say it just fine. Those of you who are should have no trouble. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 23:37:00 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:37:00 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19990131101813.007b38c0@magellan.umontreal.ca> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > > >At 02:12 PM 1/30/1999 EST, you wrote: > >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > >Robert Ratcliffe and Shilpi Bhadra are I am sure trying > >to be helpful, but it is surely disinformation to tell > >someone who is clearly a novice to the field that > >Semitic is not related to IE period (as per Bhadra) > >or at least not now known to be so related (as per > >Ratcliffe) instead of saying that {snip} > > > Why would it be disinformation? Because many competent scholars have published important evidnce that they ARE related. > There is the hypothesis, now being banded > by some, of AA being related to IE, Dravidian, among others, leading to, I > suppose, to "proto-world." That is at the pro-levels and is just a floated > hypothesis. You are presumably referring to the Nostratic hypothesis, and engaging in more disinformation by saying that this has any connection to "proto-world". This is a confusion not even made by thebetter popular journalists who have written on this, much less any responsible scholar, and represents an attempt at creating guilt by association where there is not in fact even any association to speak of (except for Greenberg and Shevoroshkin maybe). > But if someone says Semitic or Cushitic or any of the other > branches of AA is not related to IE, I think that is a valid point. Not if AA is itself related to IE. > Yes, > Semitic or any of the AA branches has nothing to do with IE. What is there > to show that Semitic is related to AA? What reconstruction is there? Chance > ressemblances are found in all languages; I can give a slew from Somali > that look related to English; ex. lug <>leg; san<>nose (by metathesis); > il<>eye; lur<>lure; naag<>nag; etc. Giving yourself a semantic leeway and > searching through a toolbox of phonetic processes, it is amazing what > patterns we can imagine. > This is not a competent critique of the Nostratic hypothesis, I dont think. Or are you actually now saying that Semitic is not even part of AA? > On another level, I do not see even the reason, except an ideological one, > the same one that puts Egyptology in oriental studies, to have an interest > in Semitic by itself in comparison to IE. Agreed, but I do not have such an interest. >The Semitic group is just a small > part of the AA languages. True, but this does not contradict the fact that many competent scholars think that AA is part of Nostratic. [snip] From manaster at umich.edu Sun Jan 31 23:39:32 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 18:39:32 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances etc. In-Reply-To: <5948.917755049@pogo.isp.pitt.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Sally Thomason wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > Alexis Manaster Ramer refers to Goddard's Comecrudan proposal > as "this little bit of classificatory work" and says that this is, > as far as he [MR] knows, Goddard's "sole substantive contribution > to this area of research". If by "this area of research" MR means > "classificatory work" in general, his claim is startling. Goddard's > 1975 article "Algonquian, Wiyot, and Yurok: Proving a Distant > Genetic Relationship" (in a Festschrift for C.F. Voegelin), though > of course not the first or only proposal of that grouping, is the > most substantive and convincing, and is certainly a well-known > contribution to the literature on long-distance relationships. I meant an original contribution, that is, one proposing a family which had been previously proposed and strongly argued (Algic was by Sapir) AND generally accepted (as Algic has been ever since Haas's paper on the subject). Ives is one of my intellectual heroes, though I think he is wrong on some few issues of methodology which I have spelled out in print and right on others (and the 1975 paper is one I have cited in this contex, I am sure). I am sorry Sally has misunderstood what I meant. My fault of course. So, unless I am mistaken and Sally would surely have pointed it out if I were, Ives' one and only published proposal for a new linguistic family is the Comecrudan one. And it is one I fully accept. Indeed one of those many contributions of Ives that make him my hero. > It's worth remembering that the Comecrudan example first came up > because MR suggested it as an example of a genetic > relationship posited by a highly respected historical > linguist on the basis of phonetic resemblances alone. Precisely, though not the only such example I dont think, it is perhaps the clearest such example there is. And it would lose all force if I did not admire Ives as I do. > My > point in mentioning some of the details of Goddard's proposal > was not to endorse it particularly -- I agree with Larry > Trask that there isn't enough data for serious hypothesis > testing (though we should also remember that Goddard > *postulated* the relationship; he did not say that he had > established one) That's a quibble. He says there is a strong case. Further, I did not talk just of Goddard. I said 'Goddard and Campbell', and I think Campbell clearly takes Comecrudan as established. > -- but to point out that Goddard emphasizes > the recurring correspondence as a crucial bit of evidence. > That is quite different from mere phonetic resemblance. Ives does not indicate that the correspondence (which he does not identify, which occurs in two examples if THAT is the one had in mind and seems to be contradicted by another one) is crucial. He mentions it in passing. And I dont believe that Campbell even mentions it, though I could, for once, be wrong. > > For the record, in his 1979 article on languages of South > Texas and the Lower Rio Grande, Goddard doesn't give an exact > indication of the amount of data available for Comecrudo -- > he cites an early "vocabulary of 148 entries" (1829) and > refers to a "more extensive body of material" collected > later. But he does give figures for the other two languages > in his postulated family: a 21-word vocabulary for Garza (1828), > whose speakers were already "largely acculturated and all spoke > Spanish" (p. 371) and a 22-entry vocabulary for Mamulique. So > the database is sparse indeed, as Goddard notes. > Indeed, but what is the implication of "For the record"? Is it again that I did something wrong? AMR