From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Tue Mar 2 13:44:27 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 08:44:27 EST Subject: consensus view Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It occurred to me that among our various misunderstandings, there is a misunderstanding about what I mean by "consensus view" of establishing language families. I cannot speak for Campbell or Goodard, or anyone but myself, but I thought it was clear from what I said. However, it might be helpful to look at it in terms of the commonplace logical distinction between SUFFICIENT and NECESSARY (to establish a family). I put "sufficient" first, because my construal of the consensus view is that it is about what is SUFFICIENT to establish a language family (beyond "reasonable" doubt). What is NECESSARY is no doubt another matter, one for which there is obvious disagreement, and for which I do not have a fixed opinion, but which must somehow be empirically grounded in such a way that we can go from what we all agree on to how we can enlarge agreeement about the things we currently (and for a long time) have disagreed about. All that I can envisage is that what is necessary must be less than what is sufficient, and that there is a relationship (subset?) between what is sufficient and what is necessary, though just what that relationship is has to be a matter for continued discussion, if we are going to "establish" (or even get widespread "acceptance") of deeper family relationships where evidence is (presumably) lacking to the current consensus view of sufficiency (cf. "there's INSUFFICIENT data to establish the family according to the consensus view, the consensus methods of demonstration.") So I think AMR misunderstood my use of "consensus view" to be about what is NECESSARY to establish a family relationship, when, in fact, it is about what is SUFFICIENT. We are still trying to figure out what is necessary. At least I am -- for purposes of this discussion. I'm gonna try to keep this message short, so I can't give all my thoughts on the subject of what is necessary (and I don't know the answer anyway). Foremost in my mind is the basic concept of language family. Previously I characterised it as the idea that all the members descend from a SINGLE ancestor. I think that is what people usually have in mind, but in the final analysis it's a big problem. All languages have historical lexical strata with respect to source. Only the "oldest" stratum seems to count as criterial to "single ancestor". And for languages for which there seem to be insufficient data that's a big problem: how to identify the oldest stratum. That's where such issues as "basic vocabulary", presumably most resistant to "borrowing", comes in -- and there has been a lot of contention about all aspects of this problem, when it comes to the practical details (I haven't mentioned "grammatical" morphemes yet but that's also an aspect of the "layer" problem). In fact, it seems to me that "oldest" stratum is only a relative term. If we consider families that are recognised by the consensus view/methods, if they have deeper relatives, as we infer by the uniformitarian principle of going from what we know to what we don't know, then what appears to be the oldest layer is actually the COMPRESSION of a bunch of older historically arranged layers. How to separate them out and arrange them chronologically, in order to extend the "oldest" stratum notion? Moving on to grammar, I have never been able to keep straight in my head why some scholars have proposed that Mbugu demonstrates the "borrowing" of (Bantu) noun classes, etc., rather than the "borrowing" of non-Bantu vocabulary. Given that Mbugu speakers are all fluent in a Bantu language (either Shambaa or Pare), the direction of "borrowing" seems moot to me. Thus, we seem to have the possibility of historically simultaneous layers from different sources -- assuming that we're not gonna dismiss Mbugu as some kind of (in-group) "slang" (which does not seem to me to be grounds for dismissal, and which nobody has suggested anyway). So far, it seems that the larger world of historical linguistics chooses to dismiss such phenomena as "rare" (uniformitarian principle?), which seems a bit shaky to me when we are dealing with distant historical situations which represent social situations that we don't know about. How to reconstruct bilingualism and "simultaneous layers" (two or more different "layers" NOT chronologically distinguished in time)? Not so removed from this is the (former) issue of whether Haitian (Creole) is a Romance language. Until relatively recent times when pidgin-creole studies started to be taken seriously by historical linguists in general (or have they? AMR, to be sure, seems to take them seriously), lexicon alone (i.e, through regular sound correspondences) seems to have been criterial of inclusion in "language family" (for the "mainstream"). Grammar did not count for much, just as it did not count for much in synchronic linguistic description. Of course, the whole insight into the "family" hypothesis came from the fact that Sanskrit conjugates and declines pretty much like Classical Greek and Latin, but as historical linguistics progressed it was "sound laws" (based on sound correspondences) that seized the attention of theorists. There was palpably less interest in grammatical change, and work on it was often motivated by how it interfered with sound correspondences and inferred processes of sound change. I must add that it was not usually a problem for demontsrating families because families were demonstrated *sufficiently* at a level where grammatical similarities could be taken for granted -- but such issues as Haitian brought up DEFINITIONAL problems of language family. How to classify when there is historical discontinuity in the grammar? (NB: I could say more about "political" motivations for different sides on whether or not Haitian should be [have been] included in Romance, but I am saying enough that can be misinterpreted without getting into that fruitful topic. Currently there is still disagreement about how to account for the grammar of Haitian and various other "creoles", e.g., whether it comes from an innate "bioprogram" or is relexified Fon (a Kwa Niger-Congo language), etc etc. There are also issues involving whether many so-called creoles actually descend from earlier pidgins, e.g., Berbice Dutch, sometimes called Berbice "Creole" Dutch, which seems to be a "mixture" of Dutch and Kalabari (the latter a variety of Ijoid, a branch of Niger-Congo that has contentious aspects for (sub)classification), or various non-European varieties of Portuguese that seem to have been "restructured", but not necessarily descended "whole cloth" from pidgins, etc etc. Does "(radical) restructuring" exclude them from their lexical source "family" affiliation? These seem to be matters of DEFINITION of "family", not whatever the historical "facts" may be) I won't take AMR to task for saying that matters of sub-classification or questions about whether or not a particular language (group) belong to an otherwise "accepted" family are UNINTERESTING, because I assume he was fixing on some narrowly focussed issue which takes the notion of "family" for granted, but I disagree for several reasons. First, the case of Kadugli (whether or not it is Niger-Congo) turned out to be very important in whether or not a genetic link could be established between Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan. Was it an otherwise "missing link"? Do deep reconstructions to demonstrate deep relations depend on proposing "missing links" -- what are the criteria, and what are the assumptions behind this (tacit?) notion? Apart from that, I continue to wonder what the point of deep family reconstuction is, apart from its original motivation to reconstruct historical human socio-cultural trends (or some rationalised form of "ancestor worship"), if historical details, which also reveal historical socio-cultural trends, are "uninteresting". It seems like tunnel-vision to me. (NB. Similarly, if proposals to relate Niger-Congo to some other family were to rest heavily on Mande and/or the northern Atlantic languages, and they are still under contention, then those proposals would remain shaky. Also, if membership in a family is uninteresting, what's left? Let Turkic be Altaic, why is it interesting whether Mongolian and Tungusic, not to mention Korean and Japanese or whatever, are also Altaic, but not whether Mande and Atlantic and Kadugli and whatever are NC? Which group doesn't matter? Why?) Agh. This is getting long -- one last comment. AMR made the attractive point that the actual reconstruction takes more work than the demonstration of relationship. Indeed, Greenberg quipped that of all the languages that have changed in the last century, Proto-Indo-European has changed the most. I hasten to add, no guilt by association is intended (though I, for one, wish I had thought of the quip first, without wishing to be associated with everything Greenberg has said). So maybe we can abstract (sound) correspondences (subject to lexical and probabilistic controls) as NECESSARY, from reconstruction, which may be SUFFICIENT . When I first read some author who insisted that reconstructed sounds were actually "formulae" for sound correspondences, I thought the point was overly fussy, but clearly this is an area where we may be able to distinguish NECESSARY (sound correspondences -- does anyone doubt it, not even disregarded by the "crackpot" literature, for the most part) from what is SUFFICIENT (phonological reconstruction to a plausible sound system, "plausible" also being a continuing problem, with plausible sound changes, cf. common criticisms of many deep reconstructions is "too many phonemes", i.e., too many sound correspondences, cf. the emperor to Mozart "too many notes", to which, unlike Mozart with his retort "just as many as NECESSARY", the response is usually to agree and hope to reduce the inventories by discovering conditioning factors, as per the shining example of Verner's Law). In fact, to return to Greenberg's quip and what I take to be the implications of AMR's observation, little has changed in Proto-IE in terms of sound correspondences over the past century, glottalic theory and the various proposals for the substances of the laryngeals seem to rest on the same old sound correspondences, so there is clearly a point to draw the line between sound correspondence and the details of a plausible reconstruction. But in view of the deeper "too many notes -- sound correspondences" the question is -- where? [NB At some point revisions of reconstructions become interminable, just as are revisions/new versions of synchronic grammatical analyses of commonplace grammatical structures] I'd like to see a systematic OUTLINE of these and further relevant issues, esp. grammatical reconstruction -- but enough for now. -- Benji From manaster at umich.edu Wed Mar 3 16:31:15 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 11:31:15 EST Subject: consensus view In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Benji Wald writes (inter alia): > AMR made the attractive point that the actual reconstruction takes more > work than the demonstration of relationship. Indeed, Greenberg quipped > that of all the languages that have changed in the last century, > Proto-Indo-European has changed the most. I hasten to add, no guilt by > association is intended... Thank you. I would like to add that there are two points on which I differ from what Greenberg has stated (although I sometimes wonder if he really believes what he says). (i) In some cases, e.g., the famous demonstration that Vietnamese is Mon-Khmer and the one that Pama-Nyungan lgs are Australian, it was necessary to look at specific sound laws, so in SOME cases language relatedness cannot apparently be established as easily as Greenberg seems to think. (ii) Unlike Greenberg, I do not hold that one must first accept a relationship before attempting reconstruction. In reality, you can take a propose relationship as a working hypothesis, try to do a reconstruction, and then use the degree of success you have had with the reconstruction as an argument for or against the hypothesis. AMR From lsa at lsadc.org Thu Mar 4 16:57:50 1999 From: lsa at lsadc.org (LSA) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 11:57:50 EST Subject: March LSA Bulletin Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The March 1999 LSA Bulletin is now available on the LSA web site: http://www.lsadc.org From sally at thomason.org Fri Mar 5 02:26:36 1999 From: sally at thomason.org (Sally Thomason) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 21:26:36 EST Subject: consensus view In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 02 Mar 1999 08:44:27 EST." Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In the middle of his long message about criteria for genetic relationship etc., Benji Wald wonders `why some scholars have proposed that Mbugu demonstrates the "borrowing" of (Bantu) noun classes, etc., rather than the "borrowing" of non-Bantu vocabulary.' He continues, `Given that Mbugu speakers are all fluent in a Bantu language...the direction of "borrowing" seems moot to me." Here's why -- or, at least, here's why *I* believe that the borrowing was of grammar rather than (mainly) vocabulary. First, there is good historical evidence -- mostly in the form of oral histories of the Pare and Shambaa peoples -- showing that the Ma'a (a.k.a. Mbugu, but Ma'a is said to be their self-name) people have for a very long time shown strong resistance to total cultural assimilation to the surrounding Bantu milieu. They resist both acculturation to Bantu and acculturation to Western ways. Their language can be seen as a reflection of this resistance: in the face of immense pressure from Bantu, including regular contacts (at least until quite recently) with Bantu-speaking kinfolk who stopped resisting some time ago (by shiftin to Bantu), the Ma'a have preserved only the most salient part of their language: the vocabulary. Not all the vocabulary, of course, but most of the basic vocabulary. Christopher Ehret estimates that ca. 50% of the total lexicon is Bantu now. This situation is paralleled by one or two others elsewhere in the world: gradual borrowing of grammar until nothing remains but (part of) the original lexicon. Second, and most importantly from a linguist's viewpoint, the linguistic evidence points unmistakably to a partly preserved non-Bantu lexicon with borrowed Bantu grammar. Borrowing -- that is, incorporating stuff from a 2nd language into the native language -- always begins with non-basic vocabulary, and includes lots of basic vocabulary only after a lot of non-basic vocabulary and probably structural features as well have been borrowed. This is the picture that fits Ma'a. There are other possible routes to extreme mixture, but for Ma'a they can be ruled out on linguistic or social grounds, or both. (1) It's not a case of borrowing from a non-Bantu lg. into a Bantu lg., because if it were the basic vocabulary would be mostly Bantu, not Cushitic. (2) It's not a case of shift from a non-Bantu lg. to a Bantu lg., because again the basic vocabulary would be mainly Bantu, and besides, if there were enough imperfect learning to cause a significant residue of non-Bantu words even in the basic vocabulary, then there ought to be more syntactic & phonological interference, because shift-induced interference always affects the syntax & phonology most; but there is no distortion at all in the Bantu grammar of Ma'a. (3) It's not a case of shift from a Bantu lg. to a non-Bantu lg., because if it were, the imperfect learning would be so extremely imperfect as to leave the entire original Bantu grammar intact -- not something you'll find in *any* case of shift with imperfect learning. The closest analogue would be in a two-language creole like Berbice Dutch; but even there it's easy to find distortions caused by imperfect learning (in the Dutch component) and non-preservation of features of Ijo in the non- Dutch component. (4) It's not a case of pidgin-turned-"creole", for the same basic reason as in (3). Besides, it's awfully hard to reconcile the social setting of Ma'a vis-a-vis its Bantu neighbors with the social setting of any pidgin or creole...I'll skip the details in the hope that that point will be reasonably obvious. And (5) it's not a case of relexification into a Bantu lg., a la Media Lengua (Quechua grammar + Spanish vocabulary), because there's not enough lexical replacement, and again, the basic vocabulary is mostly Cushitic. But in addition, the contacts between Ma'a and others have been with Bantu-speaking groups for a very long time; this can be determined by the oral histories of the Pare and the Shambaa. That is, there haven't been any intimate contacts with Cushitic speakers recently enough to account for the present and documented states of the Ma'a language. And that's even aside from the fact that Maarten Mous has established that the non-Bantu Ma'a lexicon *can't possibly* be all from one Cushitic lg.: some of it is Southern Cushitic, some from another branch of Cushitic, and a large chunk of it comes from Masai (with whom the Ma'a speakers haven't been in contact any time lately). (The question of what Ma'a was like *before* Bantuization is another and an intriguing story -- but alas, evidence of any solid kind is lacking, and probably always will be lacking.) Finally, there *was* some active non-Bantu grammar in Ma'a, both in the earliest good attestations ca. 1930 and in comparative material that shows chronological layering of Bantuization changes (e.g. Cushitic suffixes added *after* the Bantu-induced opening of word-final syllables). Strikingly, the few Cushitic grammatical features that remained in the earliest materials are now gone, to judge by the most recent fieldwork (by Maarten Mous). So what we can observe in the documentary record is the loss of the last relics of Cushitic grammar. Even in the earliest records, the only Cushitic grammatical features that remain are things that fit well into Bantu typology: a causative suffix, pronominal possessive suffixes that aren't all that unlike the Bantu possessive formation, etc. ...With one exception: a non-Bantu (probably Cushitic) collective suffix appears on a few nouns, sometimes alone and sometimes *with* a Bantu plural prefix, to indicate plurality, in the earlier materials. Also, though the phonology (even in the non-Bantu portions of the lexicon) has also been Bantuized, there is still one un-local-Bantu Cushitic phoneme, a lateral fricative; according to Mous, Ma'a speakers insert this even into Bantu words, by way of emphasizing the differentness of their special in-group language. One other comment: Wald says that nobody has suggested dismissing Ma'a `as some kind of (in-group) "slang"': wrong. This is what Mous says it now is, and he has good evidence. (Mous and I differ, though, on how it got that way.) A general point can be made here: the routes by which even the most exotic mixtures emerge aren't necessarily undiscoverable; if we have enough information, we can often figure out how mixed languages got that way. Sorting out the effects of contact isn't different in that respect from sorting out the effects of internally-motivated change. "Enough information" is of course the crucial requisite. -- Sally Thomason From linpb at hum.au.dk Fri Mar 5 12:29:16 1999 From: linpb at hum.au.dk (Peter Bakker) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 07:29:16 EST Subject: workshop on mixed languages in Aarhus Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- WORKSHOP ON MIXED LANGUAGES IN AARHUS, DENMARK May 6,7, 8. This workshop will bring together a number of people who have been working on the genesis of mixed languages from a variety of perspectives. We consider as mixed languages not Pidgins and Creoles, but rather those languages which cannot be classified in a genetic tree model, because they inherit one component (e.g. the lexicon) from one language and another component (e.g. the grammatical system) from different language. Prime examples are languages like Ma'a, Media Lengua, Michif, Mednyj Aleut and Para-Romani verieties such as Angloromani. At the Leiden workshop on mixed languages in 1994 (1), the participants spoke about particular languages that they had been working on. Few people at that time were aware of the existence of class (or classes) of mixed languages. In the meantime, more and more linguists have become aware of the fact that they do constitute a special type, be it not necessarily homogenous in structure or function. A handful of books and a number of articles on the subject have been published in the last five years, and a few others are in preparation. These mixed languages pose special challenges, not only as to the question of their genesis and their structural similarities and differences, but also for linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models. At this workshop, the focus will not be on the individual languages, but on the general properties and issues. Participants are asked to give informal presentations about special subjects. We hope to have speakers on the following subjects: - codeswitching and the genesis of mixed languages - Creoles and mixed languages - types of mixed languages - functions of mixed languages - phonology of mixed languages - registers and mixed languages - use of historical data in mixed language research - language death and mixed languages - bilingual acquisition and mixed languages - intergenerational competence differences and the genesis of mixed languages - relexification and mixed languages - lexically mixed pidgins, Creoles and other languages - bilingual production/processing and mixed languages - distortion of form in mixed languages - how many structurally different types of mixed languages are there - mixed languages and historical linguistics - mixed languages without systematic mixture - diachronic evolution of mixed languages - alternatives to the genetic tree model - mixed languages, predictability and retrospection - convergence and mixed languages - language contact phenomena in the Chinese-Mongolian-Turkic-Tibetan area - field report on Danish Romani - mixed languages and typology - extreme borrowing and mixed languages - secret languages and mixed languages Hopefully, there will not only be linguists, but also some people from other disciplines, notably biology and psychology, who will be able to give their view on some of the matter. The workshop will take place on the University Campus, Conference Centre, Nordre Ringgade 1, Richard Mortensen Stue, on Thursday May 6 (afternoon), May 7 (whole day) and May 8 (morning only?). Aarhus is the second city of Denmark, and the capital of Jutland. The University has some 20.000 students. The linguistic department has a small, but growing staff, and the number of students increases each year. Visit the institute's websites on http://www.au.dk/uk/hum/lingvist/index.html and http://ling.hum.aau.dk. The campus of Aarhus university is found on the fringe of the city centre. Aarhus can be reached by car, train, bicycle, boat and aeroplane. The bus to and between Aarhus Tirstrup Airport takes 50 minutes and the bus trip between Billund Airport and Aarhus 80 minutes. There is still room for more people, both as participants and speakers. Please contact Peter Bakker as soon as possible if you want to come. (1) The book which resulted from this workshop (Bakker & Mous eds., 1994) is still available. Its new distributor is HAG (Holland Academic Graphics) in The Hague. Address: P.O. Box 53292, 2505 AG The Hague, Netherlands. E-mail: mail at hag.nl Information: linpb at hum.aau.dk Peter Bakker Linguistics Aarhus University Willemoesgade 15-D 8200 Aarhus N Denmark tel. 00-45-8942.2178 fax: 00-45-8942.2175 From manaster at umich.edu Fri Mar 5 16:51:14 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 11:51:14 EST Subject: Ma'a In-Reply-To: <28997.920579873@pogo.isp.pitt.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I think Sally Thomason's posting raises some very interesting questions, but it might be useful if Sally could post a list of recent references on this language. AMR From sally at thomason.org Sun Mar 7 15:39:23 1999 From: sally at thomason.org (Sally Thomason) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 10:39:23 EST Subject: Ma'a/Mbugu Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- First, a few comments on Benji Wald's recent post on Ma'a: Christopher Ehret identifies at least one causative suffix in Ma'a as of Cushitic origin; Mous cautions that Ehret's etymologies need careful checking, but in any case it doesn't appear to be a Bantu suffix, and Ehret says that it is -- or was, ca. 25 years ago -- very productive. He says the same thing about two or three other non-Bantu suffixes in Ma'a. People differ on the subject of derivation vs. inflection for things like causative affixes, and likewise for collectives like the one I mentioned for Ma'a; in some languages they are treated as inflectional, in others as derivational, and no doubt their behavior differs from language to language. The pronominal possessive suffixes are certainly inflectional (at least that's how such affixes are generally analyzed in languages that have them), so indeed there is evidence of Cushitic inflection in (earlier) Ma'a. Maarten Mous has suggested (p.c. 1993) the possibility that the pre-bantuized Ma'a language originated as a mixture itself, the language of a people coalesced from an escaped group of cattle herders who had been (semi-?)enslaved by the Masai. This scenario could explain the lexical mixture in Ma'a. But, as Mous notes, it's hard to imagine a way in which this hypothesis could be tested, given the total lack of social information about the Ma'a people from the period before they arrived in the Pares. Second, Alexis Manaster Ramer asks for references. The most useful source on the present linguistic & social status of Ma'a is Maarten Mous's 1994 article "Ma'a or Mbugu", in the book Mixed Languages, ed. by Peter Bakker & Maarten Mous, pp. 175-200 (published by IFOTT at U. Amsterdam, but see Bakker's recent conference announcement on this list for a new distributor). Mous's analysis of the Ma'a lexicon may not be published: he included it in a conference paper, "The making of Ma'a", presented at the Colloquium on Synchronic and Diachronic Sociolinguistic Methods and Interpretations, Universitaet Bayreuth, 1993. The most extensive published Ma'a lexical material is (as far as I know) in Christopher Ehret's big 1980 book The Historical Reconstruction of Southern Cushitic Phonology and Vocabulary (Koelner Beitraege zur Afrikanistik, 5; Berlin: Dietrich Reimer). As reviewers cautioned, the etymologies and reconstructions in Ehret's book need to be handled with care, but there is a lot of Ma'a lexical data in the book, and many of the proposed etymologies survive scrutiny. Morris Goodman was, I think, the first person who brought this interesting case to the attention of general linguists, in his 1971 article "The strange case of Mbugu", in Dell Hymes, ed., Pidginization and creolization of languages, pp. 243-54 (Cambrige Univ. Press). There are a number of other sources, including all the older materials from the 1960s and earlier. Bibliographies can be found in my two articles on the subject: "Genetic relationship and the case of Ma'a (Mbugu)" (Studies in African Linguistics 14.195-231, 1983); and "Ma'a (Mbugu)", in S. G. Thomason, ed., Contact languages: a wider perspective (Benjamins, 1997). I've also discussed the genesis of Ma'a in a case study in Thomason & Kaufman, Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics (U. Calif. Press, 1988) -- where most of the arguments I gave to Benji Wald to support the claim of grammatical borrowing appear -- and in an article called "On reconstructing past contact situations", in Jane H. Hill et al., eds., The life of language: Papers in linguistics in honor of William Bright (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997). -- Sally Thomason P.S. I don't think there's general agreement any more that Sandawe and Hadza belong to the Khoisan family. Bonny Sands' recent UCLA dissertation failed to find solid support for the hypothesis. (For that matter, there seems to be considerable doubt among Khoisan specialists that even the southern members of the proposed family are related to each other.) From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sun Mar 7 21:31:56 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 16:31:56 EST Subject: Ma'a/Mbugu Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I read Sally's message on the evidence for the evolution of Ma'a with great interest. Frankly, I did not remember exactly what Sally's position was when I "mooted" the direction of borrowing between Ma'a and "Bantu", e.g., Derek Nurse, an extremely energetic and prolific Bantu scholar with a deep interest in historical linguistics expressed a similar conclusion, i.e., borrowing out of, not into Bantu. Sally's note helps clarify in my mind what criteria might be used to determine direction of borrowing, in fact, I think the details of the circumstances clarify what is meant by "direction" of borrowing, and are fundamentally more important than the notion of "direction" in the context of *fluent* (Bloomfield's "intimate") bilingualism. She writes: (1) It's not a case of borrowing from a non-Bantu lg. into a Bantu lg., because >if it were the basic vocabulary would be mostly Bantu, not Cushitic. This is one criterion for direction, assumed on the basis of most common and well-known cases, e.g., French in English, Arabic in Swahili, etc. Again, the process of formation of Mbugu is more interesting than extending the criterion to less clear cases, as if it were simply a matter of definition, devoid of social implications. Hence she gives further arguments, e.g., >(2) It's not a case of shift from a non-Bantu lg. to a Bantu lg., >because again the basic vocabulary would be mainly Bantu, and besides, >if there were enough imperfect learning to cause a significant residue >of non-Bantu words even in the basic vocabulary, then there ought to >be more syntactic & phonological interference, because shift-induced >interference always affects the syntax & phonology most; but there is >no distortion at all in the Bantu grammar of Ma'a. Agreed. "Imperfect learning" (of Bantu) is not at all an issue. That much I intended in what I wrote. Ma'a speakers are fluent in a Bantu language. They are, it seems, fluent bilinguals in at least one Bantu language (usually Shambaa or Pare) AND something else called Ma'a or Mbugu. That was a crucial point to my "mooting" of direction of borrowing. The case is clearly distinct from language shifting, where what is "borrowed" (actually "retained" = non-Bantu vocabulary) is equivalent to a "substratum", i.e., untranslated or untranslatable lexical items (untranslatable usually because of cultural attachments, as when Mexican Americans retain "nina" (< madrina) for "godmother", and many more obvious cases). [Actually, "fluency" in Ma'a may turn out to be a difficult concept.] Sally's (3) and (4) can be ruled out for the same reason; they involve "imperfect learning", which is not the case. >(5) it's not a case of relexification into a Bantu lg., a la Media >Lengua (Quechua grammar + Spanish vocabulary), because there's not >enough lexical replacement, and again, the basic vocabulary is mostly >Cushitic. This point is not so clear to me. I mean I get it that it's not complete relexification, but it seems to me there may be a continuum of degree of relexification (depending on what?). Therefore, the rest of what Sally says is also important. But in addition, the contacts between Ma'a and others have >been with Bantu-speaking groups for a very long time; this >can be determined by the oral histories of the Pare and the Shambaa. >That is, there haven't been any intimate contacts with Cushitic >speakers recently enough to account for the present and documented >states of the Ma'a language. And that's even aside from the fact >that Maarten Mous has established that the non-Bantu Ma'a lexicon *can't >possibly* be all from one Cushitic lg.: some of it is Southern >Cushitic, some from another branch of Cushitic, and a large chunk of >it comes from Masai (with whom the Ma'a speakers haven't been in >contact any time lately). (The question of what Ma'a was like >*before* Bantuization is another and an intriguing story -- but >alas, evidence of any solid kind is lacking, and probably always will >be lacking.) All of this is important, and VERY interesting. One might suppose that Ma'a continues a practice/tradition that has been carried on by its speakers through a number of (fluent) bilingual contact situations, each one of which is reflected in Ma'a vocabulary, presumably as distinct historical strata of contact. Note that there is also Bantu vocabulary in Ma'a, according to Sally's criterion for excluding it as a case similar to Media Lengua. Intriguing is the possibility that as Ma'a has evolved, it "always" proceeded by dragging its lexical baggage into the grammar of the "new" language, and then rejected most of that grammatical matrix as it moved on to the next situation -- e.g., that at one time Ma'a vocabulary was embedded in a Maasai grammar, left behind more easily with the loss of bilingualism in Maasai than its Maasai vocabulary. This is speculation to be rejected as unfounded if no evidence of this can be found. I am only suggesting it more abstractly as a possible process to account for what is currently (or recently) observable, and the accretion of lexical strata in Mbugu. Thus, the Maasai vocabulary may have come into Ma'a some other way without a period of large-scale bilingualism (i.e., it never adopted Maasai grammar) -- it could be various contacts with different varieties of Cushitic that first started Mbugu off on its path -- where grammar (and some lexicon) would not be so strikingly different at first. (Where grammar is not that different, lexicon is most important to act as an ethnic symbol -- and that is typical even where grammar is quite different.) > Finally, there *was* some active non-Bantu grammar in Ma'a, both >in the earliest good attestations ca. 1930 and in comparative material >that shows chronological layering of Bantuization changes (e.g. Cushitic >suffixes added *after* the Bantu-induced opening of word-final syllables). This gets us into the issue of "inflectional" vs. "derivational" morphemes, where the latter may be more susceptible to borrowing, i.e., they are more easily counted as "lexical" material. This could stand further clarification before being accepted as evidence for a particular direction of borrowing. All the grammatical morphemes at issue seem to be complete syllables and cause no phonological irregularities. >Strikingly, the few Cushitic grammatical features that remained in the >earliest materials are now gone, to judge by the most recent fieldwork >(by Maarten Mous). So what we can observe in the documentary record >is the loss of the last relics of Cushitic grammar. Even in the >earliest records, the only Cushitic grammatical features that remain >are things that fit well into Bantu typology: a causative suffix, >pronominal possessive suffixes that aren't all that unlike the >Bantu possessive formation, etc. ...With one exception: a non-Bantu >(probably Cushitic) collective suffix appears on a few nouns, sometimes >alone and sometimes *with* a Bantu plural prefix, to indicate plurality, >in the earlier materials. Right. That's the collective suffix -no, to which sometimes the Bantu collective prefix ma- is optionally added, e.g., (ma-)[lhare-no] "a group of clouds", cf. ma-book-s reported by Scotton I think for Sotho as an example of retaining English plural inflection in using the English *word* in a Sotho context. Marking such nouns for a specific noun class might be difficult to resist in speech (as opposed to in citation forms) since they might have to govern a concordial form in speech, esp. a concordial subject-marker prefixed to the verb -- which would necessarily be Bantu, either for Sotho or Ma'a. As a separate matter, I thought that all verb derivation (even on a non-Bantu root) was Bantu in Ma'a, e.g., causative -ija. (Bantu causatives have various forms. -ija < *ed-i-a seems most likely, where *ed- is originally the applied suffix to which causative -i- is added and causes a sound change, now simply morphologised as -ija in Ma'a. In contrast, Bantu languages always have at least a few irregular causative formations for certain verbs. Hence, it would be interesting if Ma'a used the -ija causative with a Bantu verb root where it is not used in Pare or Shambaa, but I doubt that would happen.) Also, though the phonology (even in the >non-Bantu portions of the lexicon) has also been Bantuized, there is >still one un-local-Bantu Cushitic phoneme, a lateral fricative; according >to Mous, Ma'a speakers insert this even into Bantu words, by way of >emphasizing the differentness of their special in-group language. I guess that's the lateral fricative spelled "lh". I could imagine Welsh speakers playfully doing that in English as well; "take me to the llake". (The segment is pre-Bantu in the general area, and occurs in other non-Bantu languages, e.g., Sandawe, a "click" language classified as Khoisan.) > One other comment: Wald says that nobody has suggested dismissing >Ma'a `as some kind of (in-group) "slang"': wrong. This is what Mous >says it now is, and he has good evidence. (Mous and I differ, though, >on how it got that way.) Yes. I thought I was making it up to exaggerate my point, but then Dixon's comment on Mous's work was called to my attention. At least Dixon's characterisation of what Mous was saying struck me as going pretty much in the direction of my point. So maybe this is the "end of the line" for Ma'a, and that it is going to end up similarly to the way Ian Hancock represents the Romani spoken in England, which does seem to be superficially similar to Media Lengua, i.e., English grammar but Romani vocabulary (probably with various stratified accretions). > A general point can be made here: the routes by which even the >most exotic mixtures emerge aren't necessarily undiscoverable; if >we have enough information, we can often figure out how mixed languages >got that way. Sorting out the effects of contact isn't different >in that respect from sorting out the effects of internally-motivated >change. "Enough information" is of course the crucial requisite. Except that enough information in this context seems to include enough social information, which also was part of my point in reconstructing and separating out "compressed" strata when we do not know the social situation which produced those strata (in the event that they are strata and not a single "pure" -- unlikely by everything we know -- "rock-bottom" stratum that validates even deeper reconstruction under the "single language" hypothesis. I am grateful for Sally's scenario, which I think will help me remember what she means in saying the direction of borrowing was FROM Bantu TO Ma'a (Mbugu). It is Ma'a that continually shows the pressures of language shift due to bilingualism, but survives (though "scathed" by replacement of "original" vocabulary and grammar) as its speakers move on to a new bilingual contact situation (including from one Bantu language to another). I still have reservations about how to clearly distinguish the bilingual processes involved from the Media Lengua or British Romani type of process -- I expect closer to British Romani, where again it might be supposed that there was a gradual (?) grammatical loss of the ethnic language with retention of much of the ethnic lexicon, including pronouns and other "basic" vocabulary (pronouns = a CLOSED lexical set, cf. derivational affixes during a specific period of time). Presumably Media Lengua did not evolve this way but was a "sudden" flushing of Qechua vocabulary in favor of Spanish, while retaining the Qechua grammar as the "host" for relexification. Of crucial importance, I'm sure, is that Media Lengua flushes out the *ethnic* language, NOT the NON-ethnic language. Thus, different social circumstances were involved in such a process, e.g., Mbugu and British Romani seem to imply a situation originating in intimate bilingualism and some kind of NOMADISM (nomadism leading to a particular solution in preserving ethnicity linguistically -- a life-style most likely nearing an end for Ma'a speakers -- unlike the Maasai they do not have a "reserve", i.e., a reservation). In any case, I completely agree with Sally that we must understand the processes involved in all cases of language "mixture" (and that that concept conflates a number of different evolutionary possibilities), if we are ever going to be able to apply that knowledge plausibly to megalo-reconstructions in order to separate out deep strata and resolve the gnawing problems of "borrowing" vs. "genetic" inheritance. I stand by for further clarification, esp what social circumstances account for Media Lengua, but also for further details of the considerations I raised for Ma'a. Media Lengua is clearly different from Mbugu or Romani because it is the "ethnic" lexicon which is lost in Media Lengua, while it is the NON-ethnic lexicon that is flushed out in Mbugu. (I have also heard some question raised about the "stability" of Media Lengua -- though I'm not quite sure what that means -- other than that some think that it may be a transient phenomenon -- but does it necessarily have to be?) Without being able to distinguish what is "ethnic" and what is not, e.g., in a deep reconstruction, we would have a hell of a time distinguishing the two types. Thanks to scholars like Sally, and many others, e.g., Muysen for ML, we know there are at least two types of Lexicon1 + Grammar2. P.S. In view of the clarification that Sally has given, I'm glad that my original message chose Mbugu/Ma'a rather than the equally thorny problem for deep reconstruction given the type Gumperz described for Kupwar, a converged grammar and three distinct vocabularies (by different means, perhaps, Dixon describes a similar situation for some parts of Australia, where, it seems, speakers have a large number of synonyms for basic words, which comes in handy when someone dies and one of the basic words that sounds like their name must be avoided for a while; such an avoidance custom also in some Bantu-speaking areas; unclear in Dixon's cursory discussion was whether the synonyms are perceived as part of a single language or organised into different over-all sets, as in the case of Kupwar, whether or not each set is associated with a different language label -- I'm sure he discusses that more fully in some other work that has not yet come to my attention). The issue for deep reconstruction remains the social inferences we make when combining families into deeper families. This remains the persistent point of deep reconstruction, as far as I can tell, and has been since the origin of the genetic hypothesis. When we hear that, say, Afrasian and IE, or whatever, are "related", we immediately think ah! that means there was once a "single" culture that later fragmented into various known cultures, i.e., to the extent that we do not necessarily assume that the current speakers are themselves relevantly biologically related in any way to the members of that single culture. From stoyan at zas.gwz-berlin.de Mon Mar 8 13:47:47 1999 From: stoyan at zas.gwz-berlin.de (Koyka Stoyanova) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:47:47 EST Subject: Workshop on Theory and Empiricism Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- WORKSHOP on THEORY AND EMPIRICISM: Historical and Dialectal Data in the Formation of Linguistic Theory TIME: 13th September 1999 - 16th September 1999 LOCATION: Centro Seminariale Monte Verità CH-6612 Ascona (Switzerland) ORGANIZING Elvira Glaser (Zurich) COMMITTEE: Michele Loporcaro (Zurich) Karin Donhauser (Berlin) in cooperation with the Centro Stefano Franscini (ETH Zurich) TOPIC: How much empirical research is needed to constitute a linguistic theory? Which fundamental principles are needed by the empirical linguistic research? These two questions address a basic problem of today's grammatical research that has been neglected by the modern grammatic theoretical literature as well as by the traditional philological research. The workshop shall provide a basis to discuss and study this problem in depth across the disciplines based on material from the Germanic and Romance languages. Topics considered will range from Phonology to Syntax. Ample space will be reserved to discuss the leading questions: - What risk do we run in taking historical or dialectal data from traditional descriptive Grammars? - What kind of distortion are we faced with in evaluating written records? How can such distortion be controlled? - What special difficulties ensue from the raising and interpretation of dialectal data? INVITED Ulrike Demske (Jena) SPEAKERS: Karin Donhauser (Berlin) Annette Fischer (Berlin) Thomas Fritz (Passau) Elvira Glaser (Zurich) Ruediger Harnisch (Bayreuth) Michele Loporcaro (Zurich) Nikolaus Ritt (Vienna) Guenter Rohdenburg (Paderborn) Richard Schrodt (Vienna) Maria Selig (Berlin) Mario Squartini (Zurich) Stefano Vassere (Bellinzona) PARTICIPANTS: The workshop is especially intended for young scientists working in the area of historical linguistics and dialectology and for advanced students who are interested in theoretical questions and who like to reflect on the relation between theory and empiricism. Workshop languages will be English, German, Italian FEES: conference fee 40 SFr.; board and lodging ca. 80 SFr./per day (Hotel Monte Verità). PhD students and other students are welcome to apply for a grant! DEADLINE for receipt of abstracts: 31.05.1999 Abstracts should be sent to the following address via snail- or e-mail: Guido Seiler Deutsches Seminar Universitaet Zuerich Schoenberggasse 9 CH-8001 Zuerich Fax: ++41/1/634 49 05 e-mail: gseiler at ds.unizh.ch Information will soon be available at: http://www.ds.unizh.ch/ ############################################################################# WORKSHOP zum Thema EMPIRIE UND THEORIE: SPRACHHISTORISCHE UND DIALEKTOLOGISCHE DATEN IN DER LINGUISTISCHEN THEORIEBILDUNG ZEIT: 13.9. - 16.9.1999 ORT: Centro Seminariale Monte Verità CH-6612 Ascona (Schweiz) VERANSTALTER: Elvira Glaser (Zuerich) Michele Loporcaro (Zuerich) Karin Donhauser (Berlin) in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Centro Stefano Franscini (ETH Zuerich) THEMA: Wieviel empirische Forschung benoetigt die linguistische Theoriebildung? Welche Grundlagen braucht die empirische linguistische Forschung? In dieser doppelten Fragestellung wird ein Grundproblem heutiger Grammatikforschung angesprochen, das in der modernen grammatiktheoretischen Literatur ebenso vernachlaessigt wurde wie in der aelteren philologischen Forschung. Die Tagung soll die Moeglichkeit bieten, diesen Problembereich in grundsaetzlicher Weise zu eroertern und an Fallbeispielen vor allem aus germanischen und romanischen Sprachen faecheruebergreifend zu studieren. Leitende Fragen fuer die Diskussion, der breiter Raum gegeben werden soll, werden sein: - Welche Risiken birgt die Uebernahme von Datensaetzen aus deskriptiven Darstellungen zur historischen Grammatik bzw. zur Grammatik von Dialekten? - Welche ueberlieferungsbedingten Verzerrungen ergeben sich bei der Auswertung sprachhistorischen Materials? Wie sind diese zu kontrollieren? - Welche besonderen Schwierigkeiten bietet die Erhebung und Interpretation von Dialektdaten? EINGELADENE Ulrike Demske (Jena) REFERENTEN: Karin Donhauser (Berlin) Annette Fischer (Berlin) Thomas Fritz (Passau) Elvira Glaser (Zuerich) Ruediger Harnisch (Bayreuth) Michele Loporcaro (Zuerich) Nikolaus Ritt (Wien) Guenter Rohdenburg (Paderborn) Richard Schrodt (Wien) Maria Selig (Berlin) Mario Squartini (Zuerich) Stefano Vassere (Bellinzona) TEILNEHMER: Die Tagung wendet sich vor allem an juengere, empirisch in den Bereichen Sprachgeschichte und Dialektologie arbeitende Wissenschaftler sowie an fortgeschrittene Studenten, die an theoretischen Fragen Interesse haben und das Verhaeltnis von Theorie und Empirie reflektieren moechten. Konferenzsprachen sind Deutsch, Englisch und Italienisch. GEBUEHREN: Tagungsgebuehr: 40 SFr.; Kost und Logis ca. 80 SFr./Tag (Unterbringung im Hotel Monte Verità). Studenten und Doktoranden koennen sich um ein Stipendium bewerben. (kurze Begruendung erforderlich!) ANMELDUNG/ mit kurzem Abstract - ca. eine DIN A4 Seite - des Projektes, INFORMATION: das im Workshop vorgestellt werden soll, an: Guido Seiler Deutsches Seminar Universitaet Zuerich Schoenberggasse 9 CH-8001 Zuerich Fax: ++41/1/634 49 05 e-mail: gseiler at ds.unizh.ch ANMELDESCHLUSS: 31.5.1999 Information in Kuerze auch unter: http://www.ds.unizh.ch =========================================== Koyka Stoyanova Zentrum fuer Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung Jaegerstr. 10/11 10117 Berlin Germany phone: ++49/30/20192-556 fax: ++049/30/20192-402 e-mail: stoyan at zas.gwz-berlin.de =========================================== From Derek.Nurse at ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr Mon Mar 8 13:46:42 1999 From: Derek.Nurse at ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr (Derek Nurse) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:46:42 EST Subject: Ma'a/Mbugu In-Reply-To: <1241.920735368@pogo.isp.pitt.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- A very good source of material on Ma'a that Sally omitted is: Matthias Brenzinger, 1987, Die sprachliche und kulturelle Stelle der Mbugu (Ma'a), MA thesis, Institut fuer Afrikanisik, Univ. of Cologne. It is an overview of everything published up to 1987 on Ma'a and is quite comprehensive. D. From diriyeam at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA Mon Mar 8 13:46:13 1999 From: diriyeam at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA (Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:46:13 EST Subject: Ma'a In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I don't think this one or Dahalo has anything to do with the Cushitic languages, much like the rest of the so-called 'southern cushitic', spoken by originally Khoisan hunters, who were then influenced by the Bantu agriculturists, Nilotic herdspeople, and probably by the travelling Cushite (Somalis were travelling all over East Africa since as early as the 12 century in search of commerce and regularly employed the hunter-gatherer people as trackers of elephants and rhinos;---we should not trust therefore a few Cushitic lexemes). There are no known southern Cushites south of the Somalis and the Oromo. I did look through Ehret's lexical collection of the so-called 'Southern Cushitic', and found nothing reliable, except some resemblances, and a few loan-words from sheep and goat rearing, indicating diffusion of the common Cushitic culture (cf. the cattle culture of the Nilotic); so what? Today, the Turkana in northern Kenya are picking camel culture from the Somalis; and the Dahalo are moving away from Cushitic influence, in line with the dominant forces of today in Kenya, to a Swahili one. There was before Meinhof who was lumping the Khoisan with the then Hamitic (Cushitic). It is only to be expected the Khoisan scattered groups are subject to greater linguistic influences than any other group. In southern Somalia, they have completed assimilated linguistically, as the Cushites advanced upon them from a northern direction; yet, they form an small ethnic group. The same thing could be expected in Tanzania, as the Bantu agriculturists advanced into the area from a western/south-western directions. Some time far in history, it seems they were the sole occupants of the much of East Africa as far as southern Africa. Dolgolpolsky (1973:27) had it Ma'a is a Bantu language by morphology. More likely, it underwent influences from all the other languages also (notably Nilo-Saharan and maybe Cushitic, though the last one would be the least as far as population histories might go). In Hagège and Haudricourt (PUF 1978:40), it is said that it is structurally bantou, and is given as an example of hybrid case. Some Biblio (unordered) Dolgopoljskij, A. B. 1973 Sravniteljno-istoriceskaja Fonetika Kusitskix Jazykov. Moscow:Nauka. Tucker, Archibald N. — Margaret A. Bryan 1974 “The ‘Mbugu’ anomaly”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Languages, 37:( i): 188- 207. Copland, B. D. 1933-34 - “Note on the Origin of the Mbugu, with a Text,” Zeitschrift fur Eingeborene-Sprachen 24:241—4. Ehret, C. 1980. Historical Reconstruction of Southern Couchitic: Phonology and Vocabulary. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Brenzinger, Matthias. 1987 Die sprachliche und kulturelle Stellung der Mbugu (Ma a). [Un-published MA. thesis, University of Cologne.] Goodman, Morris. 1971 "The strange case of Mbugu", in: Dell Hymes (ed.) 243-254. Maddieson, Ian; Spajic, Sinisa; Sands, Bonny; Ladefoged, Peter. Phonetic Structures of Dahalo. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere; 1993, 36, Dec, 5-53. Heine, Bernd. The Study of Word Order in African Languages. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics; 1975, 20, 161-183. Thomason,-Sarah-G. Ma'a (Mbugu). Chpt in CONTACT LANGUAGES: A WIDER PERSPECTIVE, Thomason, Sarah G. [Ed], Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996, pp 469-487. Thomason, Sarah Grey. 1983 “Genetic relationships and the case of Ma~ a (Mbugu)”, Studies in African Linguistics 2: 195- 231. Greenberg, J. The Languages of Africa. 1970 edition (the one I have), and others. At 11:51 AM 3/5/1999 EST, you wrote: >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >I think Sally Thomason's posting raises some very interesting >questions, but it might be useful if Sally could post a list >of recent references on this language. AMR > , , |\_/| 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 Mon Mar 8 13:39:01 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:39:01 EST Subject: Ma'a/Mbugu In-Reply-To: <1241.920735368@pogo.isp.pitt.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Sally Thomason wrote [inter alia]: > Christopher Ehret identifies at least one causative suffix in > Ma'a as of Cushitic origin; Mous cautions that Ehret's etymologies > need careful checking, but in any case it doesn't appear to be a > Bantu suffix, and Ehret says that it is -- or was, ca. 25 years > ago -- very productive. He says the same thing about two or > three other non-Bantu suffixes in Ma'a. [snip] > > The pronominal possessive suffixes are certainly inflectional > (at least that's how such affixes are generally analyzed in languages > that have them), so indeed there is evidence of Cushitic inflection > in (earlier) Ma'a. > I don't (for once!) strongly disagree with Sally, but I do query the assumption that such affixes, esp. the causative, constitute ironclad evidence that the lg started out non-Bantu. A Bantu lg could have borrowed some Cushitic affixes and then more recently lost them again. Or could it? > Second, Alexis Manaster Ramer asks for references. The most > useful source on the present linguistic & social status of Ma'a is > Maarten Mous's 1994 article "Ma'a or Mbugu", in the book Mixed > Languages, ed. by Peter Bakker & Maarten Mous, pp. 175-200 > (published by IFOTT at U. Amsterdam, but see Bakker's recent > Thank you for this and other references [snipped]. The funny thing is that several years ago I was asked to review this book and have a draft that is rather far along, which I hope someone will help me finish one of these days. I did not find Mous's paper, or indeed any of the papers in that volume, to answer my questions, though. > > P.S. I don't think there's general agreement any more that Sandawe > and Hadza belong to the Khoisan family. Bonny Sands' recent > UCLA dissertation failed to find solid support for the > hypothesis. > This is so, but I don't know that there is anyone doing solid work to try to figure out what these languages ARE related to, which is unfortunate. From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 21:23:41 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 16:23:41 EST Subject: Yakhontov and Swadesh lists Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I want to do some work with lists like those of Swadesh and Yakhontov except I want to use the binary system so I have to use the numbers 32, 64 and 128. I can drop 3 from Yakhontov's 35 list and also drop 1 from his 65 list. I also need to add 28 more to Swadesh's 100 list. The question is what and which to add or drop. I'd appreciate suggestions from anyone and everyone. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From degraff at MIT.EDU Wed Mar 10 21:23:10 1999 From: degraff at MIT.EDU (Michel DeGraff) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 16:23:10 EST Subject: One internalist pespective on creoles and genetic classification In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 02 Mar 1999 08:44:27 EST." Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- RE message from bwald at humnet.ucla.edu on Tue, 2 Mar 1999 08:44:27 EST: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- [...] > Not so removed from this is the (former) issue of whether Haitian (Creole) > is a Romance language. Until relatively recent times when pidgin-creole > studies started to be taken seriously by historical linguists in general > (or have they? AMR, to be sure, seems to take them seriously), lexicon > alone (i.e, through regular sound correspondences) seems to have been > criterial of inclusion in "language family" (for the "mainstream"). > Grammar did not count for much, just as it did not count for much in > synchronic linguistic description. [...] > [...] such issues as Haitian brought up DEFINITIONAL problems of language > family. How to classify when there is historical discontinuity in the > grammar? > (NB: I could say more about "political" motivations for different sides on > whether or not Haitian should be [have been] included in Romance, but I am > saying enough that can be misinterpreted without getting into that fruitful > topic. Currently there is still disagreement about how to account for > the grammar of Haitian and various other "creoles", e.g., whether it comes > from an innate "bioprogram" or is relexified Fon (a Kwa Niger-Congo > language), etc etc. There are also issues involving whether many so-called > creoles actually descend from earlier pidgins, e.g., Berbice Dutch, > sometimes called Berbice "Creole" Dutch, which seems to be a "mixture" of > Dutch and Kalabari (the latter a variety of Ijoid, a branch of Niger-Congo > that has contentious aspects for (sub)classification), or various > non-European varieties of Portuguese that seem to have been "restructured", > but not necessarily descended "whole cloth" from pidgins, etc etc. Does > "(radical) restructuring" exclude them from their lexical source "family" > affiliation? These seem to be matters of DEFINITION of "family", not > whatever the historical "facts" may be) [...] Dear all, Similar and related questions are being raised among creolists and generativists with interests in language change and language acquisition. As it turns out, various authors in a forthcoming MIT Press anthology address these questions from an internalist, generativist perspective. Such perspective, I do realize, is not shared by all members of this list, but I find their observations quite relevant to the intringuing questions raised by Benji Wald... Back to commercials: The book's title is LANGUAGE CREATION AND LANGUAGE CHANGE: CREOLIZATION, DIACHRONY AND DEVELOPMENT (DeGraff, ed., MIT Press, 1999). Publication information can be found at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/book-home.tcl?isbn=0262041685 What I'll do here is just quote one relevant advert ... sorry, excerpt ... from pages 13-14 of my introductory chapter (from the raw, pre-copyediting files). This chapter is (rather ambitiously) titled: "Creolization, Language Change and Language Acquisition: A Prolegomenon". Here it goes: ****************************************************************************** Pages 13-14 [...] Are the language-related cognitive processes responsible for creolization also involved in instances of ordinary acquisition and in (gradual) language change? [...] A positive answer to [that] question would connect creolization phenomena to more general diachronic phenomena, that is, to the better-understood instances of syntactic change occurring over relatively long periods of time, as for example in the history of English. Support for such a positive answer is given by contributors' proposals whose aim is to account for generalizations obtaining across cases of language change and emergence; see Roberts's and Lightfoot's chapters for two such proposals and Rizzi's and DeGraff's commentaries for further discussion. However, connecting creolization to language change [...] may at first appear controversial. At the turn of the century, Schuchardt (see Gilbert 1980b) used evidence from creole languages, as many others have since, in attempts to refute the Neogrammarian STAMMBAUMTHEORIE (``family-tree theory'') according to which the parentage of each language goes through a SINGLE ancestor; in this theory, languages reproduce asexually, so to speak (see Thomason and Kaufman 1988 for a critique and alternatives). With massive language contact in their histories, creoles clearly belie the Stammbaumtheorie's ``one parent per language'' assumption. Some (e.g., Hall 1966, 117) have tried to maintain the Neogrammarian assumption by unsuccessfully forcing creoles into genetic affiliation with their superstrates. Others (e.g., Taylor 1956) have recognized two possible ways out: (a) either creoles lie altogether outside Stammbaumtheorie (Taylor 1956, 407); cf. Thomason and Kaufman 1988, 9--12, 152, 165-166); or (b) our theories must be revised and made more ``family-friendly'' to allow for ``nongenetic'' relationships. An example of possibility (b) is Taylor's (1956, 413) proposal that creoles are ``genetically `orphans' [with] two `foster-parents': one that provides the basic morphological and/or syntactical pattern, and another from which the fundamental vocabulary is taken''! In the spirit of both (a) and (b), Thomason and Kaufman distinguish between ``genetic'' and ``nongenetic'' paths of development, the former arising via ``normal transmission'' and the latter via ``imperfect transmission'' as with abrupt creoles. But is transmission ever ``perfect''? In the I-language perspective adopted in this introduction, grammars are never transmitted: they are always created anew from innate mental resources (the language faculty plus acquisition and processing mechanisms, say) coupled with the ambient (environment-specific) PLD [Primary Linguistic Data] available to the learner (see below).[Endnote 24 --- see below] It is always the case that the PLD is both limited and heterogeneous (in varying degrees), as a result of which the final state of the language learner (i.e., the attained internal grammar, which gives rise to unlimited productivity) is inevitably underdetermined (see chapters 13--15 for further discussion). What Thomason and Kaufman (1988) call ``genetic'' versus ``nongenetic'' has no theoretical status in this framework: in both cases (``genetic'' language change AND ``nongenetic'' creolization), the learner's normal task is to set parameters using whatever PLD are available. In parameter-setting terms, what Thomason and Kaufman's distinction might refer to with respect to possibility (a) is the DEGREE of heterogeneity, stability and/or complexity of the PLD in the genetic versus nongenetic cases. In turn, the quality of the PLD is affected by the many (socially determined) EXTERNAL factors that are at play in all instances of language acquisition; two such factors, most relevant to the creolization case, are (a) the varying fluencies of the model speakers (i.e., those providing the PLD) in the evolving common language, and (b) the diversity of the model speakers' native tongues. The goal of this volume is to better understand the structure of UG by studying the CONSTANT, INTERNAL constraints on the outcomes of acquisition across various sets of NONCONSTANT, EXTERNAL conditions. In my view, such outcomes include those of both language change and creolization. [...] [...] [p 40 Endnote 24:] "In the words of Meillet (1929, 74), [C]haque enfant doit acqu'erir par lui-m^eme la capacit'e de comprendre le parler des gens de son groupe. ... La langue ne lui est pas livre'e en bloc, tout d'une pie`ce. ... Pour chaque individu, le langage est ainsi une recre'ation totale faite sous l'influence du milieu qui l'entoure. Il ne saurait y avoir discontinuite' plus absolue. [Each child must on his own acquire the capacity to understand the speech of people in his community. ... Language is not given to him en bloc, all in one piece. ... Thus, for each individual, language is a total re-creation, carried out under the influence of the surrounding environment. There could not exist a more absolute discontinuity. [my translation]] ****************************************************************************** Thank you, -michel. ___________________________________________________________________________ MIT Linguistics & Philosophy, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139-4307 http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff.home.html From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 15:29:10 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 10:29:10 EST Subject: Sorites Paradox and Ahistorical Accretion Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- There are certain things that really get me confused. These certain things are things done by linguists apparently much after (or before) thought. ONe of them is something that looks to me as if it is ahistorical accretion. I will demonstrate via an example. The word "yoke" is said to be IE and to derive from *PIE. But there does not seem to be any other meaning attached to it except "yoke". From the recent centuries (especially in the sciences and technology) whenever new words are coined out of nowhere they seem to be compounded words from Greco-Latin especially created for a specific purpose by scientists. Examples are words like entropy, enthalpy, probably energy, synchronous, etc. I find it hard to believe that this was done 6,000 years ago. So the word "yoke" must come from another word which was pressed into service in the new setting. What meaning could/should it have had? Pull? Hitch? Tie? Bind? Put up front? Tie up front? Which brings up another problem. I seem to see two ways of reasoning used in the literature. If a word can be found which has not etymology in a language it is thought to be original in that language? That seems contradictory. After all, if we found an etymology in another language, clearly then we'd have to lean in that direction. So then if an etymology cannot be found, then the word should be left neutral, pending something. But what? How about looking into other languages? Which brings up another problem. It is called a sorites paradox in logic. I can illustrate it using some kind of logic related to fuzzy logic. Suppose we could assign numbers to how similar objects are to each other. We could do this by using distinctive features. For example, an orange is closer to an apple than it is to a chair. No doubt about that. How about similarity of an orange to a lemon vs its similarity to a grape? We can make up some relevant distinctive features. Just for the purposes of this example, I will make up a few; size, color, skin texture, taste (sweet, sour etc).. Orange and lemon are closer in size, and closer in skin texture, and even in color, although not in taste. So if we were weighting each feature equally, we'd judge orange and lemon closer to each other. Now let's try this on something like this: "how close is a qumquat to a quince vs qumquat to apple?" If we do not know anything about what a quince looks and tastes like and we don't know anything about what a qumquat looks like we cannot answer the question. Suppose we knew 2 out of 3. Let's make it, apple, orange and quince. (For the purposes of this example pretend you don't know anything about quinces). We might then look at the apple and orange and decide that there are a lot of things they have in common, and might make ourselves believe that they are similar. But we all recognize that this is wrong. But how then does the linguist who only knows IE languages proceed to look at some language X and determine if it is IE without knowing anything about AA, Altaic, Uralic or Nilo-Saharan or any other language that could have been in that region, including Elamite, Sumerian, or Hurrian or Adgyg-Abxaz, or Vainax, or Kartvelian? This is like looking at a morphing video of Eddie Murphy being turned into Bill Clinton and deciding that they are the same person. That in fact is what is done when an agglutinating language at time t0 is said to be descendant of, say, an inflecting language. Now back to yoke. Is it accidental that the word for yoking/hitching is in Kipchak-Karacay-Balkar, and that means "to pull" in Turkish, and that means "load" as in a load put on an animal or a cart/wagon. Is it derived from IE yoke? This is just an example to illustrate a point. Do the naysayers to Nostratic take these (not the example) into consideration? Or do they use the rule that if they have seen a word in writing some language, then it belongs to that language? -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Wed Mar 10 15:24:07 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 10:24:07 EST Subject: Ma'a/Mbugu Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- We are now considering the issue of productive non-Bantu morphology in Ma'a. Sally notes: > Christopher Ehret identifies at least one causative suffix in >Ma'a as of Cushitic origin; Mous cautions that Ehret's etymologies >need careful checking, but in any case it doesn't appear to be a >Bantu suffix, and Ehret says that it is -- or was, ca. 25 years >ago -- very productive. The only such causative suffix that I know for Mbugu is -ija, which corresponds well to Pare -ija (or -izha) and has a Bantu etymology. That is not to say that it could not also correspond to a non-Bantu (probably Cushitic causative ?*-iyya). [Such things happen, cf. English-based creole "se", either English "say" or Akan.] One earlier observer, E.C. Green, noted that when a simple verb ends in -a, e.g., hala (be parched) the caus is added as follows; hal-ija. This is the Bantu way. However, when the verb ends in another vowel, that vowel is preserved, e.g., hletu (lessen intr) cause hletu-ja. This is not the Bantu way, because Bantu simple verbs always end in -a. None of these verb roots are Bantu, but if hletu were (which it isn't) hletu-ja would presuppose the Pare simple verb *hletu(l)a (Pare lost etymological intervocalic -l-). Next, > The pronominal possessive suffixes are certainly inflectional >(at least that's how such affixes are generally analyzed in languages >that have them), so indeed there is evidence of Cushitic inflection >in (earlier) Ma'a. In both Ma'a and the relevant Bantu languages (as general in North/Central East Bantu) the independent pronouns and possessive "suffixes" are not (all) identical in form, e.g., Pare/Shambaa/Swahili/etc 1s mi- but poss -ngu. Ma'a has (or had) independent 1s ani and possessive gho (or xo) [the reported phonology is velar but otherwise varies a lot]. In relevant Bantu possessive constructions, the possessive suffixes are affixed to the morpheme -a- 'of', e.g., -a-ngu "my/mine". In Ma'a they are not. They seem to be treated as *independent* words. There is no "linking" vowel -a-, as there would be in Bantu. In addition, at least for non-human head nouns, there is no concordial class marker, as there would be in the relevant Bantu languages, e.g., Ma'a: ihle *gho* (name *my*), cntr. Pare: jina *l-a-ngu* (name *it-of-my*), where the l- is the class prefix for the class of jina 'name'. The form of the class prefix would vary depending on the class of the head noun, but there would be one in any case. Ma'a may be following a Cushitic construction (I don't know), but it is certainly not following a relevant Bantu construction. The interesting parallelism is simply that there are morphologically distinct sets for possessive pronouns in both (relevant) Bantu and Ma'a. Beyond that, the morphology of the Ma'a possessive pronouns is word-like, not inflectional in any decisive sense. Finally, about the possessives, in Ma'a the human ones are treated like Bantu nouns (or most descriptive adjectives). They take the nominal concords, NOT the ones used in the relevant languages with possessives, e.g., Ma'a MU-gho (class.1-my) = mine (e.g., the child is *mine*). This is like Pare nominal (or adjectival) concord: MW-eza (class.1-tall) = tall (one) (e.g., a *tall* person), not like possessive concord W-a-ngu (class.1-of-my) = my/mine (e.g., the child is mine). The difference is between the concordial forms *MU and *YU, both class 1 (typically human singular). With possessives the concordial form should be *YU (in relevant languages) not *MU. [whether they are used attributively or as predicates doesn't affect the distinction here.] > Maarten Mous has suggested (p.c. 1993) the possibility that the >pre-bantuized Ma'a language originated as a mixture itself, the >language of a people coalesced from an escaped group of cattle >herders who had been (semi-?)enslaved by the Masai. This scenario >could explain the lexical mixture in Ma'a. But, as Mous notes, it's >hard to imagine a way in which this hypothesis could be tested, given >the total lack of social information about the Ma'a people from the >period before they arrived in the Pares. That seconds my point about the importance of social information. We can hope at this point that languages evolve in a way that is so constrained (if we knew the constraints) that eventually we might be able to extrapolate from similar situations (if they become recognised) for which we can get more evidence. (In fact, if linguistics lasts long enough maybe a comparable situation will arise again somewhere, pace the guys who think everyone is going to end up talking "post-modern English".) Lastly, >P.S. I don't think there's general agreement any more that Sandawe > and Hadza belong to the Khoisan family. Bonny Sands' recent > UCLA dissertation failed to find solid support for the > hypothesis. (For that matter, there seems to be considerable > doubt among Khoisan specialists that even the southern members > of the proposed family are related to each other.) That is right. Most experts in the field never accepted Greenberg's classification of Sandawe (or Hadza) is Khoisan, i.e., genetically related to the Southern branches -- not to mention doubts about them being related to each other, e.g., Khoi and San. Khoisan is a label of convenience. The typical issue remains whether they are so deeply related that it is hard (or impossible) to demonstrate, or whether the typological features they share, e.g., "clicks" and "gender" systems (hence Meinhof's "Hamitic"), may be an old speech area phenomenon since overlaid with Cushitic (in the North) and Bantu everywhere. Sandawe, more than Ma'a, is in a unique African area where members of Greenberg's "four" major families are spoken. P.S. There's more to be said about the details of how Ma'a adjusted to Bantu grammar, and where it stopped short (in the past), and I look forward to how that will be treated in the future. From diriyeam at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA Wed Mar 10 15:16:04 1999 From: diriyeam at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA (Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 10:16:04 EST Subject: Ma'a In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- There have been various mentions of bushmanoid people in the southern tip of Somalia, for a long time. Lewis (1960:216) (Lewis, I.M. The Somali Conquest of the Horn of Africa. Journal of African History. 1, 2 (1960), pp. 213—229.) states: "The second pre-Hamitic population, less numerous than the riverine cultivators, was a hunting and fishing people living an apparently nomadic existence. Their present-day descendants, much modified by Hamitic influence, survive in scattered hunting groups in Jubaland and southern Somalia where they are generally known as Ribi (or WaRibi) and as Boni (or WaBoni). Physically it has been suggested tentatively that they contain Bushman- like elements. But their physical characteristics have not been intensively studied. They appear to have been politically and economically linked to the Bantu sedentaries..." Murdoch says (1959:302) (Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History. New York, McGraw Hill) "The newcomers [Bantu-speakers] pressed steadily forward into Kenya and thence into Somalia, where the valley of the Shebelle River represents the limit of their intensive penetration. In Kenya and Somalia they found the Azanians confined to a few coastal trading settlements. The hinterland contained only Bushmanoid hunters, even in favored sections such as the valleys of the Tana, Juba, and Shebelle Rivers. The Bantu populated the latter, driving the indigenes back into the arid steppe and savanna country, where agriculture was impossible. Here a few remnants, like the Boni and Sanye tribes, still survive." A people might lose their language but keep to ancient patterns of practises, and culture. A partial example, though in this case the Romanis have kept something of their dialects, are the gypses of Europe, who live among Europeans but are referred to as different, though in some cases, because of mixing, it is not physically apparent, while in some cases there is an apparent minor physical differences. The same can be said of the hunter-gatherers in southern Somalia; they have kept hunting, an activity not practised by Somalis. In some cases, there are noticeable bushmanoid features among the Eyle---a light-yellowish complexion, eyes that look like those of the San, less hair than Cushites; I am not an anthropologists, and would not venture much into that area. However, in E.A., generally, though not absolutely, the peoples that met and clashed there have kept alive different cultures alive: that of the hunter-gather, the agriculturalist and the pastoralist (Cushites and Nilotes). For my good luck, I might say so, since I learned a lot I did not know about my own country and its peoples, I had the chance of being a teacher in a village in southern Somalia in 1974 during an alphabetisation campaign, when our dictator all of a sudden decided that everyone be literate in the new Latin script, and sent us out into the countryside by closing all schools. The village consisted of three populations that in some ways were closely integrated and yet kept a distance among themselves. The first group were of Cushitic stock, remnants of the Oromo without a doubt, by now well islamized and somalized; they possessed most of the livestock, and were partly agro-pastoralists; the second group were of people who descended from a previously bantu-speaking group; they were physically different from the cushitic group, and were mostly agriculturalists; they had kept bits of their culture despite Islam and somalization, such as the masks for dancing, not known in the broad cushitic culture; the third group, and socially the lowest, since they possessed no land of their own were the hunter-gathers, just starting to farm; they farmed land leased to them, but still practised hunting to the dismay of the other villagers, who did not want residents who hunted; in Somali culture hunting is a despised profession; of course, Somalis always hunted ivory-bearing animals and were running up and down East Africa but they don't hunt for meat; obviously, rich in livestock, they don't have to. This last group is commonly known in Somalia as the Eyle 'the dog owners'; they had hunting communities in the Juba region near the mount Eyle, named after them; but by the 70s they were settling down with the agriculturalists or migrating to towns where they found a niche for themselves as unlicensed butchers for families staging a feast; they would be paid with the offal and a few shillings; thus in Mogadishu, they had a squatter community near the national university to the consternation of the university management who had to bring in the bulldozers at last to evict them. I don't have much information of what became of them since the civil war. Of course, the whole discussion of Khoisan peoples and languages in East Africa is confusing since so many different names continue to be used (Sanye, Aweera (Heine), Boni, etc.), and some have postulated the descendants of the Eastern Cushitic (meaning Somali) and Southern Cushitic (Dahalo, Mbugu, etc.) separated 4000 years ago, when the Eastern Cushitic group migrated to the Red Sea and Golf of Aden zones, from where they would later migrate again in a southern direction. I never understood how the proponents of this later hazy theory, since no linguistic, historical or cultural proof has been shown, postulated such a theory. Herbert (1966)(Journal of Africa history, 7/1:27-46) and Turton (1975) (Journal of African history, 16/4:519-37) (an anthropologist and a historian) mention only Dyen's 'migration theory', as their guiding principal and state there is more dialects in the southern regions. True, but only of two kinds: Somaloid and Oromoid; besides, there are less dialects in central Italy, from where the Romans spread, than northern Italy. So much then for applying this intuitive principal to a micro-linguistic situation---this might work when applied to the presence of English in the Americas. Nurse and Spear (1985:38) say: "The split between Eastern and Southern Cushitic occurred at least four thousand years ago, and their subsequent histories were quite separate. Some two thousand years ago there was a major Eastern Cushitic concentration around Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. By AD. 500 the Eastern Cushitic ancestors of the Aweera had probably reached the coast of Somalia and later gave up herding for hunting and gathering, probably under the influence of the Dahalo. By the beginning of the present millennium, Eastern Cushitic Somali had also started to filter south into southern Somalia where, as we shall see, they interacted with northern Swahili communities in the first half of the present millennium. The final Eastern Cushitic group to impinge on the Swahili and related peoples were the Orma (Oromo), who pushed south out of Somalia into northeastern Kenya in the sixteenth century, disrupting coastal patterns established for over five hundred years." As far as known history goes, written or oral, it attests to an expansion from a limited coastal northern area to the south. The Ancient Egyptians, 5000 or or so years ago, sent an expedition during Queen Hatsepsut's reign, to the coasts of what is now generally agreed to be the northern coasts of Somalia, where the aromatic resinous plants, so essential to ancient religions, grow on the mountain flanks, and depicted on the frescoes of a Thebian temple at Deir el-Bahri a people similar to themselves in appearance and clothing. At the same time many terms from the religious domain of Ancient Egypt are recognizable in Somali; they include such terms as Bah and Kah (Ba and Ka, life essences of Egyptian belief), the Huur (the Hor, the bird of death), Aysitu (mother-god) and Awzaar (father zaar). Additionally, among the cultural objects depicted by the Egyptians 5000 years and still found among Cushites is the small slightly curved dagger, a local artifact (Hersi 1977:32) (Hersi, A. 1977. The Arab Factor in Somali History. Unpublished PHD dissertation, University of Los Angeles)). The question then if the people living along the coasts of the Red Sea and the Golf of Aden were the ancestors of Somalis, Afars, and Oromos, who was living there then 5000 years ago. In classifical times, the people who inhabited the northern Somali coasts were known to the Greeks as the Barbaroi (it later became the Berbers, as the medieval Arabs used to call Somalis, and is still borne by the town of Berbera in northern Somalia), and had no central government, each city having its own local council---a typical mode of Cushitic governance. The people says the writer of the Periplus Maris Erythraie were rather unruly. (Casson 1989) (Casson, Lionel. Periplus Maris Erythraie. Princeton University Press). This document was written during the first century AD. (Ibid.:7). However, Heine (1978) (The Sam Languages: A History of Rendille, Somali and Boni) had the Somalis barely starting thier northward migration from Lake Turkana, after they had diverged barely from the Boni, the small hunter group now in Kenya. I have always wondered why pastoralists, hungry for grass and water, would choose to come such a long way to the deserts northern and central Somalia when they were within reach of the green meadows of Kenya and Tanzania, just the places where the British, who were appropriating for themselves the 'Highlands of East Africa' were trying to keep the Somalis from crossing into in the 19th century when they came up with the 'Somali line', corresponding to the River Tana. For the rest, during the medieval times when Islam was spreading in the Horn, what happened iis well known from several Arabic sources (Futuh Al-Habash, etc.) and Somali oral history, and corresponds to an unprecedented expansion which took Somalis from what is now central Somalia to the northern Kenya, where they still pouring into when the British arrived and put an end to the migration. However, the Somalis were preceded by their cousins, especially in the hinterland, by the Oromo (Galla). The case of the Boni (Aweero/Aweera) then is a case of cushitization of a bushmanoid group, and is similar to the swahilization of the Dahalo, on-going now (Tosco 1992). >At 02:59 AM 3/9/1999 -0800, you wrote: >>It is only to be expected the Khoisan scattered groups are subject to >>greater linguistic influences than any other group. In southern Somalia, >>they have completed assimilated linguistically, as the Cushites advanced >>upon them from a northern direction; yet, they form an small ethnic group. > >Do you have any evidence that any currently identifiable Somali group was ever >Khoisan-speaking or are you just making an assumption based on a group that >may claim to be pre-Somali, non-Cushitic but doesn't have any idea what language >it used to speak? Nabad. > > , , |\_/| 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 ylfenn at earthlink.net Thu Mar 11 13:32:32 1999 From: ylfenn at earthlink.net (Martin E. HULD) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 08:32:32 EST Subject: Sorites Paradox and Ahistorical Accretion Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mark Hubey writes: There are certain things that really get me confused ... I will demonstrate via ... yoke. Yes, you are really confused. The PIE etymon *iugwom 'yoke' is not an isolated reconstruction, but is an specific derivational case of the root *ieugw- 'join'. Because English employs zero-derivation (a talk, to talk, a drive, to drive, a fax to fax ...) derivational processed are opaque to the monolingual speaker, but IE possessed several devices for deriving nouns from existing roots; *iugwom 'yoke' [Lat jugum, OE geoc, OCS igo, Gk. zugon, Arm. louc, OIn. yugam] is specifically the zero-grade of the root with an accented thematic vowel to make a neuter noun of instrument, 'the thing which yokes'; a verb can also be derived from the root by adding an .ne.- infix to the zero grade, thus *iu.n.gw-enti [Lat. jungunt, OIn yunjanti] (Lat. had employed the thematic ending -onti, Gk. has further restructured the cognate as zeugnuasi. Thus, PIE *iugwom [in preference to other reconstructions yugom vel sim.) is not without internal cognates within PIE. The term for the technological innovation of the yoke can be seen as built by regular processes from the resources of the language just as the word {microprocessor} has been. I don't believe the latter is in any sense restricted to 'scientists', but is the property of all users of English morphemes as *iugwom was accessible by all users of PIE morphemes. To get to your second point, "is it accidental that the word for yoking/hitching is ...?" What do you mean by accidental? Are you suggesting that God or Joseph Stalin or some other deity had some ulterior purpose in mind or that the semantic content of the morpheme is somehow responsible for the phonetic features of the form? If so, that is unscientific thinking. Do you perhaps mean to ask if the phonetic similarities between the Turkic morphemes and the IE morpheme *ieugw- are indicative of a relationship? The answer is there is no way to tell from the limited data of one case. Are the consonant variations c, ch, y typical of Turkic cognate sets as the equation of Lat j-. OE ge- OInd. y- and Gk z- are of IE? Are the vowel variations e/U regular patterns as the IE eu::ou::u series is? Is the semantic discrepancy significant? Is there reason to believe that IE stem final -gw is connected with Turkic stem final -k? Is it an 'accident' -in your sense- that Alb. ju (IPA ju:]) and Lith. jus (IPA [ju:s]) both signify the second person plural pronoun (Fr. vous, Russ vy)? The answer is yes; despite apparent phonetic and semantic similarity, Alb. ju must be from PIE *uos/ues and cognate with R. vy. gjesh 'boil' < PIE *ies- (Gk zeo:), gjesh 'gird' < PIE *ioHs- (Lith juos-iu), and gjuaj 'hunt' < PIE *ieAgh-ni- (NHG jagen) show that the reflex of PIE initial *i- in Alb. is gj-. There are a series of tests for identifying loan words, one of which, as you have guessed, is whether the word in question can be shown to be part of a morphological family rather than an isolated structure. Yes, we think of these things all the time and try to avoid snap judgments based on single, superficial coincidences or even a large collection of unrelated, superficial coincidences, in the belief that, as with UFO sightings, 1,000,000 times 0 is still 0. -------------------------------------------------------- Name: Martin E. HULD E-mail: Martin E. HULD Date: 03/11/1999 Time: 00:26:18 This message sent by NetManage's award winning standards based e-mail client Z-Mail Pro NetManage - Complete PC Connectivity Solutions -------------------------------------------------------- From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 13:30:11 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 08:30:11 EST Subject: Sorites Paradox and Ahistorical Accretion In-Reply-To: <36E4B9CD.85A54D71@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- "H. Mark Hubey" wrote: >So the word "yoke" must come from >another word which was pressed into service in the new setting. >What meaning could/should it have had? Pull? Hitch? Tie? Bind? >Put up front? Tie up front? *ieu-(g)- "to unite, tie together" ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Thu Mar 11 13:29:52 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 08:29:52 EST Subject: Ma'a Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi wrote: > > > In some cases, there are noticeable bushmanoid features among the Eyle---a > light-yellowish complexion, eyes that look like those of the San, less hair > than Cushites; I am not an anthropologists, and would not venture much into > that area. However, in E.A., generally, though not absolutely, the peoples > that met and clashed there have kept alive different cultures alive: that > of the hunter-gather, the agriculturalist and the pastoralist (Cushites and > Nilotes). It seems like we can bring multiple evidences to bear on this point. Some facts, or fact-like writings one can find in the literature" 1. Egyptians painted themselves red (and their womenfolk yellow) while they painted Asians white and Negroids(?) black. Whether the "real" Egyptians were really "black" is something that is fought over these days. Maybe they were related to the San (who apparently lived on the Horn of Africa before being overrun by Bantu speakers). 2. Recent reports in Science and Science News said that the human groups who possess the Y-chromosome (passed from father to son allegedly in the same way as the mtDNA allegedly only passes from mother to daughter) were Nilo-Saharans, San, and some other groups in Sudan(?). This again points to the same region and to the same human group. 3. The most recent articles in Science says that the mtDNA is not passed only from the mother to the daughter. (5 march 1999). It also says that the relatively recent report that said that the Neandertals split from the rest of humanity 600,000 years ago then must also be false. African EVe might have never existed and the mtDNA material could have been a recombination with the mother's genes with the father's donation. It is already beginning to sound like problems that linguists have trying to avoid having a language descend from two parents. 4. Whether the Neandertals spoke is still a favorite topic. If they did, what kind of language would they have had? Probably one poor in vowels if it is true that their articulatory apparatus would have prevented them from making the "supervowel" /i/. Then would we find these vowel poor and consonant-clustered languages where the Neandertals would have lived or mixed or interbred with the out-of-Africa contingent? This region also stretches from the Horn of Africa, through the MIddle EAst to the North Caucasus. Ubykh with 82 consonants, Kabardian with 1 (or 2) vowels, (classical) Arabic with /iua/, vowel-poor Hittite and Akkadian all point to that same region where the Neandertals would and could have mixed with the out-of-Africa contingent. This brings up point 1 again. Why do the SAn have a yellowish (reddish) complexion instead of being black after presumably having spent 2 million years or more under the hot African sun? (for more on this see, Hubey,1994) 5. Over the long-period, beyond what standard linguistics methodology allegedly cannot have anything to say, we have to use other methods to arrive at unconventional (but logical and rational) conclusions. Why is it that only some features of languages are used for geneticity when languages have so many other characteristics? (See Crowley,1992 and especially Nichols' works on this.) 6. Recent finds such as the Black Sea flood circa 5,500 BC and the rising of the ocean levels circa 12,000 years ago also point to the obvious. IE, AA, and some of the Caucasian languages (probably) and the Khoisan languages must be related in the distant feature. The languages being spoken in the ME before the proto-AA peoples migrated to the ME lacked initial liquids which can be seen in the lack of initial r in Hittite and Akkadian, in Linear-B, and in the lack of them in the toponyms of Mesopotamia region before the Sumerians and Akkadians (see von Soden). Altaic and Dravidian lacks initial liquids. That means the people who lived in the ME did not all get absorbed and at least some of their relatives are still around and kicking. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 12 18:20:49 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 13:20:49 EST Subject: linguistic features Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > 5. Over the long-period, beyond what standard linguistics > methodology allegedly cannot have anything to say, we have to use > other methods to arrive at unconventional (but logical and rational) > conclusions. Why is it that only some features of languages are used > for geneticity when languages have so many other characteristics? Because only certain features are valuable in recovering ancestry. There are countless inflectional systems available for use in languages, and countless possible phonological forms for expressing any given meaning. Consequently, data in these areas are typically useful in recovering ancestry. But other features are different. For example, there are very few possible alignment systems, and very few possible word-order patterns. But every language has to have *some* alignment system, and *some* word-order pattern. Consequently, data in these areas are of little utility: it is simply not the case, for example, that VSO languages are more likely to share a common ancestry than arbitrary languages. > (See Crowley,1992 and especially Nichols' works on this.) But Nichols's work is not really intended to set up language families: her purposes are otherwise. I'm afraid I don't know what "Crowley (1992)" might be, but, if it's the earlier edition of Terry Crowley's HL textbook, I don't understand why it's being cited. > 6. Recent finds such as the Black Sea flood circa 5,500 BC and the > rising of the ocean levels circa 12,000 years ago also point to the > obvious. IE, AA, and some of the Caucasian languages (probably) and > the Khoisan languages must be related in the distant feature. I don't know what "the distant feature" is intended to mean. But I can't for the life of me see how paleoclimatological data can lead to any linguistic conclusions at all -- least of all to the conclusion that certain languages must be related. This is a big *non sequitur*. > The languages being spoken in the ME before the proto-AA peoples > migrated to the ME lacked initial liquids which can be seen in the > lack of initial r in Hittite and Akkadian, in Linear-B, and in the > lack of them in the toponyms of Mesopotamia region before the > Sumerians and Akkadians (see von Soden). Altaic and Dravidian lacks > initial liquids. That means the people who lived in the ME did not > all get absorbed and at least some of their relatives are still > around and kicking. Fanciful, I'm afraid, even if the reports are true, which I doubt. Linear B is not even a language, but a particular writing system used for writing Mycenean Greek -- and Mycenean Greek emphatically did not lack initial liquids. Do you perhaps mean `initial rhotics'? But some of the words and names in the Linear B texts appear to have initial /r/ (which wasn't distinguished from /l/ in any case in that writing system). Anyway, classical Greek certainly has /r/-initial words, some of them seemingly with good IE etymologies, so it's not easy to see how Mycenean Greek could have lacked initial /r/. Besides, the absence of word-initial /r/ is not a rare feature -- even my own favorite language, Basque, has never tolerated initial /r/ and still doesn't tolerate it today, but I don't think anybody would regard this observation as evidence that Basque was once spoken in the Middle East. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Fri Mar 12 13:23:10 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 08:23:10 EST Subject: Sorites Paradox and Ahistorical Accretion Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Martin E. HULD wrote: > > To get to your second point, "is it accidental that the word for > yoking/hitching is ...?" What do you mean by accidental? Are you > suggesting that God or Joseph Stalin or some other deity had some ulterior > purpose in mind or that the semantic content of the morpheme is somehow > responsible for the phonetic features of the form? If so, that is > unscientific thinking. Do you perhaps mean to ask if the phonetic I would think that this form of thinking belongs mostly to people who do not know anything about how science is done. > similarities between the Turkic morphemes and the IE morpheme *ieugw- are > indicative of a relationship? The answer is there is no way to tell from > the limited data of one case. Are the consonant variations c, ch, y typical I guess there is a need to look further. If each such occurrence gets thrown away in isolation nothing will ever be collected. But then if someone does collect as many of these as possible, then the data must be evaluated according to some standard and objective method instead of making up rules as we go along or instead of repeating a heuristic (a rule of thumb) over and over. This is not a list for Nostratic but it seems to me that this list is where general methodology should be discussed. I brought these up exactly for this purpose. Somehow when AMR asks for discussion of generalities the anti-nostraticists seem to disappear. > of Turkic cognate sets as the equation of Lat j-. OE ge- OInd. y- and Gk z- > are of IE? Are the vowel variations e/U regular patterns as the IE > eu::ou::u series is? Is the semantic discrepancy significant? Is there > reason to believe that IE stem final -gw is connected with Turkic stem final > -k? Is it an 'accident' -in your sense- that Alb. ju (IPA ju:]) and Lith. > jus (IPA [ju:s]) both signify the second person plural pronoun (Fr. vous, > Russ vy)? The answer is yes; despite apparent phonetic and semantic > similarity, Alb. ju must be from PIE *uos/ues and cognate with R. vy. gjesh > 'boil' < PIE *ies- (Gk zeo:), gjesh 'gird' < PIE *ioHs- (Lith juos-iu), and > gjuaj 'hunt' < PIE *ieAgh-ni- (NHG jagen) show that the reflex of PIE > initial *i- in Alb. is gj-. How would one attempt to reach these conclusions other than a repetetion of a the old heuristic standby? > There are a series of tests for identifying loan words, one of which, as you > have guessed, is whether the word in question can be shown to be part of a > morphological family rather than an isolated structure. Yes, we think of > these things all the time and try to avoid snap judgments based on single, > superficial coincidences or even a large collection of unrelated, > superficial coincidences, in the belief that, as with UFO sightings, > 1,000,000 times 0 is still 0. Sound like good common sense. But if a field of study is to have more than a set of proverbs left over from the ancients or a set of heuristics, it seems that more rigor is needed. Isn't this the right place to discuss what "rigor" is. I am reading (actually re-reading) Ringe's work from 1995 (Nostratic and the Factor of Chance), and I have very serious problems taking it seriously since it is based on his work (1992) on his misuse of the binomial density (which AMR calls "voodoo mathematics"), but the grapevine says that he is at least a demigod if not god. I am seriously curious about what exactly in these papers has left such a serious impression on the readers some of whom I am sure inhabit this mailing-list virtual universe. You seem to be very bold. Perhaps you can "unconfuse" me on this issue also. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 13 17:41:47 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 12:41:47 EST Subject: linguistic features In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask wrote: >On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: >> The languages being spoken in the ME before the proto-AA peoples >> migrated to the ME lacked initial liquids which can be seen in the >> lack of initial r in Hittite and Akkadian, in Linear-B, and in the >> lack of them in the toponyms of Mesopotamia region before the >> Sumerians and Akkadians (see von Soden). Altaic and Dravidian lacks >> initial liquids. That means the people who lived in the ME did not >> all get absorbed and at least some of their relatives are still >> around and kicking. > >Fanciful, I'm afraid, even if the reports are true, which I doubt. Rightly so. Akkadian does not lack initial liquids at all: both r- and l- are perfectly acceptable. Hittite has initial l- but lacks initial r-, a feature simply inherited from PIE, where initial r- seems to have been very rare indeed. And as you said, Greek ("Linear B") has both l- and r- (the latter largely from PIE *sr-, but examples of *r- can be given). What we have is simply a universal tendency to avoid rhotics (and to a lesser degree laterals) in initial position. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Mar 15 13:45:13 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 08:45:13 EST Subject: linguistic features Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Miguel: -----Original Message----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal To: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU Date: Saturday, March 13, 1999 11:44 AM Subject: Re: linguistic features >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >Larry Trask wrote: > Even Faulkner's small ME dictionary has approx. 113 entries beginning with 3 (vulture) which is generally regarded to have (principally) represented a rhotic. Pokorny has approx. 66 entries beginning with a rhotic, and this count does not include the forms with the root-extensions. I doubt sincerely whether lack of an initial rhotic can be legitimately be characterized as a "universal tendency". > What we have is >simply a universal tendency to avoid rhotics (and to a lesser >degree laterals) in initial position. > >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl >Amsterdam PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: and PROTO-RELIGION: "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Tue Mar 2 13:44:27 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 08:44:27 EST Subject: consensus view Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It occurred to me that among our various misunderstandings, there is a misunderstanding about what I mean by "consensus view" of establishing language families. I cannot speak for Campbell or Goodard, or anyone but myself, but I thought it was clear from what I said. However, it might be helpful to look at it in terms of the commonplace logical distinction between SUFFICIENT and NECESSARY (to establish a family). I put "sufficient" first, because my construal of the consensus view is that it is about what is SUFFICIENT to establish a language family (beyond "reasonable" doubt). What is NECESSARY is no doubt another matter, one for which there is obvious disagreement, and for which I do not have a fixed opinion, but which must somehow be empirically grounded in such a way that we can go from what we all agree on to how we can enlarge agreeement about the things we currently (and for a long time) have disagreed about. All that I can envisage is that what is necessary must be less than what is sufficient, and that there is a relationship (subset?) between what is sufficient and what is necessary, though just what that relationship is has to be a matter for continued discussion, if we are going to "establish" (or even get widespread "acceptance") of deeper family relationships where evidence is (presumably) lacking to the current consensus view of sufficiency (cf. "there's INSUFFICIENT data to establish the family according to the consensus view, the consensus methods of demonstration.") So I think AMR misunderstood my use of "consensus view" to be about what is NECESSARY to establish a family relationship, when, in fact, it is about what is SUFFICIENT. We are still trying to figure out what is necessary. At least I am -- for purposes of this discussion. I'm gonna try to keep this message short, so I can't give all my thoughts on the subject of what is necessary (and I don't know the answer anyway). Foremost in my mind is the basic concept of language family. Previously I characterised it as the idea that all the members descend from a SINGLE ancestor. I think that is what people usually have in mind, but in the final analysis it's a big problem. All languages have historical lexical strata with respect to source. Only the "oldest" stratum seems to count as criterial to "single ancestor". And for languages for which there seem to be insufficient data that's a big problem: how to identify the oldest stratum. That's where such issues as "basic vocabulary", presumably most resistant to "borrowing", comes in -- and there has been a lot of contention about all aspects of this problem, when it comes to the practical details (I haven't mentioned "grammatical" morphemes yet but that's also an aspect of the "layer" problem). In fact, it seems to me that "oldest" stratum is only a relative term. If we consider families that are recognised by the consensus view/methods, if they have deeper relatives, as we infer by the uniformitarian principle of going from what we know to what we don't know, then what appears to be the oldest layer is actually the COMPRESSION of a bunch of older historically arranged layers. How to separate them out and arrange them chronologically, in order to extend the "oldest" stratum notion? Moving on to grammar, I have never been able to keep straight in my head why some scholars have proposed that Mbugu demonstrates the "borrowing" of (Bantu) noun classes, etc., rather than the "borrowing" of non-Bantu vocabulary. Given that Mbugu speakers are all fluent in a Bantu language (either Shambaa or Pare), the direction of "borrowing" seems moot to me. Thus, we seem to have the possibility of historically simultaneous layers from different sources -- assuming that we're not gonna dismiss Mbugu as some kind of (in-group) "slang" (which does not seem to me to be grounds for dismissal, and which nobody has suggested anyway). So far, it seems that the larger world of historical linguistics chooses to dismiss such phenomena as "rare" (uniformitarian principle?), which seems a bit shaky to me when we are dealing with distant historical situations which represent social situations that we don't know about. How to reconstruct bilingualism and "simultaneous layers" (two or more different "layers" NOT chronologically distinguished in time)? Not so removed from this is the (former) issue of whether Haitian (Creole) is a Romance language. Until relatively recent times when pidgin-creole studies started to be taken seriously by historical linguists in general (or have they? AMR, to be sure, seems to take them seriously), lexicon alone (i.e, through regular sound correspondences) seems to have been criterial of inclusion in "language family" (for the "mainstream"). Grammar did not count for much, just as it did not count for much in synchronic linguistic description. Of course, the whole insight into the "family" hypothesis came from the fact that Sanskrit conjugates and declines pretty much like Classical Greek and Latin, but as historical linguistics progressed it was "sound laws" (based on sound correspondences) that seized the attention of theorists. There was palpably less interest in grammatical change, and work on it was often motivated by how it interfered with sound correspondences and inferred processes of sound change. I must add that it was not usually a problem for demontsrating families because families were demonstrated *sufficiently* at a level where grammatical similarities could be taken for granted -- but such issues as Haitian brought up DEFINITIONAL problems of language family. How to classify when there is historical discontinuity in the grammar? (NB: I could say more about "political" motivations for different sides on whether or not Haitian should be [have been] included in Romance, but I am saying enough that can be misinterpreted without getting into that fruitful topic. Currently there is still disagreement about how to account for the grammar of Haitian and various other "creoles", e.g., whether it comes from an innate "bioprogram" or is relexified Fon (a Kwa Niger-Congo language), etc etc. There are also issues involving whether many so-called creoles actually descend from earlier pidgins, e.g., Berbice Dutch, sometimes called Berbice "Creole" Dutch, which seems to be a "mixture" of Dutch and Kalabari (the latter a variety of Ijoid, a branch of Niger-Congo that has contentious aspects for (sub)classification), or various non-European varieties of Portuguese that seem to have been "restructured", but not necessarily descended "whole cloth" from pidgins, etc etc. Does "(radical) restructuring" exclude them from their lexical source "family" affiliation? These seem to be matters of DEFINITION of "family", not whatever the historical "facts" may be) I won't take AMR to task for saying that matters of sub-classification or questions about whether or not a particular language (group) belong to an otherwise "accepted" family are UNINTERESTING, because I assume he was fixing on some narrowly focussed issue which takes the notion of "family" for granted, but I disagree for several reasons. First, the case of Kadugli (whether or not it is Niger-Congo) turned out to be very important in whether or not a genetic link could be established between Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan. Was it an otherwise "missing link"? Do deep reconstructions to demonstrate deep relations depend on proposing "missing links" -- what are the criteria, and what are the assumptions behind this (tacit?) notion? Apart from that, I continue to wonder what the point of deep family reconstuction is, apart from its original motivation to reconstruct historical human socio-cultural trends (or some rationalised form of "ancestor worship"), if historical details, which also reveal historical socio-cultural trends, are "uninteresting". It seems like tunnel-vision to me. (NB. Similarly, if proposals to relate Niger-Congo to some other family were to rest heavily on Mande and/or the northern Atlantic languages, and they are still under contention, then those proposals would remain shaky. Also, if membership in a family is uninteresting, what's left? Let Turkic be Altaic, why is it interesting whether Mongolian and Tungusic, not to mention Korean and Japanese or whatever, are also Altaic, but not whether Mande and Atlantic and Kadugli and whatever are NC? Which group doesn't matter? Why?) Agh. This is getting long -- one last comment. AMR made the attractive point that the actual reconstruction takes more work than the demonstration of relationship. Indeed, Greenberg quipped that of all the languages that have changed in the last century, Proto-Indo-European has changed the most. I hasten to add, no guilt by association is intended (though I, for one, wish I had thought of the quip first, without wishing to be associated with everything Greenberg has said). So maybe we can abstract (sound) correspondences (subject to lexical and probabilistic controls) as NECESSARY, from reconstruction, which may be SUFFICIENT . When I first read some author who insisted that reconstructed sounds were actually "formulae" for sound correspondences, I thought the point was overly fussy, but clearly this is an area where we may be able to distinguish NECESSARY (sound correspondences -- does anyone doubt it, not even disregarded by the "crackpot" literature, for the most part) from what is SUFFICIENT (phonological reconstruction to a plausible sound system, "plausible" also being a continuing problem, with plausible sound changes, cf. common criticisms of many deep reconstructions is "too many phonemes", i.e., too many sound correspondences, cf. the emperor to Mozart "too many notes", to which, unlike Mozart with his retort "just as many as NECESSARY", the response is usually to agree and hope to reduce the inventories by discovering conditioning factors, as per the shining example of Verner's Law). In fact, to return to Greenberg's quip and what I take to be the implications of AMR's observation, little has changed in Proto-IE in terms of sound correspondences over the past century, glottalic theory and the various proposals for the substances of the laryngeals seem to rest on the same old sound correspondences, so there is clearly a point to draw the line between sound correspondence and the details of a plausible reconstruction. But in view of the deeper "too many notes -- sound correspondences" the question is -- where? [NB At some point revisions of reconstructions become interminable, just as are revisions/new versions of synchronic grammatical analyses of commonplace grammatical structures] I'd like to see a systematic OUTLINE of these and further relevant issues, esp. grammatical reconstruction -- but enough for now. -- Benji From manaster at umich.edu Wed Mar 3 16:31:15 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 11:31:15 EST Subject: consensus view In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Benji Wald writes (inter alia): > AMR made the attractive point that the actual reconstruction takes more > work than the demonstration of relationship. Indeed, Greenberg quipped > that of all the languages that have changed in the last century, > Proto-Indo-European has changed the most. I hasten to add, no guilt by > association is intended... Thank you. I would like to add that there are two points on which I differ from what Greenberg has stated (although I sometimes wonder if he really believes what he says). (i) In some cases, e.g., the famous demonstration that Vietnamese is Mon-Khmer and the one that Pama-Nyungan lgs are Australian, it was necessary to look at specific sound laws, so in SOME cases language relatedness cannot apparently be established as easily as Greenberg seems to think. (ii) Unlike Greenberg, I do not hold that one must first accept a relationship before attempting reconstruction. In reality, you can take a propose relationship as a working hypothesis, try to do a reconstruction, and then use the degree of success you have had with the reconstruction as an argument for or against the hypothesis. AMR From lsa at lsadc.org Thu Mar 4 16:57:50 1999 From: lsa at lsadc.org (LSA) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 11:57:50 EST Subject: March LSA Bulletin Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The March 1999 LSA Bulletin is now available on the LSA web site: http://www.lsadc.org From sally at thomason.org Fri Mar 5 02:26:36 1999 From: sally at thomason.org (Sally Thomason) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 21:26:36 EST Subject: consensus view In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 02 Mar 1999 08:44:27 EST." Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In the middle of his long message about criteria for genetic relationship etc., Benji Wald wonders `why some scholars have proposed that Mbugu demonstrates the "borrowing" of (Bantu) noun classes, etc., rather than the "borrowing" of non-Bantu vocabulary.' He continues, `Given that Mbugu speakers are all fluent in a Bantu language...the direction of "borrowing" seems moot to me." Here's why -- or, at least, here's why *I* believe that the borrowing was of grammar rather than (mainly) vocabulary. First, there is good historical evidence -- mostly in the form of oral histories of the Pare and Shambaa peoples -- showing that the Ma'a (a.k.a. Mbugu, but Ma'a is said to be their self-name) people have for a very long time shown strong resistance to total cultural assimilation to the surrounding Bantu milieu. They resist both acculturation to Bantu and acculturation to Western ways. Their language can be seen as a reflection of this resistance: in the face of immense pressure from Bantu, including regular contacts (at least until quite recently) with Bantu-speaking kinfolk who stopped resisting some time ago (by shiftin to Bantu), the Ma'a have preserved only the most salient part of their language: the vocabulary. Not all the vocabulary, of course, but most of the basic vocabulary. Christopher Ehret estimates that ca. 50% of the total lexicon is Bantu now. This situation is paralleled by one or two others elsewhere in the world: gradual borrowing of grammar until nothing remains but (part of) the original lexicon. Second, and most importantly from a linguist's viewpoint, the linguistic evidence points unmistakably to a partly preserved non-Bantu lexicon with borrowed Bantu grammar. Borrowing -- that is, incorporating stuff from a 2nd language into the native language -- always begins with non-basic vocabulary, and includes lots of basic vocabulary only after a lot of non-basic vocabulary and probably structural features as well have been borrowed. This is the picture that fits Ma'a. There are other possible routes to extreme mixture, but for Ma'a they can be ruled out on linguistic or social grounds, or both. (1) It's not a case of borrowing from a non-Bantu lg. into a Bantu lg., because if it were the basic vocabulary would be mostly Bantu, not Cushitic. (2) It's not a case of shift from a non-Bantu lg. to a Bantu lg., because again the basic vocabulary would be mainly Bantu, and besides, if there were enough imperfect learning to cause a significant residue of non-Bantu words even in the basic vocabulary, then there ought to be more syntactic & phonological interference, because shift-induced interference always affects the syntax & phonology most; but there is no distortion at all in the Bantu grammar of Ma'a. (3) It's not a case of shift from a Bantu lg. to a non-Bantu lg., because if it were, the imperfect learning would be so extremely imperfect as to leave the entire original Bantu grammar intact -- not something you'll find in *any* case of shift with imperfect learning. The closest analogue would be in a two-language creole like Berbice Dutch; but even there it's easy to find distortions caused by imperfect learning (in the Dutch component) and non-preservation of features of Ijo in the non- Dutch component. (4) It's not a case of pidgin-turned-"creole", for the same basic reason as in (3). Besides, it's awfully hard to reconcile the social setting of Ma'a vis-a-vis its Bantu neighbors with the social setting of any pidgin or creole...I'll skip the details in the hope that that point will be reasonably obvious. And (5) it's not a case of relexification into a Bantu lg., a la Media Lengua (Quechua grammar + Spanish vocabulary), because there's not enough lexical replacement, and again, the basic vocabulary is mostly Cushitic. But in addition, the contacts between Ma'a and others have been with Bantu-speaking groups for a very long time; this can be determined by the oral histories of the Pare and the Shambaa. That is, there haven't been any intimate contacts with Cushitic speakers recently enough to account for the present and documented states of the Ma'a language. And that's even aside from the fact that Maarten Mous has established that the non-Bantu Ma'a lexicon *can't possibly* be all from one Cushitic lg.: some of it is Southern Cushitic, some from another branch of Cushitic, and a large chunk of it comes from Masai (with whom the Ma'a speakers haven't been in contact any time lately). (The question of what Ma'a was like *before* Bantuization is another and an intriguing story -- but alas, evidence of any solid kind is lacking, and probably always will be lacking.) Finally, there *was* some active non-Bantu grammar in Ma'a, both in the earliest good attestations ca. 1930 and in comparative material that shows chronological layering of Bantuization changes (e.g. Cushitic suffixes added *after* the Bantu-induced opening of word-final syllables). Strikingly, the few Cushitic grammatical features that remained in the earliest materials are now gone, to judge by the most recent fieldwork (by Maarten Mous). So what we can observe in the documentary record is the loss of the last relics of Cushitic grammar. Even in the earliest records, the only Cushitic grammatical features that remain are things that fit well into Bantu typology: a causative suffix, pronominal possessive suffixes that aren't all that unlike the Bantu possessive formation, etc. ...With one exception: a non-Bantu (probably Cushitic) collective suffix appears on a few nouns, sometimes alone and sometimes *with* a Bantu plural prefix, to indicate plurality, in the earlier materials. Also, though the phonology (even in the non-Bantu portions of the lexicon) has also been Bantuized, there is still one un-local-Bantu Cushitic phoneme, a lateral fricative; according to Mous, Ma'a speakers insert this even into Bantu words, by way of emphasizing the differentness of their special in-group language. One other comment: Wald says that nobody has suggested dismissing Ma'a `as some kind of (in-group) "slang"': wrong. This is what Mous says it now is, and he has good evidence. (Mous and I differ, though, on how it got that way.) A general point can be made here: the routes by which even the most exotic mixtures emerge aren't necessarily undiscoverable; if we have enough information, we can often figure out how mixed languages got that way. Sorting out the effects of contact isn't different in that respect from sorting out the effects of internally-motivated change. "Enough information" is of course the crucial requisite. -- Sally Thomason From linpb at hum.au.dk Fri Mar 5 12:29:16 1999 From: linpb at hum.au.dk (Peter Bakker) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 07:29:16 EST Subject: workshop on mixed languages in Aarhus Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- WORKSHOP ON MIXED LANGUAGES IN AARHUS, DENMARK May 6,7, 8. This workshop will bring together a number of people who have been working on the genesis of mixed languages from a variety of perspectives. We consider as mixed languages not Pidgins and Creoles, but rather those languages which cannot be classified in a genetic tree model, because they inherit one component (e.g. the lexicon) from one language and another component (e.g. the grammatical system) from different language. Prime examples are languages like Ma'a, Media Lengua, Michif, Mednyj Aleut and Para-Romani verieties such as Angloromani. At the Leiden workshop on mixed languages in 1994 (1), the participants spoke about particular languages that they had been working on. Few people at that time were aware of the existence of class (or classes) of mixed languages. In the meantime, more and more linguists have become aware of the fact that they do constitute a special type, be it not necessarily homogenous in structure or function. A handful of books and a number of articles on the subject have been published in the last five years, and a few others are in preparation. These mixed languages pose special challenges, not only as to the question of their genesis and their structural similarities and differences, but also for linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models. At this workshop, the focus will not be on the individual languages, but on the general properties and issues. Participants are asked to give informal presentations about special subjects. We hope to have speakers on the following subjects: - codeswitching and the genesis of mixed languages - Creoles and mixed languages - types of mixed languages - functions of mixed languages - phonology of mixed languages - registers and mixed languages - use of historical data in mixed language research - language death and mixed languages - bilingual acquisition and mixed languages - intergenerational competence differences and the genesis of mixed languages - relexification and mixed languages - lexically mixed pidgins, Creoles and other languages - bilingual production/processing and mixed languages - distortion of form in mixed languages - how many structurally different types of mixed languages are there - mixed languages and historical linguistics - mixed languages without systematic mixture - diachronic evolution of mixed languages - alternatives to the genetic tree model - mixed languages, predictability and retrospection - convergence and mixed languages - language contact phenomena in the Chinese-Mongolian-Turkic-Tibetan area - field report on Danish Romani - mixed languages and typology - extreme borrowing and mixed languages - secret languages and mixed languages Hopefully, there will not only be linguists, but also some people from other disciplines, notably biology and psychology, who will be able to give their view on some of the matter. The workshop will take place on the University Campus, Conference Centre, Nordre Ringgade 1, Richard Mortensen Stue, on Thursday May 6 (afternoon), May 7 (whole day) and May 8 (morning only?). Aarhus is the second city of Denmark, and the capital of Jutland. The University has some 20.000 students. The linguistic department has a small, but growing staff, and the number of students increases each year. Visit the institute's websites on http://www.au.dk/uk/hum/lingvist/index.html and http://ling.hum.aau.dk. The campus of Aarhus university is found on the fringe of the city centre. Aarhus can be reached by car, train, bicycle, boat and aeroplane. The bus to and between Aarhus Tirstrup Airport takes 50 minutes and the bus trip between Billund Airport and Aarhus 80 minutes. There is still room for more people, both as participants and speakers. Please contact Peter Bakker as soon as possible if you want to come. (1) The book which resulted from this workshop (Bakker & Mous eds., 1994) is still available. Its new distributor is HAG (Holland Academic Graphics) in The Hague. Address: P.O. Box 53292, 2505 AG The Hague, Netherlands. E-mail: mail at hag.nl Information: linpb at hum.aau.dk Peter Bakker Linguistics Aarhus University Willemoesgade 15-D 8200 Aarhus N Denmark tel. 00-45-8942.2178 fax: 00-45-8942.2175 From manaster at umich.edu Fri Mar 5 16:51:14 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 11:51:14 EST Subject: Ma'a In-Reply-To: <28997.920579873@pogo.isp.pitt.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I think Sally Thomason's posting raises some very interesting questions, but it might be useful if Sally could post a list of recent references on this language. AMR From sally at thomason.org Sun Mar 7 15:39:23 1999 From: sally at thomason.org (Sally Thomason) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 10:39:23 EST Subject: Ma'a/Mbugu Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- First, a few comments on Benji Wald's recent post on Ma'a: Christopher Ehret identifies at least one causative suffix in Ma'a as of Cushitic origin; Mous cautions that Ehret's etymologies need careful checking, but in any case it doesn't appear to be a Bantu suffix, and Ehret says that it is -- or was, ca. 25 years ago -- very productive. He says the same thing about two or three other non-Bantu suffixes in Ma'a. People differ on the subject of derivation vs. inflection for things like causative affixes, and likewise for collectives like the one I mentioned for Ma'a; in some languages they are treated as inflectional, in others as derivational, and no doubt their behavior differs from language to language. The pronominal possessive suffixes are certainly inflectional (at least that's how such affixes are generally analyzed in languages that have them), so indeed there is evidence of Cushitic inflection in (earlier) Ma'a. Maarten Mous has suggested (p.c. 1993) the possibility that the pre-bantuized Ma'a language originated as a mixture itself, the language of a people coalesced from an escaped group of cattle herders who had been (semi-?)enslaved by the Masai. This scenario could explain the lexical mixture in Ma'a. But, as Mous notes, it's hard to imagine a way in which this hypothesis could be tested, given the total lack of social information about the Ma'a people from the period before they arrived in the Pares. Second, Alexis Manaster Ramer asks for references. The most useful source on the present linguistic & social status of Ma'a is Maarten Mous's 1994 article "Ma'a or Mbugu", in the book Mixed Languages, ed. by Peter Bakker & Maarten Mous, pp. 175-200 (published by IFOTT at U. Amsterdam, but see Bakker's recent conference announcement on this list for a new distributor). Mous's analysis of the Ma'a lexicon may not be published: he included it in a conference paper, "The making of Ma'a", presented at the Colloquium on Synchronic and Diachronic Sociolinguistic Methods and Interpretations, Universitaet Bayreuth, 1993. The most extensive published Ma'a lexical material is (as far as I know) in Christopher Ehret's big 1980 book The Historical Reconstruction of Southern Cushitic Phonology and Vocabulary (Koelner Beitraege zur Afrikanistik, 5; Berlin: Dietrich Reimer). As reviewers cautioned, the etymologies and reconstructions in Ehret's book need to be handled with care, but there is a lot of Ma'a lexical data in the book, and many of the proposed etymologies survive scrutiny. Morris Goodman was, I think, the first person who brought this interesting case to the attention of general linguists, in his 1971 article "The strange case of Mbugu", in Dell Hymes, ed., Pidginization and creolization of languages, pp. 243-54 (Cambrige Univ. Press). There are a number of other sources, including all the older materials from the 1960s and earlier. Bibliographies can be found in my two articles on the subject: "Genetic relationship and the case of Ma'a (Mbugu)" (Studies in African Linguistics 14.195-231, 1983); and "Ma'a (Mbugu)", in S. G. Thomason, ed., Contact languages: a wider perspective (Benjamins, 1997). I've also discussed the genesis of Ma'a in a case study in Thomason & Kaufman, Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics (U. Calif. Press, 1988) -- where most of the arguments I gave to Benji Wald to support the claim of grammatical borrowing appear -- and in an article called "On reconstructing past contact situations", in Jane H. Hill et al., eds., The life of language: Papers in linguistics in honor of William Bright (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997). -- Sally Thomason P.S. I don't think there's general agreement any more that Sandawe and Hadza belong to the Khoisan family. Bonny Sands' recent UCLA dissertation failed to find solid support for the hypothesis. (For that matter, there seems to be considerable doubt among Khoisan specialists that even the southern members of the proposed family are related to each other.) From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sun Mar 7 21:31:56 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 16:31:56 EST Subject: Ma'a/Mbugu Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I read Sally's message on the evidence for the evolution of Ma'a with great interest. Frankly, I did not remember exactly what Sally's position was when I "mooted" the direction of borrowing between Ma'a and "Bantu", e.g., Derek Nurse, an extremely energetic and prolific Bantu scholar with a deep interest in historical linguistics expressed a similar conclusion, i.e., borrowing out of, not into Bantu. Sally's note helps clarify in my mind what criteria might be used to determine direction of borrowing, in fact, I think the details of the circumstances clarify what is meant by "direction" of borrowing, and are fundamentally more important than the notion of "direction" in the context of *fluent* (Bloomfield's "intimate") bilingualism. She writes: (1) It's not a case of borrowing from a non-Bantu lg. into a Bantu lg., because >if it were the basic vocabulary would be mostly Bantu, not Cushitic. This is one criterion for direction, assumed on the basis of most common and well-known cases, e.g., French in English, Arabic in Swahili, etc. Again, the process of formation of Mbugu is more interesting than extending the criterion to less clear cases, as if it were simply a matter of definition, devoid of social implications. Hence she gives further arguments, e.g., >(2) It's not a case of shift from a non-Bantu lg. to a Bantu lg., >because again the basic vocabulary would be mainly Bantu, and besides, >if there were enough imperfect learning to cause a significant residue >of non-Bantu words even in the basic vocabulary, then there ought to >be more syntactic & phonological interference, because shift-induced >interference always affects the syntax & phonology most; but there is >no distortion at all in the Bantu grammar of Ma'a. Agreed. "Imperfect learning" (of Bantu) is not at all an issue. That much I intended in what I wrote. Ma'a speakers are fluent in a Bantu language. They are, it seems, fluent bilinguals in at least one Bantu language (usually Shambaa or Pare) AND something else called Ma'a or Mbugu. That was a crucial point to my "mooting" of direction of borrowing. The case is clearly distinct from language shifting, where what is "borrowed" (actually "retained" = non-Bantu vocabulary) is equivalent to a "substratum", i.e., untranslated or untranslatable lexical items (untranslatable usually because of cultural attachments, as when Mexican Americans retain "nina" (< madrina) for "godmother", and many more obvious cases). [Actually, "fluency" in Ma'a may turn out to be a difficult concept.] Sally's (3) and (4) can be ruled out for the same reason; they involve "imperfect learning", which is not the case. >(5) it's not a case of relexification into a Bantu lg., a la Media >Lengua (Quechua grammar + Spanish vocabulary), because there's not >enough lexical replacement, and again, the basic vocabulary is mostly >Cushitic. This point is not so clear to me. I mean I get it that it's not complete relexification, but it seems to me there may be a continuum of degree of relexification (depending on what?). Therefore, the rest of what Sally says is also important. But in addition, the contacts between Ma'a and others have >been with Bantu-speaking groups for a very long time; this >can be determined by the oral histories of the Pare and the Shambaa. >That is, there haven't been any intimate contacts with Cushitic >speakers recently enough to account for the present and documented >states of the Ma'a language. And that's even aside from the fact >that Maarten Mous has established that the non-Bantu Ma'a lexicon *can't >possibly* be all from one Cushitic lg.: some of it is Southern >Cushitic, some from another branch of Cushitic, and a large chunk of >it comes from Masai (with whom the Ma'a speakers haven't been in >contact any time lately). (The question of what Ma'a was like >*before* Bantuization is another and an intriguing story -- but >alas, evidence of any solid kind is lacking, and probably always will >be lacking.) All of this is important, and VERY interesting. One might suppose that Ma'a continues a practice/tradition that has been carried on by its speakers through a number of (fluent) bilingual contact situations, each one of which is reflected in Ma'a vocabulary, presumably as distinct historical strata of contact. Note that there is also Bantu vocabulary in Ma'a, according to Sally's criterion for excluding it as a case similar to Media Lengua. Intriguing is the possibility that as Ma'a has evolved, it "always" proceeded by dragging its lexical baggage into the grammar of the "new" language, and then rejected most of that grammatical matrix as it moved on to the next situation -- e.g., that at one time Ma'a vocabulary was embedded in a Maasai grammar, left behind more easily with the loss of bilingualism in Maasai than its Maasai vocabulary. This is speculation to be rejected as unfounded if no evidence of this can be found. I am only suggesting it more abstractly as a possible process to account for what is currently (or recently) observable, and the accretion of lexical strata in Mbugu. Thus, the Maasai vocabulary may have come into Ma'a some other way without a period of large-scale bilingualism (i.e., it never adopted Maasai grammar) -- it could be various contacts with different varieties of Cushitic that first started Mbugu off on its path -- where grammar (and some lexicon) would not be so strikingly different at first. (Where grammar is not that different, lexicon is most important to act as an ethnic symbol -- and that is typical even where grammar is quite different.) > Finally, there *was* some active non-Bantu grammar in Ma'a, both >in the earliest good attestations ca. 1930 and in comparative material >that shows chronological layering of Bantuization changes (e.g. Cushitic >suffixes added *after* the Bantu-induced opening of word-final syllables). This gets us into the issue of "inflectional" vs. "derivational" morphemes, where the latter may be more susceptible to borrowing, i.e., they are more easily counted as "lexical" material. This could stand further clarification before being accepted as evidence for a particular direction of borrowing. All the grammatical morphemes at issue seem to be complete syllables and cause no phonological irregularities. >Strikingly, the few Cushitic grammatical features that remained in the >earliest materials are now gone, to judge by the most recent fieldwork >(by Maarten Mous). So what we can observe in the documentary record >is the loss of the last relics of Cushitic grammar. Even in the >earliest records, the only Cushitic grammatical features that remain >are things that fit well into Bantu typology: a causative suffix, >pronominal possessive suffixes that aren't all that unlike the >Bantu possessive formation, etc. ...With one exception: a non-Bantu >(probably Cushitic) collective suffix appears on a few nouns, sometimes >alone and sometimes *with* a Bantu plural prefix, to indicate plurality, >in the earlier materials. Right. That's the collective suffix -no, to which sometimes the Bantu collective prefix ma- is optionally added, e.g., (ma-)[lhare-no] "a group of clouds", cf. ma-book-s reported by Scotton I think for Sotho as an example of retaining English plural inflection in using the English *word* in a Sotho context. Marking such nouns for a specific noun class might be difficult to resist in speech (as opposed to in citation forms) since they might have to govern a concordial form in speech, esp. a concordial subject-marker prefixed to the verb -- which would necessarily be Bantu, either for Sotho or Ma'a. As a separate matter, I thought that all verb derivation (even on a non-Bantu root) was Bantu in Ma'a, e.g., causative -ija. (Bantu causatives have various forms. -ija < *ed-i-a seems most likely, where *ed- is originally the applied suffix to which causative -i- is added and causes a sound change, now simply morphologised as -ija in Ma'a. In contrast, Bantu languages always have at least a few irregular causative formations for certain verbs. Hence, it would be interesting if Ma'a used the -ija causative with a Bantu verb root where it is not used in Pare or Shambaa, but I doubt that would happen.) Also, though the phonology (even in the >non-Bantu portions of the lexicon) has also been Bantuized, there is >still one un-local-Bantu Cushitic phoneme, a lateral fricative; according >to Mous, Ma'a speakers insert this even into Bantu words, by way of >emphasizing the differentness of their special in-group language. I guess that's the lateral fricative spelled "lh". I could imagine Welsh speakers playfully doing that in English as well; "take me to the llake". (The segment is pre-Bantu in the general area, and occurs in other non-Bantu languages, e.g., Sandawe, a "click" language classified as Khoisan.) > One other comment: Wald says that nobody has suggested dismissing >Ma'a `as some kind of (in-group) "slang"': wrong. This is what Mous >says it now is, and he has good evidence. (Mous and I differ, though, >on how it got that way.) Yes. I thought I was making it up to exaggerate my point, but then Dixon's comment on Mous's work was called to my attention. At least Dixon's characterisation of what Mous was saying struck me as going pretty much in the direction of my point. So maybe this is the "end of the line" for Ma'a, and that it is going to end up similarly to the way Ian Hancock represents the Romani spoken in England, which does seem to be superficially similar to Media Lengua, i.e., English grammar but Romani vocabulary (probably with various stratified accretions). > A general point can be made here: the routes by which even the >most exotic mixtures emerge aren't necessarily undiscoverable; if >we have enough information, we can often figure out how mixed languages >got that way. Sorting out the effects of contact isn't different >in that respect from sorting out the effects of internally-motivated >change. "Enough information" is of course the crucial requisite. Except that enough information in this context seems to include enough social information, which also was part of my point in reconstructing and separating out "compressed" strata when we do not know the social situation which produced those strata (in the event that they are strata and not a single "pure" -- unlikely by everything we know -- "rock-bottom" stratum that validates even deeper reconstruction under the "single language" hypothesis. I am grateful for Sally's scenario, which I think will help me remember what she means in saying the direction of borrowing was FROM Bantu TO Ma'a (Mbugu). It is Ma'a that continually shows the pressures of language shift due to bilingualism, but survives (though "scathed" by replacement of "original" vocabulary and grammar) as its speakers move on to a new bilingual contact situation (including from one Bantu language to another). I still have reservations about how to clearly distinguish the bilingual processes involved from the Media Lengua or British Romani type of process -- I expect closer to British Romani, where again it might be supposed that there was a gradual (?) grammatical loss of the ethnic language with retention of much of the ethnic lexicon, including pronouns and other "basic" vocabulary (pronouns = a CLOSED lexical set, cf. derivational affixes during a specific period of time). Presumably Media Lengua did not evolve this way but was a "sudden" flushing of Qechua vocabulary in favor of Spanish, while retaining the Qechua grammar as the "host" for relexification. Of crucial importance, I'm sure, is that Media Lengua flushes out the *ethnic* language, NOT the NON-ethnic language. Thus, different social circumstances were involved in such a process, e.g., Mbugu and British Romani seem to imply a situation originating in intimate bilingualism and some kind of NOMADISM (nomadism leading to a particular solution in preserving ethnicity linguistically -- a life-style most likely nearing an end for Ma'a speakers -- unlike the Maasai they do not have a "reserve", i.e., a reservation). In any case, I completely agree with Sally that we must understand the processes involved in all cases of language "mixture" (and that that concept conflates a number of different evolutionary possibilities), if we are ever going to be able to apply that knowledge plausibly to megalo-reconstructions in order to separate out deep strata and resolve the gnawing problems of "borrowing" vs. "genetic" inheritance. I stand by for further clarification, esp what social circumstances account for Media Lengua, but also for further details of the considerations I raised for Ma'a. Media Lengua is clearly different from Mbugu or Romani because it is the "ethnic" lexicon which is lost in Media Lengua, while it is the NON-ethnic lexicon that is flushed out in Mbugu. (I have also heard some question raised about the "stability" of Media Lengua -- though I'm not quite sure what that means -- other than that some think that it may be a transient phenomenon -- but does it necessarily have to be?) Without being able to distinguish what is "ethnic" and what is not, e.g., in a deep reconstruction, we would have a hell of a time distinguishing the two types. Thanks to scholars like Sally, and many others, e.g., Muysen for ML, we know there are at least two types of Lexicon1 + Grammar2. P.S. In view of the clarification that Sally has given, I'm glad that my original message chose Mbugu/Ma'a rather than the equally thorny problem for deep reconstruction given the type Gumperz described for Kupwar, a converged grammar and three distinct vocabularies (by different means, perhaps, Dixon describes a similar situation for some parts of Australia, where, it seems, speakers have a large number of synonyms for basic words, which comes in handy when someone dies and one of the basic words that sounds like their name must be avoided for a while; such an avoidance custom also in some Bantu-speaking areas; unclear in Dixon's cursory discussion was whether the synonyms are perceived as part of a single language or organised into different over-all sets, as in the case of Kupwar, whether or not each set is associated with a different language label -- I'm sure he discusses that more fully in some other work that has not yet come to my attention). The issue for deep reconstruction remains the social inferences we make when combining families into deeper families. This remains the persistent point of deep reconstruction, as far as I can tell, and has been since the origin of the genetic hypothesis. When we hear that, say, Afrasian and IE, or whatever, are "related", we immediately think ah! that means there was once a "single" culture that later fragmented into various known cultures, i.e., to the extent that we do not necessarily assume that the current speakers are themselves relevantly biologically related in any way to the members of that single culture. From stoyan at zas.gwz-berlin.de Mon Mar 8 13:47:47 1999 From: stoyan at zas.gwz-berlin.de (Koyka Stoyanova) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:47:47 EST Subject: Workshop on Theory and Empiricism Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- WORKSHOP on THEORY AND EMPIRICISM: Historical and Dialectal Data in the Formation of Linguistic Theory TIME: 13th September 1999 - 16th September 1999 LOCATION: Centro Seminariale Monte Verit? CH-6612 Ascona (Switzerland) ORGANIZING Elvira Glaser (Zurich) COMMITTEE: Michele Loporcaro (Zurich) Karin Donhauser (Berlin) in cooperation with the Centro Stefano Franscini (ETH Zurich) TOPIC: How much empirical research is needed to constitute a linguistic theory? Which fundamental principles are needed by the empirical linguistic research? These two questions address a basic problem of today's grammatical research that has been neglected by the modern grammatic theoretical literature as well as by the traditional philological research. The workshop shall provide a basis to discuss and study this problem in depth across the disciplines based on material from the Germanic and Romance languages. Topics considered will range from Phonology to Syntax. Ample space will be reserved to discuss the leading questions: - What risk do we run in taking historical or dialectal data from traditional descriptive Grammars? - What kind of distortion are we faced with in evaluating written records? How can such distortion be controlled? - What special difficulties ensue from the raising and interpretation of dialectal data? INVITED Ulrike Demske (Jena) SPEAKERS: Karin Donhauser (Berlin) Annette Fischer (Berlin) Thomas Fritz (Passau) Elvira Glaser (Zurich) Ruediger Harnisch (Bayreuth) Michele Loporcaro (Zurich) Nikolaus Ritt (Vienna) Guenter Rohdenburg (Paderborn) Richard Schrodt (Vienna) Maria Selig (Berlin) Mario Squartini (Zurich) Stefano Vassere (Bellinzona) PARTICIPANTS: The workshop is especially intended for young scientists working in the area of historical linguistics and dialectology and for advanced students who are interested in theoretical questions and who like to reflect on the relation between theory and empiricism. Workshop languages will be English, German, Italian FEES: conference fee 40 SFr.; board and lodging ca. 80 SFr./per day (Hotel Monte Verit?). PhD students and other students are welcome to apply for a grant! DEADLINE for receipt of abstracts: 31.05.1999 Abstracts should be sent to the following address via snail- or e-mail: Guido Seiler Deutsches Seminar Universitaet Zuerich Schoenberggasse 9 CH-8001 Zuerich Fax: ++41/1/634 49 05 e-mail: gseiler at ds.unizh.ch Information will soon be available at: http://www.ds.unizh.ch/ ############################################################################# WORKSHOP zum Thema EMPIRIE UND THEORIE: SPRACHHISTORISCHE UND DIALEKTOLOGISCHE DATEN IN DER LINGUISTISCHEN THEORIEBILDUNG ZEIT: 13.9. - 16.9.1999 ORT: Centro Seminariale Monte Verit? CH-6612 Ascona (Schweiz) VERANSTALTER: Elvira Glaser (Zuerich) Michele Loporcaro (Zuerich) Karin Donhauser (Berlin) in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Centro Stefano Franscini (ETH Zuerich) THEMA: Wieviel empirische Forschung benoetigt die linguistische Theoriebildung? Welche Grundlagen braucht die empirische linguistische Forschung? In dieser doppelten Fragestellung wird ein Grundproblem heutiger Grammatikforschung angesprochen, das in der modernen grammatiktheoretischen Literatur ebenso vernachlaessigt wurde wie in der aelteren philologischen Forschung. Die Tagung soll die Moeglichkeit bieten, diesen Problembereich in grundsaetzlicher Weise zu eroertern und an Fallbeispielen vor allem aus germanischen und romanischen Sprachen faecheruebergreifend zu studieren. Leitende Fragen fuer die Diskussion, der breiter Raum gegeben werden soll, werden sein: - Welche Risiken birgt die Uebernahme von Datensaetzen aus deskriptiven Darstellungen zur historischen Grammatik bzw. zur Grammatik von Dialekten? - Welche ueberlieferungsbedingten Verzerrungen ergeben sich bei der Auswertung sprachhistorischen Materials? Wie sind diese zu kontrollieren? - Welche besonderen Schwierigkeiten bietet die Erhebung und Interpretation von Dialektdaten? EINGELADENE Ulrike Demske (Jena) REFERENTEN: Karin Donhauser (Berlin) Annette Fischer (Berlin) Thomas Fritz (Passau) Elvira Glaser (Zuerich) Ruediger Harnisch (Bayreuth) Michele Loporcaro (Zuerich) Nikolaus Ritt (Wien) Guenter Rohdenburg (Paderborn) Richard Schrodt (Wien) Maria Selig (Berlin) Mario Squartini (Zuerich) Stefano Vassere (Bellinzona) TEILNEHMER: Die Tagung wendet sich vor allem an juengere, empirisch in den Bereichen Sprachgeschichte und Dialektologie arbeitende Wissenschaftler sowie an fortgeschrittene Studenten, die an theoretischen Fragen Interesse haben und das Verhaeltnis von Theorie und Empirie reflektieren moechten. Konferenzsprachen sind Deutsch, Englisch und Italienisch. GEBUEHREN: Tagungsgebuehr: 40 SFr.; Kost und Logis ca. 80 SFr./Tag (Unterbringung im Hotel Monte Verit?). Studenten und Doktoranden koennen sich um ein Stipendium bewerben. (kurze Begruendung erforderlich!) ANMELDUNG/ mit kurzem Abstract - ca. eine DIN A4 Seite - des Projektes, INFORMATION: das im Workshop vorgestellt werden soll, an: Guido Seiler Deutsches Seminar Universitaet Zuerich Schoenberggasse 9 CH-8001 Zuerich Fax: ++41/1/634 49 05 e-mail: gseiler at ds.unizh.ch ANMELDESCHLUSS: 31.5.1999 Information in Kuerze auch unter: http://www.ds.unizh.ch =========================================== Koyka Stoyanova Zentrum fuer Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung Jaegerstr. 10/11 10117 Berlin Germany phone: ++49/30/20192-556 fax: ++049/30/20192-402 e-mail: stoyan at zas.gwz-berlin.de =========================================== From Derek.Nurse at ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr Mon Mar 8 13:46:42 1999 From: Derek.Nurse at ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr (Derek Nurse) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:46:42 EST Subject: Ma'a/Mbugu In-Reply-To: <1241.920735368@pogo.isp.pitt.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- A very good source of material on Ma'a that Sally omitted is: Matthias Brenzinger, 1987, Die sprachliche und kulturelle Stelle der Mbugu (Ma'a), MA thesis, Institut fuer Afrikanisik, Univ. of Cologne. It is an overview of everything published up to 1987 on Ma'a and is quite comprehensive. D. From diriyeam at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA Mon Mar 8 13:46:13 1999 From: diriyeam at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA (Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:46:13 EST Subject: Ma'a In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I don't think this one or Dahalo has anything to do with the Cushitic languages, much like the rest of the so-called 'southern cushitic', spoken by originally Khoisan hunters, who were then influenced by the Bantu agriculturists, Nilotic herdspeople, and probably by the travelling Cushite (Somalis were travelling all over East Africa since as early as the 12 century in search of commerce and regularly employed the hunter-gatherer people as trackers of elephants and rhinos;---we should not trust therefore a few Cushitic lexemes). There are no known southern Cushites south of the Somalis and the Oromo. I did look through Ehret's lexical collection of the so-called 'Southern Cushitic', and found nothing reliable, except some resemblances, and a few loan-words from sheep and goat rearing, indicating diffusion of the common Cushitic culture (cf. the cattle culture of the Nilotic); so what? Today, the Turkana in northern Kenya are picking camel culture from the Somalis; and the Dahalo are moving away from Cushitic influence, in line with the dominant forces of today in Kenya, to a Swahili one. There was before Meinhof who was lumping the Khoisan with the then Hamitic (Cushitic). It is only to be expected the Khoisan scattered groups are subject to greater linguistic influences than any other group. In southern Somalia, they have completed assimilated linguistically, as the Cushites advanced upon them from a northern direction; yet, they form an small ethnic group. The same thing could be expected in Tanzania, as the Bantu agriculturists advanced into the area from a western/south-western directions. Some time far in history, it seems they were the sole occupants of the much of East Africa as far as southern Africa. Dolgolpolsky (1973:27) had it Ma'a is a Bantu language by morphology. More likely, it underwent influences from all the other languages also (notably Nilo-Saharan and maybe Cushitic, though the last one would be the least as far as population histories might go). In Hag?ge and Haudricourt (PUF 1978:40), it is said that it is structurally bantou, and is given as an example of hybrid case. Some Biblio (unordered) Dolgopoljskij, A. B. 1973 Sravniteljno-istoriceskaja Fonetika Kusitskix Jazykov. Moscow:Nauka. Tucker, Archibald N. ? Margaret A. Bryan 1974 ?The ?Mbugu? anomaly?, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Languages, 37:( i): 188- 207. Copland, B. D. 1933-34 - ?Note on the Origin of the Mbugu, with a Text,? Zeitschrift fur Eingeborene-Sprachen 24:241?4. Ehret, C. 1980. Historical Reconstruction of Southern Couchitic: Phonology and Vocabulary. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Brenzinger, Matthias. 1987 Die sprachliche und kulturelle Stellung der Mbugu (Ma a). [Un-published MA. thesis, University of Cologne.] Goodman, Morris. 1971 "The strange case of Mbugu", in: Dell Hymes (ed.) 243-254. Maddieson, Ian; Spajic, Sinisa; Sands, Bonny; Ladefoged, Peter. Phonetic Structures of Dahalo. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere; 1993, 36, Dec, 5-53. Heine, Bernd. The Study of Word Order in African Languages. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics; 1975, 20, 161-183. Thomason,-Sarah-G. Ma'a (Mbugu). Chpt in CONTACT LANGUAGES: A WIDER PERSPECTIVE, Thomason, Sarah G. [Ed], Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996, pp 469-487. Thomason, Sarah Grey. 1983 ?Genetic relationships and the case of Ma~ a (Mbugu)?, Studies in African Linguistics 2: 195- 231. Greenberg, J. The Languages of Africa. 1970 edition (the one I have), and others. At 11:51 AM 3/5/1999 EST, you wrote: >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >I think Sally Thomason's posting raises some very interesting >questions, but it might be useful if Sally could post a list >of recent references on this language. AMR > , , |\_/| 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 Mon Mar 8 13:39:01 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:39:01 EST Subject: Ma'a/Mbugu In-Reply-To: <1241.920735368@pogo.isp.pitt.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Sally Thomason wrote [inter alia]: > Christopher Ehret identifies at least one causative suffix in > Ma'a as of Cushitic origin; Mous cautions that Ehret's etymologies > need careful checking, but in any case it doesn't appear to be a > Bantu suffix, and Ehret says that it is -- or was, ca. 25 years > ago -- very productive. He says the same thing about two or > three other non-Bantu suffixes in Ma'a. [snip] > > The pronominal possessive suffixes are certainly inflectional > (at least that's how such affixes are generally analyzed in languages > that have them), so indeed there is evidence of Cushitic inflection > in (earlier) Ma'a. > I don't (for once!) strongly disagree with Sally, but I do query the assumption that such affixes, esp. the causative, constitute ironclad evidence that the lg started out non-Bantu. A Bantu lg could have borrowed some Cushitic affixes and then more recently lost them again. Or could it? > Second, Alexis Manaster Ramer asks for references. The most > useful source on the present linguistic & social status of Ma'a is > Maarten Mous's 1994 article "Ma'a or Mbugu", in the book Mixed > Languages, ed. by Peter Bakker & Maarten Mous, pp. 175-200 > (published by IFOTT at U. Amsterdam, but see Bakker's recent > Thank you for this and other references [snipped]. The funny thing is that several years ago I was asked to review this book and have a draft that is rather far along, which I hope someone will help me finish one of these days. I did not find Mous's paper, or indeed any of the papers in that volume, to answer my questions, though. > > P.S. I don't think there's general agreement any more that Sandawe > and Hadza belong to the Khoisan family. Bonny Sands' recent > UCLA dissertation failed to find solid support for the > hypothesis. > This is so, but I don't know that there is anyone doing solid work to try to figure out what these languages ARE related to, which is unfortunate. From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 21:23:41 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 16:23:41 EST Subject: Yakhontov and Swadesh lists Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I want to do some work with lists like those of Swadesh and Yakhontov except I want to use the binary system so I have to use the numbers 32, 64 and 128. I can drop 3 from Yakhontov's 35 list and also drop 1 from his 65 list. I also need to add 28 more to Swadesh's 100 list. The question is what and which to add or drop. I'd appreciate suggestions from anyone and everyone. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From degraff at MIT.EDU Wed Mar 10 21:23:10 1999 From: degraff at MIT.EDU (Michel DeGraff) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 16:23:10 EST Subject: One internalist pespective on creoles and genetic classification In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 02 Mar 1999 08:44:27 EST." Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- RE message from bwald at humnet.ucla.edu on Tue, 2 Mar 1999 08:44:27 EST: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- [...] > Not so removed from this is the (former) issue of whether Haitian (Creole) > is a Romance language. Until relatively recent times when pidgin-creole > studies started to be taken seriously by historical linguists in general > (or have they? AMR, to be sure, seems to take them seriously), lexicon > alone (i.e, through regular sound correspondences) seems to have been > criterial of inclusion in "language family" (for the "mainstream"). > Grammar did not count for much, just as it did not count for much in > synchronic linguistic description. [...] > [...] such issues as Haitian brought up DEFINITIONAL problems of language > family. How to classify when there is historical discontinuity in the > grammar? > (NB: I could say more about "political" motivations for different sides on > whether or not Haitian should be [have been] included in Romance, but I am > saying enough that can be misinterpreted without getting into that fruitful > topic. Currently there is still disagreement about how to account for > the grammar of Haitian and various other "creoles", e.g., whether it comes > from an innate "bioprogram" or is relexified Fon (a Kwa Niger-Congo > language), etc etc. There are also issues involving whether many so-called > creoles actually descend from earlier pidgins, e.g., Berbice Dutch, > sometimes called Berbice "Creole" Dutch, which seems to be a "mixture" of > Dutch and Kalabari (the latter a variety of Ijoid, a branch of Niger-Congo > that has contentious aspects for (sub)classification), or various > non-European varieties of Portuguese that seem to have been "restructured", > but not necessarily descended "whole cloth" from pidgins, etc etc. Does > "(radical) restructuring" exclude them from their lexical source "family" > affiliation? These seem to be matters of DEFINITION of "family", not > whatever the historical "facts" may be) [...] Dear all, Similar and related questions are being raised among creolists and generativists with interests in language change and language acquisition. As it turns out, various authors in a forthcoming MIT Press anthology address these questions from an internalist, generativist perspective. Such perspective, I do realize, is not shared by all members of this list, but I find their observations quite relevant to the intringuing questions raised by Benji Wald... Back to commercials: The book's title is LANGUAGE CREATION AND LANGUAGE CHANGE: CREOLIZATION, DIACHRONY AND DEVELOPMENT (DeGraff, ed., MIT Press, 1999). Publication information can be found at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/book-home.tcl?isbn=0262041685 What I'll do here is just quote one relevant advert ... sorry, excerpt ... from pages 13-14 of my introductory chapter (from the raw, pre-copyediting files). This chapter is (rather ambitiously) titled: "Creolization, Language Change and Language Acquisition: A Prolegomenon". Here it goes: ****************************************************************************** Pages 13-14 [...] Are the language-related cognitive processes responsible for creolization also involved in instances of ordinary acquisition and in (gradual) language change? [...] A positive answer to [that] question would connect creolization phenomena to more general diachronic phenomena, that is, to the better-understood instances of syntactic change occurring over relatively long periods of time, as for example in the history of English. Support for such a positive answer is given by contributors' proposals whose aim is to account for generalizations obtaining across cases of language change and emergence; see Roberts's and Lightfoot's chapters for two such proposals and Rizzi's and DeGraff's commentaries for further discussion. However, connecting creolization to language change [...] may at first appear controversial. At the turn of the century, Schuchardt (see Gilbert 1980b) used evidence from creole languages, as many others have since, in attempts to refute the Neogrammarian STAMMBAUMTHEORIE (``family-tree theory'') according to which the parentage of each language goes through a SINGLE ancestor; in this theory, languages reproduce asexually, so to speak (see Thomason and Kaufman 1988 for a critique and alternatives). With massive language contact in their histories, creoles clearly belie the Stammbaumtheorie's ``one parent per language'' assumption. Some (e.g., Hall 1966, 117) have tried to maintain the Neogrammarian assumption by unsuccessfully forcing creoles into genetic affiliation with their superstrates. Others (e.g., Taylor 1956) have recognized two possible ways out: (a) either creoles lie altogether outside Stammbaumtheorie (Taylor 1956, 407); cf. Thomason and Kaufman 1988, 9--12, 152, 165-166); or (b) our theories must be revised and made more ``family-friendly'' to allow for ``nongenetic'' relationships. An example of possibility (b) is Taylor's (1956, 413) proposal that creoles are ``genetically `orphans' [with] two `foster-parents': one that provides the basic morphological and/or syntactical pattern, and another from which the fundamental vocabulary is taken''! In the spirit of both (a) and (b), Thomason and Kaufman distinguish between ``genetic'' and ``nongenetic'' paths of development, the former arising via ``normal transmission'' and the latter via ``imperfect transmission'' as with abrupt creoles. But is transmission ever ``perfect''? In the I-language perspective adopted in this introduction, grammars are never transmitted: they are always created anew from innate mental resources (the language faculty plus acquisition and processing mechanisms, say) coupled with the ambient (environment-specific) PLD [Primary Linguistic Data] available to the learner (see below).[Endnote 24 --- see below] It is always the case that the PLD is both limited and heterogeneous (in varying degrees), as a result of which the final state of the language learner (i.e., the attained internal grammar, which gives rise to unlimited productivity) is inevitably underdetermined (see chapters 13--15 for further discussion). What Thomason and Kaufman (1988) call ``genetic'' versus ``nongenetic'' has no theoretical status in this framework: in both cases (``genetic'' language change AND ``nongenetic'' creolization), the learner's normal task is to set parameters using whatever PLD are available. In parameter-setting terms, what Thomason and Kaufman's distinction might refer to with respect to possibility (a) is the DEGREE of heterogeneity, stability and/or complexity of the PLD in the genetic versus nongenetic cases. In turn, the quality of the PLD is affected by the many (socially determined) EXTERNAL factors that are at play in all instances of language acquisition; two such factors, most relevant to the creolization case, are (a) the varying fluencies of the model speakers (i.e., those providing the PLD) in the evolving common language, and (b) the diversity of the model speakers' native tongues. The goal of this volume is to better understand the structure of UG by studying the CONSTANT, INTERNAL constraints on the outcomes of acquisition across various sets of NONCONSTANT, EXTERNAL conditions. In my view, such outcomes include those of both language change and creolization. [...] [...] [p 40 Endnote 24:] "In the words of Meillet (1929, 74), [C]haque enfant doit acqu'erir par lui-m^eme la capacit'e de comprendre le parler des gens de son groupe. ... La langue ne lui est pas livre'e en bloc, tout d'une pie`ce. ... Pour chaque individu, le langage est ainsi une recre'ation totale faite sous l'influence du milieu qui l'entoure. Il ne saurait y avoir discontinuite' plus absolue. [Each child must on his own acquire the capacity to understand the speech of people in his community. ... Language is not given to him en bloc, all in one piece. ... Thus, for each individual, language is a total re-creation, carried out under the influence of the surrounding environment. There could not exist a more absolute discontinuity. [my translation]] ****************************************************************************** Thank you, -michel. ___________________________________________________________________________ MIT Linguistics & Philosophy, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA 02139-4307 http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff.home.html From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 15:29:10 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 10:29:10 EST Subject: Sorites Paradox and Ahistorical Accretion Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- There are certain things that really get me confused. These certain things are things done by linguists apparently much after (or before) thought. ONe of them is something that looks to me as if it is ahistorical accretion. I will demonstrate via an example. The word "yoke" is said to be IE and to derive from *PIE. But there does not seem to be any other meaning attached to it except "yoke". From the recent centuries (especially in the sciences and technology) whenever new words are coined out of nowhere they seem to be compounded words from Greco-Latin especially created for a specific purpose by scientists. Examples are words like entropy, enthalpy, probably energy, synchronous, etc. I find it hard to believe that this was done 6,000 years ago. So the word "yoke" must come from another word which was pressed into service in the new setting. What meaning could/should it have had? Pull? Hitch? Tie? Bind? Put up front? Tie up front? Which brings up another problem. I seem to see two ways of reasoning used in the literature. If a word can be found which has not etymology in a language it is thought to be original in that language? That seems contradictory. After all, if we found an etymology in another language, clearly then we'd have to lean in that direction. So then if an etymology cannot be found, then the word should be left neutral, pending something. But what? How about looking into other languages? Which brings up another problem. It is called a sorites paradox in logic. I can illustrate it using some kind of logic related to fuzzy logic. Suppose we could assign numbers to how similar objects are to each other. We could do this by using distinctive features. For example, an orange is closer to an apple than it is to a chair. No doubt about that. How about similarity of an orange to a lemon vs its similarity to a grape? We can make up some relevant distinctive features. Just for the purposes of this example, I will make up a few; size, color, skin texture, taste (sweet, sour etc).. Orange and lemon are closer in size, and closer in skin texture, and even in color, although not in taste. So if we were weighting each feature equally, we'd judge orange and lemon closer to each other. Now let's try this on something like this: "how close is a qumquat to a quince vs qumquat to apple?" If we do not know anything about what a quince looks and tastes like and we don't know anything about what a qumquat looks like we cannot answer the question. Suppose we knew 2 out of 3. Let's make it, apple, orange and quince. (For the purposes of this example pretend you don't know anything about quinces). We might then look at the apple and orange and decide that there are a lot of things they have in common, and might make ourselves believe that they are similar. But we all recognize that this is wrong. But how then does the linguist who only knows IE languages proceed to look at some language X and determine if it is IE without knowing anything about AA, Altaic, Uralic or Nilo-Saharan or any other language that could have been in that region, including Elamite, Sumerian, or Hurrian or Adgyg-Abxaz, or Vainax, or Kartvelian? This is like looking at a morphing video of Eddie Murphy being turned into Bill Clinton and deciding that they are the same person. That in fact is what is done when an agglutinating language at time t0 is said to be descendant of, say, an inflecting language. Now back to yoke. Is it accidental that the word for yoking/hitching is in Kipchak-Karacay-Balkar, and that means "to pull" in Turkish, and that means "load" as in a load put on an animal or a cart/wagon. Is it derived from IE yoke? This is just an example to illustrate a point. Do the naysayers to Nostratic take these (not the example) into consideration? Or do they use the rule that if they have seen a word in writing some language, then it belongs to that language? -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Wed Mar 10 15:24:07 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 10:24:07 EST Subject: Ma'a/Mbugu Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- We are now considering the issue of productive non-Bantu morphology in Ma'a. Sally notes: > Christopher Ehret identifies at least one causative suffix in >Ma'a as of Cushitic origin; Mous cautions that Ehret's etymologies >need careful checking, but in any case it doesn't appear to be a >Bantu suffix, and Ehret says that it is -- or was, ca. 25 years >ago -- very productive. The only such causative suffix that I know for Mbugu is -ija, which corresponds well to Pare -ija (or -izha) and has a Bantu etymology. That is not to say that it could not also correspond to a non-Bantu (probably Cushitic causative ?*-iyya). [Such things happen, cf. English-based creole "se", either English "say" or Akan.] One earlier observer, E.C. Green, noted that when a simple verb ends in -a, e.g., hala (be parched) the caus is added as follows; hal-ija. This is the Bantu way. However, when the verb ends in another vowel, that vowel is preserved, e.g., hletu (lessen intr) cause hletu-ja. This is not the Bantu way, because Bantu simple verbs always end in -a. None of these verb roots are Bantu, but if hletu were (which it isn't) hletu-ja would presuppose the Pare simple verb *hletu(l)a (Pare lost etymological intervocalic -l-). Next, > The pronominal possessive suffixes are certainly inflectional >(at least that's how such affixes are generally analyzed in languages >that have them), so indeed there is evidence of Cushitic inflection >in (earlier) Ma'a. In both Ma'a and the relevant Bantu languages (as general in North/Central East Bantu) the independent pronouns and possessive "suffixes" are not (all) identical in form, e.g., Pare/Shambaa/Swahili/etc 1s mi- but poss -ngu. Ma'a has (or had) independent 1s ani and possessive gho (or xo) [the reported phonology is velar but otherwise varies a lot]. In relevant Bantu possessive constructions, the possessive suffixes are affixed to the morpheme -a- 'of', e.g., -a-ngu "my/mine". In Ma'a they are not. They seem to be treated as *independent* words. There is no "linking" vowel -a-, as there would be in Bantu. In addition, at least for non-human head nouns, there is no concordial class marker, as there would be in the relevant Bantu languages, e.g., Ma'a: ihle *gho* (name *my*), cntr. Pare: jina *l-a-ngu* (name *it-of-my*), where the l- is the class prefix for the class of jina 'name'. The form of the class prefix would vary depending on the class of the head noun, but there would be one in any case. Ma'a may be following a Cushitic construction (I don't know), but it is certainly not following a relevant Bantu construction. The interesting parallelism is simply that there are morphologically distinct sets for possessive pronouns in both (relevant) Bantu and Ma'a. Beyond that, the morphology of the Ma'a possessive pronouns is word-like, not inflectional in any decisive sense. Finally, about the possessives, in Ma'a the human ones are treated like Bantu nouns (or most descriptive adjectives). They take the nominal concords, NOT the ones used in the relevant languages with possessives, e.g., Ma'a MU-gho (class.1-my) = mine (e.g., the child is *mine*). This is like Pare nominal (or adjectival) concord: MW-eza (class.1-tall) = tall (one) (e.g., a *tall* person), not like possessive concord W-a-ngu (class.1-of-my) = my/mine (e.g., the child is mine). The difference is between the concordial forms *MU and *YU, both class 1 (typically human singular). With possessives the concordial form should be *YU (in relevant languages) not *MU. [whether they are used attributively or as predicates doesn't affect the distinction here.] > Maarten Mous has suggested (p.c. 1993) the possibility that the >pre-bantuized Ma'a language originated as a mixture itself, the >language of a people coalesced from an escaped group of cattle >herders who had been (semi-?)enslaved by the Masai. This scenario >could explain the lexical mixture in Ma'a. But, as Mous notes, it's >hard to imagine a way in which this hypothesis could be tested, given >the total lack of social information about the Ma'a people from the >period before they arrived in the Pares. That seconds my point about the importance of social information. We can hope at this point that languages evolve in a way that is so constrained (if we knew the constraints) that eventually we might be able to extrapolate from similar situations (if they become recognised) for which we can get more evidence. (In fact, if linguistics lasts long enough maybe a comparable situation will arise again somewhere, pace the guys who think everyone is going to end up talking "post-modern English".) Lastly, >P.S. I don't think there's general agreement any more that Sandawe > and Hadza belong to the Khoisan family. Bonny Sands' recent > UCLA dissertation failed to find solid support for the > hypothesis. (For that matter, there seems to be considerable > doubt among Khoisan specialists that even the southern members > of the proposed family are related to each other.) That is right. Most experts in the field never accepted Greenberg's classification of Sandawe (or Hadza) is Khoisan, i.e., genetically related to the Southern branches -- not to mention doubts about them being related to each other, e.g., Khoi and San. Khoisan is a label of convenience. The typical issue remains whether they are so deeply related that it is hard (or impossible) to demonstrate, or whether the typological features they share, e.g., "clicks" and "gender" systems (hence Meinhof's "Hamitic"), may be an old speech area phenomenon since overlaid with Cushitic (in the North) and Bantu everywhere. Sandawe, more than Ma'a, is in a unique African area where members of Greenberg's "four" major families are spoken. P.S. There's more to be said about the details of how Ma'a adjusted to Bantu grammar, and where it stopped short (in the past), and I look forward to how that will be treated in the future. From diriyeam at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA Wed Mar 10 15:16:04 1999 From: diriyeam at MAGELLAN.UMontreal.CA (Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 10:16:04 EST Subject: Ma'a In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- There have been various mentions of bushmanoid people in the southern tip of Somalia, for a long time. Lewis (1960:216) (Lewis, I.M. The Somali Conquest of the Horn of Africa. Journal of African History. 1, 2 (1960), pp. 213?229.) states: "The second pre-Hamitic population, less numerous than the riverine cultivators, was a hunting and fishing people living an apparently nomadic existence. Their present-day descendants, much modified by Hamitic influence, survive in scattered hunting groups in Jubaland and southern Somalia where they are generally known as Ribi (or WaRibi) and as Boni (or WaBoni). Physically it has been suggested tentatively that they contain Bushman- like elements. But their physical characteristics have not been intensively studied. They appear to have been politically and economically linked to the Bantu sedentaries..." Murdoch says (1959:302) (Africa: Its Peoples and Their Cultural History. New York, McGraw Hill) "The newcomers [Bantu-speakers] pressed steadily forward into Kenya and thence into Somalia, where the valley of the Shebelle River represents the limit of their intensive penetration. In Kenya and Somalia they found the Azanians confined to a few coastal trading settlements. The hinterland contained only Bushmanoid hunters, even in favored sections such as the valleys of the Tana, Juba, and Shebelle Rivers. The Bantu populated the latter, driving the indigenes back into the arid steppe and savanna country, where agriculture was impossible. Here a few remnants, like the Boni and Sanye tribes, still survive." A people might lose their language but keep to ancient patterns of practises, and culture. A partial example, though in this case the Romanis have kept something of their dialects, are the gypses of Europe, who live among Europeans but are referred to as different, though in some cases, because of mixing, it is not physically apparent, while in some cases there is an apparent minor physical differences. The same can be said of the hunter-gatherers in southern Somalia; they have kept hunting, an activity not practised by Somalis. In some cases, there are noticeable bushmanoid features among the Eyle---a light-yellowish complexion, eyes that look like those of the San, less hair than Cushites; I am not an anthropologists, and would not venture much into that area. However, in E.A., generally, though not absolutely, the peoples that met and clashed there have kept alive different cultures alive: that of the hunter-gather, the agriculturalist and the pastoralist (Cushites and Nilotes). For my good luck, I might say so, since I learned a lot I did not know about my own country and its peoples, I had the chance of being a teacher in a village in southern Somalia in 1974 during an alphabetisation campaign, when our dictator all of a sudden decided that everyone be literate in the new Latin script, and sent us out into the countryside by closing all schools. The village consisted of three populations that in some ways were closely integrated and yet kept a distance among themselves. The first group were of Cushitic stock, remnants of the Oromo without a doubt, by now well islamized and somalized; they possessed most of the livestock, and were partly agro-pastoralists; the second group were of people who descended from a previously bantu-speaking group; they were physically different from the cushitic group, and were mostly agriculturalists; they had kept bits of their culture despite Islam and somalization, such as the masks for dancing, not known in the broad cushitic culture; the third group, and socially the lowest, since they possessed no land of their own were the hunter-gathers, just starting to farm; they farmed land leased to them, but still practised hunting to the dismay of the other villagers, who did not want residents who hunted; in Somali culture hunting is a despised profession; of course, Somalis always hunted ivory-bearing animals and were running up and down East Africa but they don't hunt for meat; obviously, rich in livestock, they don't have to. This last group is commonly known in Somalia as the Eyle 'the dog owners'; they had hunting communities in the Juba region near the mount Eyle, named after them; but by the 70s they were settling down with the agriculturalists or migrating to towns where they found a niche for themselves as unlicensed butchers for families staging a feast; they would be paid with the offal and a few shillings; thus in Mogadishu, they had a squatter community near the national university to the consternation of the university management who had to bring in the bulldozers at last to evict them. I don't have much information of what became of them since the civil war. Of course, the whole discussion of Khoisan peoples and languages in East Africa is confusing since so many different names continue to be used (Sanye, Aweera (Heine), Boni, etc.), and some have postulated the descendants of the Eastern Cushitic (meaning Somali) and Southern Cushitic (Dahalo, Mbugu, etc.) separated 4000 years ago, when the Eastern Cushitic group migrated to the Red Sea and Golf of Aden zones, from where they would later migrate again in a southern direction. I never understood how the proponents of this later hazy theory, since no linguistic, historical or cultural proof has been shown, postulated such a theory. Herbert (1966)(Journal of Africa history, 7/1:27-46) and Turton (1975) (Journal of African history, 16/4:519-37) (an anthropologist and a historian) mention only Dyen's 'migration theory', as their guiding principal and state there is more dialects in the southern regions. True, but only of two kinds: Somaloid and Oromoid; besides, there are less dialects in central Italy, from where the Romans spread, than northern Italy. So much then for applying this intuitive principal to a micro-linguistic situation---this might work when applied to the presence of English in the Americas. Nurse and Spear (1985:38) say: "The split between Eastern and Southern Cushitic occurred at least four thousand years ago, and their subsequent histories were quite separate. Some two thousand years ago there was a major Eastern Cushitic concentration around Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. By AD. 500 the Eastern Cushitic ancestors of the Aweera had probably reached the coast of Somalia and later gave up herding for hunting and gathering, probably under the influence of the Dahalo. By the beginning of the present millennium, Eastern Cushitic Somali had also started to filter south into southern Somalia where, as we shall see, they interacted with northern Swahili communities in the first half of the present millennium. The final Eastern Cushitic group to impinge on the Swahili and related peoples were the Orma (Oromo), who pushed south out of Somalia into northeastern Kenya in the sixteenth century, disrupting coastal patterns established for over five hundred years." As far as known history goes, written or oral, it attests to an expansion from a limited coastal northern area to the south. The Ancient Egyptians, 5000 or or so years ago, sent an expedition during Queen Hatsepsut's reign, to the coasts of what is now generally agreed to be the northern coasts of Somalia, where the aromatic resinous plants, so essential to ancient religions, grow on the mountain flanks, and depicted on the frescoes of a Thebian temple at Deir el-Bahri a people similar to themselves in appearance and clothing. At the same time many terms from the religious domain of Ancient Egypt are recognizable in Somali; they include such terms as Bah and Kah (Ba and Ka, life essences of Egyptian belief), the Huur (the Hor, the bird of death), Aysitu (mother-god) and Awzaar (father zaar). Additionally, among the cultural objects depicted by the Egyptians 5000 years and still found among Cushites is the small slightly curved dagger, a local artifact (Hersi 1977:32) (Hersi, A. 1977. The Arab Factor in Somali History. Unpublished PHD dissertation, University of Los Angeles)). The question then if the people living along the coasts of the Red Sea and the Golf of Aden were the ancestors of Somalis, Afars, and Oromos, who was living there then 5000 years ago. In classifical times, the people who inhabited the northern Somali coasts were known to the Greeks as the Barbaroi (it later became the Berbers, as the medieval Arabs used to call Somalis, and is still borne by the town of Berbera in northern Somalia), and had no central government, each city having its own local council---a typical mode of Cushitic governance. The people says the writer of the Periplus Maris Erythraie were rather unruly. (Casson 1989) (Casson, Lionel. Periplus Maris Erythraie. Princeton University Press). This document was written during the first century AD. (Ibid.:7). However, Heine (1978) (The Sam Languages: A History of Rendille, Somali and Boni) had the Somalis barely starting thier northward migration from Lake Turkana, after they had diverged barely from the Boni, the small hunter group now in Kenya. I have always wondered why pastoralists, hungry for grass and water, would choose to come such a long way to the deserts northern and central Somalia when they were within reach of the green meadows of Kenya and Tanzania, just the places where the British, who were appropriating for themselves the 'Highlands of East Africa' were trying to keep the Somalis from crossing into in the 19th century when they came up with the 'Somali line', corresponding to the River Tana. For the rest, during the medieval times when Islam was spreading in the Horn, what happened iis well known from several Arabic sources (Futuh Al-Habash, etc.) and Somali oral history, and corresponds to an unprecedented expansion which took Somalis from what is now central Somalia to the northern Kenya, where they still pouring into when the British arrived and put an end to the migration. However, the Somalis were preceded by their cousins, especially in the hinterland, by the Oromo (Galla). The case of the Boni (Aweero/Aweera) then is a case of cushitization of a bushmanoid group, and is similar to the swahilization of the Dahalo, on-going now (Tosco 1992). >At 02:59 AM 3/9/1999 -0800, you wrote: >>It is only to be expected the Khoisan scattered groups are subject to >>greater linguistic influences than any other group. In southern Somalia, >>they have completed assimilated linguistically, as the Cushites advanced >>upon them from a northern direction; yet, they form an small ethnic group. > >Do you have any evidence that any currently identifiable Somali group was ever >Khoisan-speaking or are you just making an assumption based on a group that >may claim to be pre-Somali, non-Cushitic but doesn't have any idea what language >it used to speak? Nabad. > > , , |\_/| 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 ylfenn at earthlink.net Thu Mar 11 13:32:32 1999 From: ylfenn at earthlink.net (Martin E. HULD) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 08:32:32 EST Subject: Sorites Paradox and Ahistorical Accretion Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mark Hubey writes: There are certain things that really get me confused ... I will demonstrate via ... yoke. Yes, you are really confused. The PIE etymon *iugwom 'yoke' is not an isolated reconstruction, but is an specific derivational case of the root *ieugw- 'join'. Because English employs zero-derivation (a talk, to talk, a drive, to drive, a fax to fax ...) derivational processed are opaque to the monolingual speaker, but IE possessed several devices for deriving nouns from existing roots; *iugwom 'yoke' [Lat jugum, OE geoc, OCS igo, Gk. zugon, Arm. louc, OIn. yugam] is specifically the zero-grade of the root with an accented thematic vowel to make a neuter noun of instrument, 'the thing which yokes'; a verb can also be derived from the root by adding an .ne.- infix to the zero grade, thus *iu.n.gw-enti [Lat. jungunt, OIn yunjanti] (Lat. had employed the thematic ending -onti, Gk. has further restructured the cognate as zeugnuasi. Thus, PIE *iugwom [in preference to other reconstructions yugom vel sim.) is not without internal cognates within PIE. The term for the technological innovation of the yoke can be seen as built by regular processes from the resources of the language just as the word {microprocessor} has been. I don't believe the latter is in any sense restricted to 'scientists', but is the property of all users of English morphemes as *iugwom was accessible by all users of PIE morphemes. To get to your second point, "is it accidental that the word for yoking/hitching is ...?" What do you mean by accidental? Are you suggesting that God or Joseph Stalin or some other deity had some ulterior purpose in mind or that the semantic content of the morpheme is somehow responsible for the phonetic features of the form? If so, that is unscientific thinking. Do you perhaps mean to ask if the phonetic similarities between the Turkic morphemes and the IE morpheme *ieugw- are indicative of a relationship? The answer is there is no way to tell from the limited data of one case. Are the consonant variations c, ch, y typical of Turkic cognate sets as the equation of Lat j-. OE ge- OInd. y- and Gk z- are of IE? Are the vowel variations e/U regular patterns as the IE eu::ou::u series is? Is the semantic discrepancy significant? Is there reason to believe that IE stem final -gw is connected with Turkic stem final -k? Is it an 'accident' -in your sense- that Alb. ju (IPA ju:]) and Lith. jus (IPA [ju:s]) both signify the second person plural pronoun (Fr. vous, Russ vy)? The answer is yes; despite apparent phonetic and semantic similarity, Alb. ju must be from PIE *uos/ues and cognate with R. vy. gjesh 'boil' < PIE *ies- (Gk zeo:), gjesh 'gird' < PIE *ioHs- (Lith juos-iu), and gjuaj 'hunt' < PIE *ieAgh-ni- (NHG jagen) show that the reflex of PIE initial *i- in Alb. is gj-. There are a series of tests for identifying loan words, one of which, as you have guessed, is whether the word in question can be shown to be part of a morphological family rather than an isolated structure. Yes, we think of these things all the time and try to avoid snap judgments based on single, superficial coincidences or even a large collection of unrelated, superficial coincidences, in the belief that, as with UFO sightings, 1,000,000 times 0 is still 0. -------------------------------------------------------- Name: Martin E. HULD E-mail: Martin E. HULD Date: 03/11/1999 Time: 00:26:18 This message sent by NetManage's award winning standards based e-mail client Z-Mail Pro NetManage - Complete PC Connectivity Solutions -------------------------------------------------------- From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 13:30:11 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 08:30:11 EST Subject: Sorites Paradox and Ahistorical Accretion In-Reply-To: <36E4B9CD.85A54D71@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- "H. Mark Hubey" wrote: >So the word "yoke" must come from >another word which was pressed into service in the new setting. >What meaning could/should it have had? Pull? Hitch? Tie? Bind? >Put up front? Tie up front? *ieu-(g)- "to unite, tie together" ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Thu Mar 11 13:29:52 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 08:29:52 EST Subject: Ma'a Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi wrote: > > > In some cases, there are noticeable bushmanoid features among the Eyle---a > light-yellowish complexion, eyes that look like those of the San, less hair > than Cushites; I am not an anthropologists, and would not venture much into > that area. However, in E.A., generally, though not absolutely, the peoples > that met and clashed there have kept alive different cultures alive: that > of the hunter-gather, the agriculturalist and the pastoralist (Cushites and > Nilotes). It seems like we can bring multiple evidences to bear on this point. Some facts, or fact-like writings one can find in the literature" 1. Egyptians painted themselves red (and their womenfolk yellow) while they painted Asians white and Negroids(?) black. Whether the "real" Egyptians were really "black" is something that is fought over these days. Maybe they were related to the San (who apparently lived on the Horn of Africa before being overrun by Bantu speakers). 2. Recent reports in Science and Science News said that the human groups who possess the Y-chromosome (passed from father to son allegedly in the same way as the mtDNA allegedly only passes from mother to daughter) were Nilo-Saharans, San, and some other groups in Sudan(?). This again points to the same region and to the same human group. 3. The most recent articles in Science says that the mtDNA is not passed only from the mother to the daughter. (5 march 1999). It also says that the relatively recent report that said that the Neandertals split from the rest of humanity 600,000 years ago then must also be false. African EVe might have never existed and the mtDNA material could have been a recombination with the mother's genes with the father's donation. It is already beginning to sound like problems that linguists have trying to avoid having a language descend from two parents. 4. Whether the Neandertals spoke is still a favorite topic. If they did, what kind of language would they have had? Probably one poor in vowels if it is true that their articulatory apparatus would have prevented them from making the "supervowel" /i/. Then would we find these vowel poor and consonant-clustered languages where the Neandertals would have lived or mixed or interbred with the out-of-Africa contingent? This region also stretches from the Horn of Africa, through the MIddle EAst to the North Caucasus. Ubykh with 82 consonants, Kabardian with 1 (or 2) vowels, (classical) Arabic with /iua/, vowel-poor Hittite and Akkadian all point to that same region where the Neandertals would and could have mixed with the out-of-Africa contingent. This brings up point 1 again. Why do the SAn have a yellowish (reddish) complexion instead of being black after presumably having spent 2 million years or more under the hot African sun? (for more on this see, Hubey,1994) 5. Over the long-period, beyond what standard linguistics methodology allegedly cannot have anything to say, we have to use other methods to arrive at unconventional (but logical and rational) conclusions. Why is it that only some features of languages are used for geneticity when languages have so many other characteristics? (See Crowley,1992 and especially Nichols' works on this.) 6. Recent finds such as the Black Sea flood circa 5,500 BC and the rising of the ocean levels circa 12,000 years ago also point to the obvious. IE, AA, and some of the Caucasian languages (probably) and the Khoisan languages must be related in the distant feature. The languages being spoken in the ME before the proto-AA peoples migrated to the ME lacked initial liquids which can be seen in the lack of initial r in Hittite and Akkadian, in Linear-B, and in the lack of them in the toponyms of Mesopotamia region before the Sumerians and Akkadians (see von Soden). Altaic and Dravidian lacks initial liquids. That means the people who lived in the ME did not all get absorbed and at least some of their relatives are still around and kicking. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 12 18:20:49 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 13:20:49 EST Subject: linguistic features Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > 5. Over the long-period, beyond what standard linguistics > methodology allegedly cannot have anything to say, we have to use > other methods to arrive at unconventional (but logical and rational) > conclusions. Why is it that only some features of languages are used > for geneticity when languages have so many other characteristics? Because only certain features are valuable in recovering ancestry. There are countless inflectional systems available for use in languages, and countless possible phonological forms for expressing any given meaning. Consequently, data in these areas are typically useful in recovering ancestry. But other features are different. For example, there are very few possible alignment systems, and very few possible word-order patterns. But every language has to have *some* alignment system, and *some* word-order pattern. Consequently, data in these areas are of little utility: it is simply not the case, for example, that VSO languages are more likely to share a common ancestry than arbitrary languages. > (See Crowley,1992 and especially Nichols' works on this.) But Nichols's work is not really intended to set up language families: her purposes are otherwise. I'm afraid I don't know what "Crowley (1992)" might be, but, if it's the earlier edition of Terry Crowley's HL textbook, I don't understand why it's being cited. > 6. Recent finds such as the Black Sea flood circa 5,500 BC and the > rising of the ocean levels circa 12,000 years ago also point to the > obvious. IE, AA, and some of the Caucasian languages (probably) and > the Khoisan languages must be related in the distant feature. I don't know what "the distant feature" is intended to mean. But I can't for the life of me see how paleoclimatological data can lead to any linguistic conclusions at all -- least of all to the conclusion that certain languages must be related. This is a big *non sequitur*. > The languages being spoken in the ME before the proto-AA peoples > migrated to the ME lacked initial liquids which can be seen in the > lack of initial r in Hittite and Akkadian, in Linear-B, and in the > lack of them in the toponyms of Mesopotamia region before the > Sumerians and Akkadians (see von Soden). Altaic and Dravidian lacks > initial liquids. That means the people who lived in the ME did not > all get absorbed and at least some of their relatives are still > around and kicking. Fanciful, I'm afraid, even if the reports are true, which I doubt. Linear B is not even a language, but a particular writing system used for writing Mycenean Greek -- and Mycenean Greek emphatically did not lack initial liquids. Do you perhaps mean `initial rhotics'? But some of the words and names in the Linear B texts appear to have initial /r/ (which wasn't distinguished from /l/ in any case in that writing system). Anyway, classical Greek certainly has /r/-initial words, some of them seemingly with good IE etymologies, so it's not easy to see how Mycenean Greek could have lacked initial /r/. Besides, the absence of word-initial /r/ is not a rare feature -- even my own favorite language, Basque, has never tolerated initial /r/ and still doesn't tolerate it today, but I don't think anybody would regard this observation as evidence that Basque was once spoken in the Middle East. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Fri Mar 12 13:23:10 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 08:23:10 EST Subject: Sorites Paradox and Ahistorical Accretion Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Martin E. HULD wrote: > > To get to your second point, "is it accidental that the word for > yoking/hitching is ...?" What do you mean by accidental? Are you > suggesting that God or Joseph Stalin or some other deity had some ulterior > purpose in mind or that the semantic content of the morpheme is somehow > responsible for the phonetic features of the form? If so, that is > unscientific thinking. Do you perhaps mean to ask if the phonetic I would think that this form of thinking belongs mostly to people who do not know anything about how science is done. > similarities between the Turkic morphemes and the IE morpheme *ieugw- are > indicative of a relationship? The answer is there is no way to tell from > the limited data of one case. Are the consonant variations c, ch, y typical I guess there is a need to look further. If each such occurrence gets thrown away in isolation nothing will ever be collected. But then if someone does collect as many of these as possible, then the data must be evaluated according to some standard and objective method instead of making up rules as we go along or instead of repeating a heuristic (a rule of thumb) over and over. This is not a list for Nostratic but it seems to me that this list is where general methodology should be discussed. I brought these up exactly for this purpose. Somehow when AMR asks for discussion of generalities the anti-nostraticists seem to disappear. > of Turkic cognate sets as the equation of Lat j-. OE ge- OInd. y- and Gk z- > are of IE? Are the vowel variations e/U regular patterns as the IE > eu::ou::u series is? Is the semantic discrepancy significant? Is there > reason to believe that IE stem final -gw is connected with Turkic stem final > -k? Is it an 'accident' -in your sense- that Alb. ju (IPA ju:]) and Lith. > jus (IPA [ju:s]) both signify the second person plural pronoun (Fr. vous, > Russ vy)? The answer is yes; despite apparent phonetic and semantic > similarity, Alb. ju must be from PIE *uos/ues and cognate with R. vy. gjesh > 'boil' < PIE *ies- (Gk zeo:), gjesh 'gird' < PIE *ioHs- (Lith juos-iu), and > gjuaj 'hunt' < PIE *ieAgh-ni- (NHG jagen) show that the reflex of PIE > initial *i- in Alb. is gj-. How would one attempt to reach these conclusions other than a repetetion of a the old heuristic standby? > There are a series of tests for identifying loan words, one of which, as you > have guessed, is whether the word in question can be shown to be part of a > morphological family rather than an isolated structure. Yes, we think of > these things all the time and try to avoid snap judgments based on single, > superficial coincidences or even a large collection of unrelated, > superficial coincidences, in the belief that, as with UFO sightings, > 1,000,000 times 0 is still 0. Sound like good common sense. But if a field of study is to have more than a set of proverbs left over from the ancients or a set of heuristics, it seems that more rigor is needed. Isn't this the right place to discuss what "rigor" is. I am reading (actually re-reading) Ringe's work from 1995 (Nostratic and the Factor of Chance), and I have very serious problems taking it seriously since it is based on his work (1992) on his misuse of the binomial density (which AMR calls "voodoo mathematics"), but the grapevine says that he is at least a demigod if not god. I am seriously curious about what exactly in these papers has left such a serious impression on the readers some of whom I am sure inhabit this mailing-list virtual universe. You seem to be very bold. Perhaps you can "unconfuse" me on this issue also. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 13 17:41:47 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 12:41:47 EST Subject: linguistic features In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask wrote: >On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: >> The languages being spoken in the ME before the proto-AA peoples >> migrated to the ME lacked initial liquids which can be seen in the >> lack of initial r in Hittite and Akkadian, in Linear-B, and in the >> lack of them in the toponyms of Mesopotamia region before the >> Sumerians and Akkadians (see von Soden). Altaic and Dravidian lacks >> initial liquids. That means the people who lived in the ME did not >> all get absorbed and at least some of their relatives are still >> around and kicking. > >Fanciful, I'm afraid, even if the reports are true, which I doubt. Rightly so. Akkadian does not lack initial liquids at all: both r- and l- are perfectly acceptable. Hittite has initial l- but lacks initial r-, a feature simply inherited from PIE, where initial r- seems to have been very rare indeed. And as you said, Greek ("Linear B") has both l- and r- (the latter largely from PIE *sr-, but examples of *r- can be given). What we have is simply a universal tendency to avoid rhotics (and to a lesser degree laterals) in initial position. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Mar 15 13:45:13 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 08:45:13 EST Subject: linguistic features Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear Miguel: -----Original Message----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal To: HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU Date: Saturday, March 13, 1999 11:44 AM Subject: Re: linguistic features >----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >Larry Trask wrote: > Even Faulkner's small ME dictionary has approx. 113 entries beginning with 3 (vulture) which is generally regarded to have (principally) represented a rhotic. Pokorny has approx. 66 entries beginning with a rhotic, and this count does not include the forms with the root-extensions. I doubt sincerely whether lack of an initial rhotic can be legitimately be characterized as a "universal tendency". > What we have is >simply a universal tendency to avoid rhotics (and to a lesser >degree laterals) in initial position. > >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl >Amsterdam PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: and PROTO-RELIGION: "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138)