PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language)

ECOLING at aol.com ECOLING at aol.com
Tue Jul 13 15:51:00 UTC 1999


Patrick Ryan writes:

>I simply do not understand why some find it difficult to understand that
>reconstructing the Proto-Language is only primarily different from
>reconstructing Indo-European in the wider selection of source languages
>for
>data. Of course, secondarily I have labored to reconstruct the underlying
>monosyllables by analysis of attested compounds.

>Pat

I strongly support work on earlier language families not part of the
standard doctrine today.
Against those who say (very nearly) that everything which
can be discovered has already been discovered.
That is of course a charicature, but with some truth to it.
(Or they say this while specifying "using the comparative method",
and defining it circularly to mean only the existing tools,
and only those ways of using those tools,
which are well known today.)

However, the above statement by Patrick Ryan I find highly surprising.

Of course it is going to get RELATIVELY more difficult
to reconstruct to greater time depths.
The mistake of those who reject all Nostratic and similar work
is in drawing a sharp fixed line,
saying that short of that time depth it can be done,
beyond that time depth it cannot be done.

The mistake of Patrick Ryan in the quotation above is to neglect
that it does get substantially more difficult as the time depths increase,
or in particular language families, because of the specific nature
of the sound-changes and grammatical changes which occurred,
or etc.

There is no sharp break.
There is a gradually increasing difficulty with time depth and
    with depth of changes (the two correlated but not the same concept).
There is ample room for expanding the tools used,
and for empirical studies of what sorts of changes each tool is
capable of penetrating beyond, and to what degree.

To give merely one example, one factor, sound symbolsim:

If there are sound-symbolic ideal forms for lexemes having
certain meanings,
then the more arbitrary ones (farther from those sound-symbolic
ideal forms)
have greater value as evidence for historical connections
of specific languages or language families,
simply because they are less likely to have resulted from
later pressure towards the sound-symbolic ideal.

This is of course a terribly difficult circularity,
because it means that look-alikes which are more widely attested
for a given meaning or set of related meanings
may be EITHER relics of an earlier historical unity
(whose changes were perhaps ALSO retarded by sound-symbolic forces),
OR the results of pressure towards some sound-symbolic ideal forms,
from diverse original and unrelated forms.
Much more subtle and difficult reasoning is therefore needed to
establish what are results of sound-symbolism and what are results
of historical common origins.
EVEN when we have a suprisingly widespread statistical sound-meaning
correlation.

The usual procedure is also circular.
Simply taking a sample of purportedly unrelated languages
and attempting to determine how many look-alikes word lists contain
is a bit naive,
because the languages may not be totally unrelated,
because chance resemblances may be more common in certain
meaning or sound ranges,
because the biases of different types of sound-system structures
are not yet well handled,
and for many other reasons.

Lloyd Anderson



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