What is Relatedness?

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/26/99 11:09:50 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote:

<<When we have a family of related languages, on what grounds do we decide
what the internal structure is for the family tree?  In other words, how
do we decide which of these languages are more closely related than others
in the family?>>

But what does "more closely related" mean?   This isn't just a question about
terminology.  It rather goes to what we are proving and hope to prove by
establishing "relatedness."

If - for example - a language has innovated and borrowed so wildly that it
retains very little of the ancestor, it may be "more closely related" in some
chronological sense.  But in fact we can imagine it being far more different
from the immediate ancestor than say some conservative cousin that retained
the attributes common to the family.

So a language that has innovated and borrowed away most of its heritage may
not be "closely related" in terms of its vocabulary, use of syntax and just
plain in its sound to the ear.  But yet we would call it "more closely
related" because a few words or sounds give us evidence of "descent" from a
common ancestor.  But a great deal of that language - let's say the majority
and its most distinguishing features - would in fact be descended not from
the ancestor, but from somewhere else.

A "backwoods" language exposed to new and sophisticated cultural and
technological input might expand many times over its original form.  Many new
words and concepts might be introduced.  New tenses might suddenly be needed
to indicate matters of time and relationships that simply did not matter in
the old days.  People who calculated time only in terms of the seasons might
need to start perceiving and discriminating befores and afters, duratives and
completedness, perfects and aorists.  Sounds might have to be borrowed and
allophones split and evolve into phonemes to accomodate subtle differences
between meanings.  (E.g., the defense rests, but "dee-fense" wins ballgames.)
 Everything might be overhauled as a result.

This is a side-path off of the discussion in which Larry Trask discussed a
language changing so much that it might be perceived as a different language.
 And perhaps it raises the question whether counting the number of apparent
differences between languages (as e.g. the UPenn tree does to some degree) is
a valid way to measure genetic distance.

How much must a language borrow, for example, before it starts to owe more to
the loaning language than it does to a parent or grandparent that has just
left a few strands of genetic relation?  And conversely would those few
strands of genetic relatedness mislead us into thinking that it was genetic
distance and not borrowing or innovation that caused so little of the
ancestor to be retained?

<<Nearly everybody agrees that we should do so on the basis
of shared characteristics of the languages which cannot reasonably be
attributed to parallel innovation or to borrowing. >>

And of course there is an inverse function that applies here.  If some languag
es had those shared characteristics, but lost them before they became
documented in writing or otherwise left no evidence - it would be taken as
evidence of relative unrelatedness.  But what might actually have occurred is
that the evidence of relatedness might have been innovated or borrowed away
in a frenzy of change.

So we wouldn't be talking about "parallel innovation or borrowing" misleading
us about shared characteristics, but instead misleading us because they have
destroyed the evidence of the real relationship.

The UPenn seems to use a "value" or a neutral count (in terms of shared
innovations) called "lost."   This APPEARS to apply only to attributes that
are presumed to have been present in PIE.  But the fact is that a truly
innovative language might have lost shared innovations that arose after PIE,
and those lost shared innovations might have given us a completely different
picture of relatedness.

But because the loss happened before documentation, we are mislead into
thinking they were never there.

After all, if presumed attributes of PIE can be "lost" in daughter languages,
then attributes ("shared innovation") of a sub-family - e.g., NW IndoEuropean
- could have been lost in a particularly innovative member of that subgroup -
e.g., Greek or Latin - before documentation.  And I don't believe there is
any methodology that could neceassrily recover them.

Regards,
Steve Long