Africa vs. Americas, Multilateral Comparison

[Larry Trask]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Lloyd Anderson writes:

>  I believe an underlying psychological reason for not treating the
>  African and the American applications of Multilateral Comparison
>  together is simply the great discomfort most comparative-historical
>  linguists have with techniques which are used to discover plausible
>  hypotheses for future work.  They are simply not comfortable at
>  the edges of new knowledge, because it cannot have the certainty
>  of the most exacting techniques applied in long-established fields.
>  There is obviously no criticism here of those more detailed techniques,
>  it is simply inappropriate to insist on them at the edges of new knowledge.
>  It manifests an inflexibility to be unable to adapt one's choice of
>  techniques to the differences between long-established fields and the edges
>  of significantly new knowledge not limited to filling in details.

Well, I query this view of my field.

To begin with, as Lloyd himself emphasizes, MC is not a new technique but a
very old one.  It is also a technique which has been largely supplanted by
newer and better techniques.

More generally, though, I take issue with the suggestion that today's
historical and comparative linguists are generally inflexible old
stick-in-the-muds who can't cope with new ideas.  In fact, I would say that we
are living in one of the liveliest and most interesting periods that the
subject has ever seen.

These days the literature is full of masses of fascinating new data and of
constant new ideas.  The importance of contact and convergence phenomena is
being ever more steadily recognized.  We are learning more and more about the
complex and messy ways in which languages change and about the social factors
which are important in promoting change.  New models of linguistic descent are
being put forward almost in a breathless rush, and these new models are being
applied both to long-standing problems and to new ones.  A number of groups are
trying very hard to develop useful mathematical and computational approaches to
such problems as long-range comparison and tree-drawing.  We have Johanna
Nichols's population typology, Malcolm Ross on social networks, Thurston and
others on esoterogeny and exoterogeny, Roger Lass on parallels with
evolutionary biology, Daniel Nettles on computational models of rate of change
and population size, Jim Matisoff and others unraveling the huge and complex
mess that is Sino-Tibetan, Peter Bakker and others showing us undeniable mixed
languages, the Pennsylvania and Cambridge groups with their best-tree
approaches...I could go on in this vein for some time.

Indeed, the field is in such ferment that I almost get dizzy trying to keep up
with the flow of news ideas.  Just to cite one example, Bob Dixon's recent book
promoting the punk-eek model has already spawned a sizeable number of papers
debating its applicability to many areas of the world.

Inflexible stick-in-the-muds?  I don't think so.  We may not be all that keen
on MC, but nobody can say we're not interested in new ideas.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk