Conservative dilemma

Larry Trask larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
Fri Sep 3 16:11:09 UTC 1999


On Mon, 30 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

> There are I would assume none today who doubt that
> Albanian is proven by the Comparative Method to be
> an Indo-European language.
> Yet only recently one correspondent stated that Ringe and the
> Philadelphia group excluded Albanian from their algorithmic
> approach to the family tree of Indo-European because their
> algorithms would not work on it.  (Their algorithms use less
> information than does the Comparative Method, it is safe to say?)

Ringe et al. report that the Albanian data are too sparse for their
algorithm to be applied to it usefully.  They do not elaborate, but I
presume the problem is the paucity of inherited material in Albanian,
which has been subjected to layer upon layer of heavy influence from
other languages, many of them IE.

As for "less information", well, it is not so much the quantity as the
kind.  Ringe's method makes use of certain specified characters, and, if
Albanian cannot be clearly classified in terms of these characters, the
method won't work.  The comparative method uses different kinds of
information, and IEists, after a monumental struggle, were finally able
to extract enough information of the required type to determine that
Albanian was an IE language.

[snip of Algic evidence]

> Now consider Greenberg's attempt to find a morphological
> irregularity to bolster his claims of genetic relationship among
> some of the languages of his Amerind.  He adduced some alternation I
> think it was in 3rd sg. pronominals between y- and t-. This is WEAK
> evidence, for exactly the same reasons that it is weak evidence in
> the Wiyot-Algonquian case.  Because we do NOT (yet?) have evidence
> to convince most that all of these "Amerind" languages can be
> demonstrated to be related, it is argued against Greenberg that this
> could have arisen by chance, and is therefore "not" evidence.  But
> evidence is evidence, whether or not it is part of a successful
> proof (or legal case).  It is simply not logically consistent to
> accept in one case but not in another this kind of very weak
> resemblance, involving the weakest, least information-rich sounds.
> (Yes, I could try to argue along with the rest of you that the
> Wiyot- Algonquian case might be better if it is specific to
> pronominal prefixes; and of course because much more effort has been
> spent on it too! But that would be cheating, based on the final
> result much later.)

The particular morphological alternations identified by Greenberg and
cited here are indeed very interesting, and they are precisely the sort
of thing we normally count as evidence.  But the big problem is that
these alternations occur in only a very few of the languages assigned by
G to his vast "Amerind" family.  Consequently, while they may reasonably
be counted as evidence for a group containing the languages exhibiting
the alternations, they are of no possible relevance to the validity of
Amerind.

To put it another way, the dental preterites found in English and in
German are a piece of evidence for relating English and German, but they
are certainly not evidence for linking English and German to Irish,
Russian, Albanian, Greek or Bengali, none of which has dental
preterites.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk



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