Phonemic split

[Sean Crist]

On Fri, 10 Sep 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> 1. Unless your premise is that the three obstruent distinction was there
> from the very start of human speech, you are going to have to find a way
> for language to acquire obstruent sets. Otherwise you follow an obvious path,
> where if all 20 daughters have a total of lets say 20 "obstruents" together,
> then the reconstructed parent must have had all twenty "obstruents".  (Please
> don't take "obstruents" literally.)

> Either the "sporadic phonemic split" needed to create 3 different obstruents
> out of less than 3 happened somewhere along the line, or three obstruents
> have always been with us.

Or a new distinction arose because the conditioning environment for some
earlier alternation was neutralized by regular sound change.  I went into
some detail about this at the beginning of my post.

> My even bigger point was, because the approach is blind to continuity, it
> really can't identify more than the differences between languages.  It can't
> really identify "innovations" because it can't be sure that they are
> innovations.  It doesn't know what the original was.  And because it is blind
> to continuity, it can't be relied upon to see chronology properly.  To the
> extent you are now relying on reconstructions to fill in those holes, you are
> simply reflecting the assumptions already in those reconstructions.  And
> there is nothing new in that.

Yes; when we're talking about the unrooted tree which is the immediate
product of the algorithm in question, I think all of the things you've
said in this paragraph are true.

Once you pick a point on the tree as the root, however, these things are
no longer true.  At this point, you're introducing a host of claims about
what is original and what is an innovation.

For example, if Italic and Celtic share some characteristic, and if the
languages both higher and lower in the tree share some other value for
that character, it must be case that Italo-Celtic's value for the
character is an innovation and not a retention.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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