What is Relatedness?

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

I wrote:
<<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?>>

Sean Crist replied (1/11/00 1:52:22 AM):
<<It might owe a great deal to the loaning language in terms of its lexicon,
but we just don't find cases where languages substantially borrow syntax or
inflectional morphology.  This is one of the reasons why inflectional
morphology is extremely valuable in the determining genetic affiliation.>>

Well, then that raises a very interesting question.

One of the criticisms that came up often when I asked some linguists to
comment on the tree was that it mixed apples and oranges.  And cherries.  Syd
Lamb wrote in a private message (repd w/permission) that lexical,
phonological and morphological items "are largely independent of one another
in how they are involved in change. Hence a tree constructed on purely
phonological grounds, for IE or Uto-Aztecan, or any complex family, will come
out quite different from one constructed on purely lexical grounds, and both
will differ from one constructed on purely morphological grounds."

There's no question that morphology can reflect different genetic
relationships than lexical or phonological items.  This is precisely what
happened with Germanic in the UPenn exercise.  It was pointed out in another
post that "there are a great many morphological and constructional elements
to be found in the earliest Indoeuropean texts that are in opposition to
apparent lexical similarities and dissimilarities.  One example is the
accusative of specification discussed by Hahn in 'Naming Constuctions in
Indoeuropean languages' ... This kind of morphology and syntax points in a
very different direction than mere homonyms."

It was also pointed out that the UPenn "outcome showed that their lexical
choices in German were older than their morphological choices,..."  so that
it looks as if "the Germans got their words from Latin and Celtic first and
their syntax from Slavic later."  Suggesting perhaps that the "problem is
trickier than it looks."

Does all this reflect the possibility that an accurate and true morphological
IE tree would and should look different than an accurate and true lexical IE
tree?  Is the process of change that complex?  If that is the case, then
measuring "relatedness" by mixing the two together in a lump of shared
charcteristics may very well render the result inaccurate on both counts.

I was also given an example that I will try to repeat related to how
conservatism might affect the usable evidence of relatedness:
Two IE languages - possibly in contact - accidentially retain a feature from
PIE.  All other IE languages lose that feature before any records exist.  The
researcher would be forced to conclude that this feature is a shared
innovation, having NO WAY OF KNOWING of the PIE origins.  He would have no
way of knowing that it should go in the "lost" category for the other
languages.  On that basis, the two languages might have a common "character"
in the UPenn analysis and show evidence of relatedness.  But in fact all that
is being measured is the relative conservatism of the two languages.

(As far as non-borrowability of "syntactical morphology" goes, I was given
the example of the overwhelming and extensive use of the original Latinism
<-tion> in modern English.  And the comment was that if that sort of thing
showed up in two ancient languages with no recorded history to explain how it
got there, "some historical linguists would probably say that it had to come
from the proto-language.")

Which brings me back to the point of my original post.  A language borrows
and innovates radically.  To the point where let's say - to make the point
clear to the most obtuse degree - 99% of all lexical and morphological
features are not from the original parent.

Sean Crist replied:
<<It doesn't matter how many words a language has borrowed; its genetic
affiliation does not and cannot change.  As we've previously discussed, you
can often identify loan words, because they will not have undergone the sound
changes which occurred in the language prior to the borrowing.>>

This misses the point.  The point is simply evidentiary.  The radically
changing language could have little or no evidence left of its genetic
affilation.  CRITICAL EVIDENCE OF THAT 'GENETIC' AFFILATION HAS BEEN LOST.
(And whether the borrowings happened before or after the sound changes is not
relevant here - the borrowings are the bulk of the language and all the
evidence you have.)

Saying that these attributes fall into the "lost" category on the UPenn grid
just won't do.  And that's simply because there is no way of knowing if they
were lost or if they were ever there.  Something that is "lost" looks and
acts exactly like something that was never there.

The UPenn tree uses some 300 features across all of IE and some 4000 years.
Is it possible that the absence of some of those features in some languages
is not due to recent innovations but losses in other languages?  Is it
possible that things that are categorized as "lost" in the UPenn  grid were
never there?

These problems are not simple ones and the solutions mentioned in your post
do not neatly answer them.  The sum total of the relationships between 12
language families over 4000 years may be too complex to settle with just 300
"shared" features.

Regards,
Steve Long

PS - Someone - I forget who - also wanted to know how the UPenn tree analysis
could claim to "confirm the Indo-Hittite hypothesize"  when the actual
language used was Luwian.