When a Parent Becomes a Daughter

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/11/00 12:05:57 AM, Sean Crist wrote:

<<In this post and in others, you've conceived of language branching as a
main trunk which continues, and a daughter which separates off of this trunk
and goes its own way (e.g., when you use the phrase "...a daughter branches
off"). I'd argue that THIS IS NOT LOOKING AT THINGS THE RIGHT WAY. There are
only forkings.  It's not possible for just one daughter to branch off; if
there's been a forking, then you have two daughters.>> (caps mine)

So we get back to why one way of looking at it is THE RIGHT WAY and the other
is not.

My point in this post was only to suggest that if one calls a Parent
coexisting with a Daughter "reification" then speaking of two Daughters
coexisting might also be "reification".  But let's put that aside for the
moment and consider the forking versus branching question again.

Sean Crist wrote:
*A forking in a language follows from a forking in the community of speakers,
typically because of migration leading to geographical separation.  When the
original single group splits into two groups who wander off from each other,
the copies of the language information in the minds of the members of both
groups start out basically identical. Over time, however, the norms in the
two communities DRIFT IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, since the two groups are no
longer in contact*

Which does not answer the question why the proper model is a forking rather
than a branching.  The DEGREE OF DRIFT may vary between the two groups.  A
RADICAL DEGREE OF DRIFT in one group and a SMALL CONSERVATIVE DRIFT in the
other would suggest a branching not a forking.  What is important to my post
is:  WOULD YOU HAVE CALLED THE SMALL CONSERVATIVE DRIFT A NEW LANGUAGE IF THE
SPLIT HAD NEVER OCCURED?

Methodologically, it appears that you are "reifying" a new language because a
split has occurred - NOT because of any quality of change in the language.

A splits into B and C.  You would have continued to call A "A" if no split
occurred.  But because of the split, you call it "B."

I hope you understand there is a bit of a problem here.

But my question now is does it matter?  If you go back in the archive, you'll
see that you answered my question without using the "parent cannot co-exist
with its daughter" idea and that it was Prof Trask who cited it.

I suspect that the difference between branching and forking are
terminological and operationally cannot tell us about the degree of drift in
both or either language.  It also does not tell us if what is drifting is
going to become a designated "innovation" in determining any kind of a family
tree.  Some innovations don't matter, some do.

My question was something like - could Anatolian, after say innovating away
from "narrow PIE", borrow back features that it had lost?  I was looking for b
orrowings that imitated genetics.   E.g., Mencken noted that after abandoning
the "King's English", Americans rediscovered and adopted it.

<<Perhaps some of the conceptual difficulty here comes from taking the
biological metaphor of "parent" and "daughter" too literally.  In biology,
we are actually talking about separate individuals.  I did not gradually
develop from my mother or father by starting out as an identical copy of
one of those individuals and gradually changing into someone else. In
language, however, what we're talking about are copies of information
which gradually change separately and become progressively more different
from each other.>>

Actually, this does happen biologically in non-sexual reproduction.  The
amoeba splits in two and technically there is no parent left.  If this is
your model, I'm fine with that.  But the real question is I think - can we
mistake the influence of one daughter on another and mistakedly call it the
remains of the parent?  E.g., -if Slavic loaned the word for wheel from Greek
- or vice versa - could we mistake it as being a gift to both from the
reified parent - PIE?

Regards,
Steve Long