What is Relatedness?

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>I think if you look closely you'll see that you cannot identify "shared"
>innovations if they are no longer there to identify.

-- in which case the language isn't there any more either.

>(I think that may be terminological again.  Since a language that is made up
>entirely of loan words would have no genetic affilation except the languages
>it loaned from.)

-- actually, no.  Borrowing vocabulary is not the same thing as borrowing
syntax.

In any case, languages do not in fact borrow all their vocabulary -- even in
the case of a radically innovative language like English, the _core_
vocabulary remains remarkably stable.

That, incidentally, was how the existance of Indo-European was deduced
originally -- "father", "mother", etc.

>And a robust language exposed to  new ideas and things may be too interested
>in change to retain the very shared attributes and innovations that you
>might be using to show relatedness.

-- you're anthromorphizing the process of language change again.  It's not a
conscious process, on the whole, and languages are not individuals.  A
language has no interests, desires, needs or wants and does not make
"decisions".

>If this is true, it should throw up a big caution sign in terms of measuring
>relatedness in the context of varing rates of change among languages.

-- we don't measure relatedness in terms of the RATE of change, we measure it
in terms of SHARED INNOVATION.

English has changed much more rapidly than say, Icelandic.  This affects the
genetic relations involved not one iota.

>If I subject a group of plants to a good does of radiation and they mutate
>like crazy and then compare the next generations to their unmutated
>relatives, I may be hard put to call them very closely related at all.

-- no, in point of fact their relationships would be entirely obvious once
you'd done a DNA comparison.  There's less than 2% genetic difference between
chimps and humans, for instance.

If you changed _all_ or nearly all the genes in an organism, it would die
100% of the time.

>I would HAVE conclude that they were not related at all.

-- see above.

>AND finally the evolution of Frankish to French may be direct and historical
>evidence of a how a language with insufficient resources needed to alter
>substantially to absorb a much more complex cultural situation.

-- Frankish did not evolve into French.  Where did you get this bizzare
notion?

Frankish (a Germanic language) became _extinct_ in the Gallo-Roman areas to
which the western Franks migrated, and in which the Franks were a dominant
minority.

It was replaced by a local Late Latin dialect which evolved into French (a
Romance language).

There are a couple of hundred Frankish loan-words in French, and some Celtic
loans.

French is no more Frankish than English is Italian (or Hindustani).