"is the same as" [was Re: Respect goes both ways!]

[Stanley Friesen]

At 11:14 AM 12/22/99 +0000, Larry Trask wrote:
>Stanley Friesen writes:

>> I guess I am not so adamant that sameness always be transitive.

>Well, if the relation 'is the same as' is to be taken as non-transitive, then
>what, if any, semantic content can be assigned to it?  How would it then
>differ, say, from the relation 'is similar to'?

It can be taken to be of *local* import only.

Let us take an example from an area I am somewhat more familiar with to
make the point clearer.

In California, as I am sure you know, the mountains surround a central
valley.  In these mountains there are populations of salamanders of a
particular sort - that cannot live in lowland areas like the Central
Valley.  Now, starting from (if I remember correctly) somewhere around San
Fransisco, one can trace an unbroken series of populations northwards.
Adjacent populations are always virtually identical, and can always
interbreed successfully.  By the biological species definition (the
biological equivalent of the mutual comprehension definition of a language)
any adjacent pair of these populations are clearly the same species.  One
can continue this chain on around the Central Valley into the Sierras, and
then southwards to the edge of the desert..  By this time, despite each
adjacent population being virtually identical, the salamanders are easily
distinguished from the ones we started with on the other side of the
Valley.  Now we continue the chain on around, back to the coast ranges via
the transverse ranges, and then north again to where we started.  When we
finally meet our original populations, the two sets of populations can NOT
interbreed.  By the standard definition they are distinct species.  Or are
they?  After all, if one goes the other* way, the two locally distinct
populations are connected by a continuous series of interbreeding populations.

It seems absurd to say that just because the end-points are clearly
distinct that each of the intermediate steps must *also* be held to be
distinct!  Ergo, I must use "same" to refer to a purely "local" state of
affairs - any two *specific* populations are either the same or not,
irregardless of the situation with other pairs of populations in the same
series.

The same sort of situation can, and *does* hold for languages.  The West
Romance area is a dialect continuum, with chains of locally similar
dialects connecting all of the separate "languages" in West Romance.  So,
does one treat all of West Romance as one language?  It seems silly to call
French and Portugese the same language, does it not. Yet they are connected
by a series of pairwise similar dialects.

>> It is generally rather messy to try to apply a transitive form of
>> similarity to biological entities, not just language. ...

>> And natural languages are clearly biological entities.  So fuzziness is the
>> only useful way to go.

>I have no quarrel with anything in these last two paragraphs, with which I
>agree.

>But, if we agree to a fuzzy interpretation of 'is the same as', and hence to
>its negation 'is not the same as', then we can no longer manipulate these
>relations as though they had non-fuzzy interpretations, and draw non-fuzzy
>conclusions -- which I think is the practice I was objecting to in the first
>place.

I am a little confused here.  I do not remember ever actually applying
"sameness" in a non-fuzzy manner in this discussion.  (Of course, given the
time lags, my memory is a little fuzzy itself).

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com