When a Parent Becomes a Daughter

[Sean Crist]

On Sat, 15 Jan 2000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> 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.

It's apparently a problem for you.  Linguists are well aware that there is
no clear criterion for looking at two lects and saying "same language" vs.
"different languages."  It is purely a matter of convention what
distinctions we want to draw and what names we want to use.

For example, consider the following two cases:

	-Earlier Dutch forked into Dutch and Afrikaans.

	-Latin forked into Italian, Spanish, French, etc.

In the former case, we continue to use the term for the parent language
for one of the daughters.  In the latter case, we don't.  What we choose
to call the daughters is _purely_ a matter of convention.  Linguistically
speaking, the two cases are examples of exactly the same thing; it doesn't
matter whether we've arbitrarily chosen to use the name of the parent
language as the name of one of the daughters.

If we wanted, we could extend the term "Latin" to replace "Italian" as the
term for "the dominant Romance language spoken in Italy today." Likewise,
we could come up with a new name for present-day Dutch to reflect that the
common ancestor of present-day Dutch and Afrikaans has forked and that it
no longer exists in its earlier form.

Swapping the terminology this way would make no difference whatever in the
actual linguistic facts.  "Dutch" means "the grouping of lects in space
and time which we find it convenient to call 'Dutch'".  You seem to be
having an awful time getting your mind around this, because you've been
beating this same drum since last summer.

> 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.

I never drew any distinction between branching and forking.  I use the
terms to mean exactly the same thing.

> 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 borrowings that imitated genetics.

As I've said, you occasionally get cases where a loan word cannot be
detected on purely phonological grounds, but you _never_ get the wholesale
borrowing of an entire system of inflectional morphology.  This is why
inflectional morphology is so valuable in determining genetic affiliation.

In very, very rare cases, a single inflectional morpheme might have been
borrowed; it's been claimed that English 3sg. -s (replacing -eth)
represents a Norse influence.  But there is not one recorded case where a
whole system of inflectional morphology has been borrowed; it just
_doesn't_ happen.

> E.g., Mencken noted
> that after abandoning the "King's English", Americans rediscovered and
> adopted it.

I don't know what you're referring to here.

> 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?

If it were borrowed from just one branch into another, I'd be willing to
entertain the idea that the loan was early enough for the crucial sound
changes not to have taken place, so that we couldn't identify the
borrowing. However, the PIE word for "wheel" is attested in most of the
branches of IE.  It is vanishingly improbable that the word could be a
loan word in all of these branches without ever showing any telltale
phonological signs of the borrowing in any of the branches.

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