"is the same as"

[Larry Trask]

Stanley Friesen writes:

[snip account of ring species among salamanders]

>  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.

Why "absurd"?

At least in biology, such relations as "can interbreed with" or "cannot readily
be distinguished by eye from" need not be transitive -- I agree.  But by what
right can we identify the relation "is the same as" with one of these?  And
what would be the point of doing this?

>  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.

Indeed, and this is a common state of affairs.  But how does this constitute an
argument for treating "is the same as" as a non-transitive relation?  Better, I
suggest, to forget about this last relation altogether, and to speak instead of
some more appropriate relation, such as "is readily mutually comprehensible
with" -- which again I agree is not going to be transitive.

[LT, earlier]

>> 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).

As far as I can recall now, the objections of which I speak were not to Stanley
Friesen's postings, but rather to somebody else's.  But it's been a while.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk