Basque Criteria 10 -17 for inclusion (1)

[Larry Trask]

Lloyd Anderson writes:

The posting I'm trying to reply to here is enormous.  I'm afraid
I can't possibly deal with all of it now, or perhaps ever.  So I'll
content myself with responding to a point or two for now.  Maybe
later I can turn to other points.

>  The discussion of "criteria" when seeking candidate vocabulary
>  which descends from earlier stages of a language is clearly
>  relevant whenever we seek such vocabulary,
>  is is relevant to much more than Basque.
>  Most of the particular suggestions made also apply to more than just Basque.

But I'm only working on Basque, and the doubtless fascinating and
complex issues that arise in working on Algonquian are of no
relevance to me.

>  This message contains additional material to support
>  a more sophisticated and nuanced set of techniques for selecting items
>  to include as potential monomorphemic Old Basque lexicon.
>  The core concept underlying all of these specific suggestions
>  for modifying Trask's criteria is that we are dealing with gradient
>  and fuzzy matters, matters of degree, ones not susceptible to
>  sharp yes-or-no decisions.

Unfortunately, I have to *make* "sharp yes-or-no decisions".
For my purposes, I need a list of words, and so, before I can
do anything else, I have to decide which words should go into that
list.  I can't include a word to only 30%.  Fuzziness exists, yes,
but my response to fuzziness is this: if there is *any* doubt that
the word belongs in the list, then leave it out.

>  Though each criterion or perspective
>  by itself may give a clear result in special cases, it need not,
>  and the combination of criteria can give a complex of information
>  which we can weight different ways.  If we "tag" the items
>  with multiple scores in a computer database, we can then change
>  the weightings as seems appropriate to consider different hypotheses.

Irrelevant to my purposes, I'm afraid.

I am not considering different hypotheses.  In principle, I don't
even have *any* hypotheses.  I want to compile a list of words,
and I want my conclusions to derive entirely from that list.
That's all.

So, the only issue for me is a simple one: which words go into
the list?

>  This message adds criteria 10-17 to the earlier message titled
>  "9 specifics on Including and excluding data"
>  sent on 30th October, 1999.

>  Larry Trask recently again challenged that he had not received
>  specific alternative suggestions for criteria for inclusion
>  of words when seeking ancient native monomorphemic lexical items
>  for Basque.  That statement is false on its face,
>  I simply refer to the message just mentioned from 30 October, 1999,
>  which should be in our archives, with the additions here.

It is not false.  Please watch yourself, Lloyd.

>  And Trask's statement is also false on its face based on Trask's own
>  message of 9th December, 1999, in which he admitted that he had
>  received specific suggestions:

Suggestions.  Comments.  Points.  Yes.  But criteria?  No.

That posting did not add up to a set of explicit criteria for
deciding whether any given Basque word should or should not
go into my list.

>  Let's start with a point of agreement:

>  >So, Lloyd, are you now agreeing to the following?

>  >   Expressive formations should be subject to no special treatment
>  >   at all, but must be treated just like all other words, according
>  >   to exactly the same criteria, whatever those are.

>  >Yes or no?

>  Of course I agree with this, and always did agree.

Fine.  Good.

>  I have only protested against criteria which had biases against
>  expressives or other strata of vocabulary,
>  not advocated that we should have some a priori criteria
>  to include specifically expressives or any other words
>  even if they did not satisfy other *reasonable, legitimate, unbiased*
>  criteria.  I emphasize the latter part deliberately,
>  because criteria cannot stand as valid judges of other matters
>  unless the criteria themselves are first judged.

OK, Lloyd: then *what other* criteria do you propose?

>  I'll continue here with principled, fully general criteria
>  which differ from Trask's:

>  10.  bias against longer words

>  Trask has stated the goals of his collection this way:

>  >native, ancient and monomorphemic lexical items.  That's all.
>  >I think I've been pretty explicit about this.

>  Yet in the same message where he stated this, he also
>  replied as follows:

>  [LA]
>  >> The exclusion of expressives,
>  >> *or systematically of any other group of words*
>  >> (such as the longer words, as noted above),
>  >> through any aspect of the sampling procedure,
>  >> would of course tend to invalidate such general validity.

>  [LT]
>  >No; not at all.  Polysyllabic words are excluded by definition: they are
>  >not relevant to my task.

>  I'll assume that was a typo, "polysyllabic" instead of "polymorphemic",
>  because otherwise polysyllabic words are *not* excluded by the definition
>  of goals just quoted.  They certainly are *not* excluded automatically
>  by any principles of reliable historical reconstruction!

Indeed.  That was a dozy typo, and I did mean 'polymorphemic'.
My apologies.

>  11.  "polymorphemic" not intended synchronically
>
>  But it may not be a typo, it may rather reveal some interdependence of
>  criteria in Trask's thinking.

No; it was just a typo.

>  Assuredly, polysyllabic words are more likely to be polymorphemic,
>  and the skilled and knowledgeable analyst may be able to segment
>  many polysyllabic words into etymologizable parts.  Some of these
>  results must certainly reflect the psychological reality of the morphemes
>  for the speakers.
>  But if we take the concept seriously in a synchronic sense,
>  then we must recognize that also in ancient languages,
>  even proto-languages, there may be many words
>  which demonstrably once were morphemically composite,
>  which yet for the speakers of the proto-language were single morphemes.
>  Trask does not seem to recognize this problem.

Yes, I do.

When I exclude polymorphemic words, I exclude words which can
reasonably be shown to be polymorphemic *in origin*.  I don't
care whether these words are still regarded as polymorphemic
by speakers today.  I'm doing historical work, not synchronic
work on the contemporary language.

Probably no modern English-speaker perceives 'hussy' as polymorphemic,
but we can show that is, in origin.  And probably no modern
Basque-speaker perceives <itun> 'confession', 'banns' as
polymorphemic, but we can show that it is, in origin -- in fact,
it consists of no fewer than *four* morphemes -- and so
it doesn't go into my list.

>  Most or all languages we know of do contain historically polymorphemic
>  vocabulary items which are synchronically monomorphemic.
>  So we must be willing to reconstruct such words for any proto-language
>  also.  This is the error of over-analysis, over-segmentation.

If it's monomorphemic as far back as we can trace it, then it's
monomorphemic for my purposes.

Basque <itun> is certainly polymorphemic, so it's out.

Basque <gibel> 'liver' is probably polymorphemic in origin, but
I can't demonstrate this decisively, so it will probably go in.
I'm pondering this one.

Basque <sabel> 'stomach' is possibly polymorphemic, but this is
doubtful and far from demonstrable, so it goes in.

There is no trace of evidence that Basque <buru> 'head' is
polymorphemic, so in it goes.

>  Trask (in another message today) classes English "vixen" as
>  "Bimorphemic in English",
>  I do not understand a synchronic basis for his doing so.
>  It was polymorphemic at one time, but surely not in English now.

True, but not relevant.  The word is polymorphemic *in origin*, and
so, for the kind of purpose I have in mind, it must be classed
as polymorphemic.

>  There is no other word in the American Heritage Dictionary beginning
>  with "vix-", and there is no English feminine ending "-en" sufficiently
>  salient
>  that I can think of a word with it right off hand, though that may be my
>  personal mental limitation of the moment.
>  (I could only think of "oxen", "oven", "coven", "maven", "raven",
>  "maiden".)
>  So "vixen" is not even as decomposible as the
>  famous "cranberry" where at least "-berry" is obvious.
>  This has been the pattern of Trask's remarks on a host of other items,
>  where he classes them as polymorphemic if he can *etymologize*
>  them as multiple morphemes, not if they are polymorphemic
>  in a sychronic analysis of the language itself.

Of course.  Lloyd, I'm doing *historical* work here.

>  That tends to exclude words illegitimately by my understanding
>  of the goals Trask has stated for himself.  As we use "polymorphemic"
>  more and more loosely, we make the restricted monomorphemic
>  set included by a set of criteria less and less representative of
>  the language as a whole.

Certainly not.  And I am not using the term 'polymorphemic' "loosely"
at all.  For me, if we can show beyond reasonable doubt that a word
consists historically of two or more morphemes, then it is
polymorphemic.  What could be clearer?

>  Representativeness of the language as a whole
>  is of course not Trask's aim when he states his goal explicitly
>  including the criterion "monomorphemic".

Damn straight.  I am not interested, at this stage anyway, in
characterizing Pre-Basque "as a whole".  I'm only interested in
the morpheme-structure constraints applying to native and
monomorphemic lexical items.

>  But it is a relevant way to evaluate how he states his conclusions,
>  and it is my distinct impression that he very often states his goals
>  without that limitation, as if his results could then have a wider
>  validity, as if he had not restricted himself to monomorphemic words only.

Certainly not.  What on earth are you talking about, Lloyd?

>  Here is one, from Trask's message of 9th December, 1999,
>  quoted more fully elsewhere in this message today:

>  >for assembling a plausible list of Pre-Basque words

>  Notice that this did *not* specify
>  "a plausible list of monomorphemic Pre-Basque words".
>  It might be inferred from context, and he has stated
>  the monomorphemic criterion elsewhere, but as I said,
>  I think he tends to drop that limitation, and therefore to
>  end of in effect claiming a wider validity of his eventual
>  conclusions than is warranted by the severe limitations
>  he imposes on his data.

Again, certainly not.  True, I don't always bother to type out
the tediously long word 'monomorphemic' on every occasion.
But, in these discussions, that's what I usually mean, unless
I say otherwise.

>  12.  Reduplications are not polymorphemic unless the
>  unreduplicated form also occurs.
>  This is elementary.

It is not elementary, and it is probably not even true.

Basque has a class of m-reduplications.  Here are a few:

	<aiko-maiko> 'pretext'
	<zirimiri> 'drizzle'
	<zurrumurru> 'whisper, rumor, gossip'
	<txistmist> 'lightning'

In each case, the first element has no known existence outside the
reduplicated form.

Now, whatever one may think of these things, it is certainly
not obvious that they are "monomorphemic" -- end of story.

>  The term "reduplication" is rather often
>  applied to words that are primary, merely because they have
>  the same consonant or even syllable as their first and second.
>  It is often applied to nursery words and expressive words.
>  But "dad", "mom", "mommy", "daddy", etc. are not polymorphemic,
>  by a careful use of the criteria for morpheme division.

Eh?  What?

Lloyd, you don't think 'mommy' and 'daddy' are polymorphemic?
You don't think 'mommy' is <mom> + <-y>?  You don't think 'daddy'
is <dad> + <-y>?  You also don't think 'doggy' is <dog> + <-y>?

This is your idea of "careful" morpheme division?

>  Not even "mama", despite "ma" which seems synchronically
>  to be a shortening of "mama" not the reverse.

A different case, I'd say.

>       Trask has not explicitly said, so far as I know, that
>  reduplications are polymorphemic, but I suspect he has tended
>  to think of them that way.  I'll be happy if this is not the case.

I have my doubts as to whether reduplicated forms lacking source words
are capable of being segmented into morphemes in the ordinary way at all.
But I am certainly not going to declare them obviously monomorphemic.

However, this is unlikely to be an issue, since few if any of these
words will satisfy my other criteria anyway.  For example, <aiko-maiko>
is recorded only from 1909, and is hardly found outside the Bizkaian
dialect, and similar remarks apply to my other examples.

OK; that's all I've got time for now.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk