Uniformitarian Principle

[Douglas G Kilday]

>[Phil Jennings]

>> Gravity is a constant, but it is contingent on mass and distance.

[Vidhyanath Rao]

>The first part is actually an consequence of the UP. People (Dirac?)
>have proposed theories in which the gravitational constant (and more
>recently, the cosmological constant) changes over time. It is just that
>such theories do not solve any pressing problem.

[DGK]

If memory serves, Dirac's proposal of G decreasing with the age of the
universe was part of his Large Number Hypothesis (LNH), which to him was one
possible solution to the "pressing problem" of ratios among various physical
quantities (e.g. strength of gravity vs. electromagnetism). Theoretical
physicists are seldom concerned with "practical" matters (deadlier weapons,
better surveillance, etc.) though they may be called upon to contribute,
like Archimedes or Oppenheimer. The real difficulty with theories of
variable G is measuring its ancient values. One early proposal involved
dinosaur tracks, but as there was no accurate way to determine the mass of
the dinosaurs, no firm conclusions could be drawn. In my own ambitious
youth, I considered careful measurements of oscillatory ripple-marks in
ancient sandstones, of which I had some Middle Proterozoic specimens (dated
to 1.6-1.7 billion years old). "You need to figure out how to put a flume
onto a centrifuge", said a professor. The problem of determining how
ripple-marks would vary under a slight (~1%) change in G exceeded my
ability, and there are other undetermined factors with ancient ripples
(depth of water, amount of suspended material, degree of adhesion of
aggregate) which would swamp the effect of G. Hence the answer to "Is G a
constant?" is a hearty "Non liquet".

What has this to do with linguistics? The way I was schooled, the
Uniformitarian Principle in geology states simply "The present is the key to
the past". This does _not_ exclude variable G, catastrophic flooding,
extinctions caused by asteroids, etc. It means that we do not posit physical
forces in the past which do not operate today. Several list-members have
invoked a linguistic UP, usually without any clear statement, and not always
consistently. Larry Trask has been the staunchest advocate of the UP on this
list, yet he has attacked the principle of net lexical stasis, apparently
believing that the inventory of contentives in a language grows continuously
(as claimed by Robert Whiting). Now, if the UP and LT's view of lexical
growth are both correct, the alleged present inflationary situation has
_always_ characterized languages, all of which are therefore, in principle,
traceable back to a single word. (So was that word /N/, /?@N/, /tik/, or
/bekos/? Never mind ... rhetorical question.)

For the purposes of this list, I would suggest a statement of the UP roughly
as follows: "The history and prehistory of languages used by anatomically
modern humans involve no fundamental processes not occurring today." This
leaves rather vague the matter of what "fundamental processes" are, like
"physical forces" in geology. Specific examples of results might well be
unique, so the UP is _not_ equivalent to the rather crude synchronic
typological arguments often encountered in reconstructive debates. It deals
with dynamics, not statics. An example to which the UP might be applied is
the proposal that pre-PIE had ergative-absolutive case-marking. If the
proponents can give clear examples of E-A languages turning into
nominative-accusative languages during historical times, and in the process
today, then the proposal is credible. If OTOH the record, and current
behavior, show that E-A case-marking tends to develop out of N-A structure,
then the ergative pre-PIE hypothesis is in trouble.