Genetic Descent

[David L. White]

--On Wednesday, May 23, 2001 11:48 am -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[from Thomason and Kaufman]

>         Well, I can, on p. 14:  "... any linguistic feature can be
> transferred from any language to any other language."  No restrictions are
> mentioned, and TK consistently fail to note that not everything that could
> conceivably occur actually does.

LT:  Ah, I see.  But this statement seems very different from the position you
imputed to T and K: "Anything goes."  This quote plainly does not say that
anything can happen at all, but only that there are no linguistic features
that cannot be borrowed.  Are you aware of any features that cannot be
borrowed?

DLW:  There are apparently no cases of things like 1) singular personal
endings being borrowed without plural personal endings being borrowed, or 2)
past morphemes being borrowed without future morphemes.  Whether TK meant
"anything goes" or not depends on how strong a reading we give to their
statement.  They certainly did not exclude it.  It should be noted that
whether finite verbal morphology gets borowed at all is a matter of
definition, because if it is never mixed, then it could (or could not) be
taken as an indicator of genetic descent.

[on Thomason's agreement that Anglo-Romani is a variety of English]

>         So even the mixed language crowd now admits that a language which
> has grammar from source A and (non-grammatical) lexicon from source B is a
> form of language A?  That is pretty much what I have been saying.

TK: No; this is not at all what Thomason is saying.

DLW:  I am afraid that, given the nature of Anglo-Romani, that is what she
is saying.

TK:  She is saying that Anglo-Romani is a form of English, and no more. She is
not conceding or asserting any general point at all.  And it seems quite clear
that, in other cases, such as that of Laha, she concludes that a language with
grammar from source A but lexis from source B is in fact a variety of B.

DLW:  Which just goes to show that she has no clear standard, and might as
well be tossing coins.

LT:  By the way, I am troubled by this seemingly dismissive expression "the
mixed-language crowd".  Are you suggesting that no mixed languages can
exist at all?

DLW:  Yes, if the evidence in TK is all there is to support the idea.  But
recall that I have always held open the possibility that mixed languages do
exist.  I just said I had not yet seen any.  The Greek/Arabic example cited
below seems to be one.  (This example is also mentioned in TK, but the facts
given were, a usual, too vague to enable a critical observer to determine
what was going on.)

LT:  If so, let me ask this: in what respect does Michif fall
short of being a mixed language?  It looks to me like a paradigm case of a
mixed language.  If we encountered, or imagined, a real mixed language,
what features would it have that Michif lacks?

DLW:  The finite verbal morphology of Michif is all Cree.  Therefore, by the
Davidian standard, it is Cree.  That also answers the scond question.

>> [on my example of Takia, which has retained Austronesian morphemes but
>> borrowed grammatical patterns wholesale from the Papuan language Waskia]

>>>         It is Austronesian, and not much of a puzzle, except for TK, who
>>> must try to figure out, without any very clear standard, whether it is
>>> 1) Austronesian, 2) Papuan, or 3) a new "mixed" language.

[LT]

>> First, why is it Austronesian?  By what criterion does the origin of
>> morphemes wholly outweight the origin of morphological patterns?  Isn't
>> this rather arbitrary?

>         Categories can be transferred rather easily.  We do not call Old
> Lithuanian a mixed langage between Baltic and Finnic, or a form of Finnic,
> merely because it created (if I am remembering correctly) an allative.
> All this means is that the language was evidently imposed on a large
> number of Finnic speakers at some point.  (That there is substantial
> Finnic or Uralic sub-stratal influence in Baltic and Slavic is asserted
> by TK, by the way, though I do not recall that they mention this
> partiuclar example.)  Mere borrowing of categories does not affect
> genetic descent.

LT:  But the Takia case is not similar to that of Lithuanian.  Takia has not
merely acquired a single new grammatical form by contact:

DLW:  Old Lithuanian did not borrow a single new grammatical form.  A
re-read of the relevant section of TK, which does in fact treat this matter,
is advised.  Otherwise, the case for declaring Lithuanian a mixed language
will turn out to be distressingly strong.

That is the problem (or one of them) with TK's approach: it (mixing
metaphors more than a little bit) opens the Pandora's Box to sliding down
the slippery slope of declaring all cases of significant external influence
cases of language mixture.  Things like the current "No Proto" movement,
which you quite right decry, are the inevitable result.  TK's idea seems to
be that it takes "a lot" of external influence before a language can be
declared mixed, but how much is "a lot".  There are, predictably enough,
intermediate cases.

It is ironic, by the way, that TK should wind up in effect declaring that
all cases if significant external influence are cases of language mixture,
for they quite rightly heap scorn upon earlier attempts to regard all cases
of significant external influence as "creolization".  Substituting "language
mixture" for "creolizaton" is not progress:  it just lands us in the same
conceptual swamp under a new (and newly trendy) name.

LT:  instead, it has
imported the *entirety* of the Waskia morphological system, leaving behind
no original Takia morphological patterns at all.  In a strong sense, it has
imported the entire verbal (and nominal) morphology of Waskia, even though
it has not borrowed any morphemes.  Does this not make a very big
difference?

DLW:  Not really, no.  For L2 language learners to model L2 on L1 as much as
they can get away with is commonplace.  For (hypothetical) example, English
high-school learners of German who used natural gender, made all clauses
verb-medial, ignored final devoicing, etc., would still have to considered
as speaking German, however badly, because what they said would be
comprehensible as German, not as English.  The severity of influence does
not matter, unless we enjoy slipping down slopes, not to mention tossing
coins.

LT:  Consider a similar but hypothetical case.  Suppose English-Navaho
bilinguals were to create a new speech variety, consisting wholly of
English morphemes arranged wholly in Navaho grammatical patterns, with
Navaho grammatical distinctions but not English ones, and the long Navaho
sequences of morphemes but no English sequences.  By your reasoning, the
result would be clearly a form of English and not a form of Navaho.  Is
this reasonable?

DLW:  Obviously it is to me, or I would not have proposed it.  Foreign
accents (in all apsects) can occasionally be severe enough to preclude
native understanding, but this does not affect genetic descent.  Indian
English, for example, is often difficult or impossible for non-Indians to
understand, but this does not render it not English.

>> Second, why is it incumbent upon T and K to classify Takia, or any
>> language, in such a rigorous way?  Why aren't they free to decide "none
>> of the above"?

>         What would "none of the above be"?  The three possibilities given
> above exhaust those that are reasonable.

LT:  The missing possibility is this: it makes little sense to ask the question
in the first place.  It may well be that rigid categorization is not
appropriate for (some) mixed languages.  The choice among asserting that Takia
"is" Austronesian, or "is" Papuan, or "is" neither may simply be inadequate to
capture linguistic reality.

DLW:  Possibly, but I see not reason to believe it in this case.  If the
finite verbal morphology (morphemes, not categories) is Takia, it is Takia.
That may well seem arbitrary, but it is not.  Verbs are more basic than
nouns, and what is more basic is more indicative of descent.  For English,
it is easy to demonstrate this by considering the following sentence:

 The tanks crossing the bridge was/were not ideal.

 With "were", this is a statement (improbable as it may be) about the tanks.
With "were", it is a statement about the proposition in general.  In the
more normal reading, with "was", it is easy to see that the verb agrees with
"crossing", not with "tanks", and that therefore "crossing" is the head of
the NP. (Not to mention being a gerund, not a participle.)  If it is the
head of the NP, it is reasonable to suppose that it is also in some sense
the head of the corresponding sentence "The tanks crossed the bridge".  We
may also note that things that might be held to apply to an entire
proposition, like negation, are typically attached to or associated with
verbs, and that though there is a type of language, polysynthetic, in which
the verb and its mandatorily associated elements form a complete sentence,
there is no corresponding type of language where the subject noun and its
mandatorily associated elements form a complete sentence.  Thus upon
examination it is not arbitrary to regard vebal morphology as more basic
than nominal morphology.

 Consider the alternative:  if it is true that mixed nominal morphologies
occur but mixed (finite) verbal morphologies do not, this should be
explained, but how?  The Chomskyite "solution", no doubt, would be simply to
declare this an arbitrary "aspect of Universal Grammar", presumably coded
for by one of those many "grammar genes", the possession of which exalts us
above lower creation (thus repairing to some limited extent the damage done
to our collective self-esteem by Darwin).  In other words, declare victory
and go home.   Does this really get us anywhere?  I don't think so.

LT:  We've just had the census here in Britain.  The census form tries
desperately to classify every individual into one ethnic group or another.
But not everybody fits very well.  What ethnic group does Tiger Woods
belong to?  In fact, I understand, Mr. Woods, who clearly has a sense of
humor, has invented a new ethnic group for himself -- an ethnic group of
which he is possibly the only member.

Why should languages be simpler than people?

DLW:  Mis-formed question, does not compute.  Linguistic descent is only
vaguely and very abstractly relatable to genetic descent.

> And since when is the equivalent
> of a mental coin toss to be preferred to a clear standard?

LT:  No one is proposing a coin toss.

DLW:  In the absence of a clear standard, and in the presence of
intermediate cases, they might as well be.

LT:  Anyway, what is the value of having "a
clear standard" if that standard forces us into conclusions which fly in
the face of the facts?

DLW: Facts like what?

LT:  You have picked verbal morphology as your standard,
and now you have further selected the etymology of morphemes in preference
to the origin of morphological patterns.  All those seems wholly arbitrary
to me, and in no way to be preferred to any other arbitrary criterion.

DLW:  Reasons that neither is arbitrary have been given above.

But now consider another case discussed by Thomason: Kormakiti Arabic.
This variety is the mother tongue of the people in one village in Cyprus.
It is descended from the Arabic brought to the island in the twelfth
century.  It consists of a complex mixture of Arabic and Cypriot Greek.
The lexicon, based on a sample, is about 62% Arabic and 38% Greek, with the
Greek component including many items of basic vocabulary.  Arabic words are
built from Arabic phonemes and take Arabic morphology and phrasal syntax.
Greek words are built from Greek phonemes and take Greek morphology and
phrasal syntax.  Phrases are combined into sentences by rules which are a
mixture of Arabic and Greek.

So, in this language, Arabic verbs take Arabic verbal morphology, while
Greek verbs take Greek verbal morphology.  What does your "clear standard"
say about this case?

DLW:  That it is, if the facts are in order, a true mixed language.  But
note that even here the mixed verbal morphology is mixed according to the
origin of the verb, and does not involve a true across the board mixture. We
see nothing like Arabic third person endings and Greek 1st and 2nd person
endings.
>> Therefore, using David White's criterion, Laha has changed from being a
>> language entirely distinct from Malay to a mere variety of Malay.

>         If the fantasy scenario envisaged above is to be taken as a fact.

LT:  Who says this is "a fantasy scenario"?  The investigator has looked
carefully at Laha and concluded that it arose by massive replacement of the
original Laha grammar by Malay grammar.  Why does this unremarkable
conclusion bother you so much?

DLW:  Are the posited intermeidate stages attested?  If not, the term
"fantasy scenario", though a little harsh, is not unjustified.  More
critically, the whole case is in fact circular, for what Thomason asserts is
that if her view of how languages mix, apparently shared by Collins, is
correct, then her view of how languages mix is correct.  No kidding.

>> So, the possible conclusions:

>> (1) The speech variety called 'Laha' has indeed changed from being one
>> language to being another.

>> (2) Laha has always been, and remains, a language distinct from Malay,
>> even though it has imported almost the entirety of Malay grammar.

>         It is a language distinct from Malay but descended from Malay.
> Sudden re-lexification, as probably happened in both Anglo-Romani and
> Mednyj Aleut, can create this.

How do you know there was "sudden relexification"?  Isn't this just another
"fantasy scenario"?

For Laha, yes, but it is no longer disputed for Anglo-Romani.  Since
Thomason has changed her mind about this case, which in TK was presented as
if proof positive of language mixture, I suppose that the linguistic
equivalent of a doctrine of papal infallibilility is not to be applied.

> Such developments are unusual and should
> be recognized as distinct from the more normal sort of genetic descent,
> where mutual intelligibility across generations always exists, but, as
> Thomason in effect admits in her interpretation of Anglo-Romani, do not
> constitute non-genetic descent.

LT:  Now you are proposing that a language can arise so suddenly that there
is no mutual comprehensibility across generations?  This strikes you as more
plausible than gradual regrammaticalization?  Whew.

DLW:  What happened in Anglo-Romani?  Abrupt re-lexification created a form
of English that was not mutually comprehensible with other English.  More
technically, within the small world of the English Gypsies mutual
comprehensibility across generations did exist (lets not exaggerate), but
was made possible only by bilingualism.  I am not proposing that a situation
existed where parents and children could not understand each other.  With
regard to "gradual regrammaticalization", I have stressed above that the
presumed intermediate stages of mixed finite verbal morphology do not exist.

>> (3) Collins and Thomason are completely wrong in their interpretation,
>> and Laha must have had some other origin.

>         Probably.  If piecemeal borrowing of parts verbal morhpology,
>         which would seem to be possible under Thomason's scenario, is
> possible, we should (hopefully) be able to find some examples of the
> process caught in the act, resulting in mixed verbal morphology.  Unless
> Laha is one (and so far I have seen no evidence to show that it is), I
> can still assert that there are not any.

LT:  All right -- Kormakiti Arabic, then.

DLW:  This has been treated above.  Though it is an example of a mixed
language, it is not an example of mixed borrowing of finite verbal
morphology.

>         The scenario envisaged by Collins and Thomason is just that:  a
> scenario envisaged.  It is not a fact.  I would need to know what the "few
> bits of Laha grammar" are.  If they involve finite verbal morphology, then
> what I have been saying is wrong.  (Though pointing out that TK's examples
> did not in fact show this would still hardly be an outrage.)  If they
> involve nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,
> or (worse yet) mere categories, then what I have been saying is not wrong.

LT:  I regret that I can't answer this, since Thomason doesn't provide that
much detail, and since our library doesn't take the journal in which Collins's
article appears.  However, I'm intrigued about this case now, so I'll see if I
can find out.  Unfortunately, I am now buried in the annual ordeal of exam
marking, so I won't be doing anything quickly.

DLW:  Obviously we need more real facts here.

> Malay, by the way, is by typology if not history a semi-creole, so I would
> also like to know what the parts of "Malay grammar" that have supposedly
> been imported supposedy are.

LT:  To be honest, I can't see why this is relevant.

DLW:  Well I can.  If Malay has no finite verbal morphology, then looking
for signs of it in Laha is obviously pointless, and Laha cannot possibly
provide counter-evidence to my main assertion, which has always been not
that mixed languages do not exist, but that mixed borrowing of finite verbal
morphologies does not occur.  (And that this can be used to trace genetic
descent.)

To back up a bit, my main point is that the genetic descent of any given
language is to be traced through the frame morphemes.  This is, after all,
how we demonrate to the naïve natives that Englsh is not a Romance language:
the Romance words are always in a Germanic frame.  In situations where
external influences are more severe, the frame can be accordingly reduced.
The bare minimum that it is reduced to is finite verbal morphology, for this
is what is most basic to the sentence frame.  For example, if we say
"Revision necessitates significant re-conceptualization", the only thing
Germanic in there is the third person singular /-s/.  Not a coincidence.

Dr. David L. White