Rate of Change

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/1/2001 1:34:38 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<< -- well, this is a little odd, considering your argument is that a language
spoken in 7000 BCE and spread over three-quarters of Eurasia was still so
undifferentiated in and around 1000 BCE that whole sentences from Celtic,
Italic, Greek, Slavic, Baltic and Indo-Iranian were still mutually
comprehensible.>>

First of all, I still know enough Greek and Latin and heard enough Greek and
Latin a long time ago to know that the two languages were 99.9%
unintelligible to one another.  Except of course for what they overtly
borrowed from one another.

Your "whole sentences" logically prove nothing when those sentences are few
indeed compared to whole languages.  If there were no close resemblances at
all, no one would dare claim that these languages were even related in
anyway.  There has to be some, but there are very very few.

If you compare the actual corpus of what we have in Latin and Greek from
before the current era - and that is hundreds of thousands of sentences -
actual matching sentences are pathetically minuscule, even if you include
clearly borrowed phrases.

<<so undifferentiated in and around 1000 BCE that whole sentences from Celtic,
Italic, Greek, Slavic, Baltic and Indo-Iranian were still mutually
comprehensible.>>

This is the kind of statement that would embarrass any serious scientist.
You have no evidence of what Italic or Slavic or Baltic was like in 1000BC.
To go on and say they were mutually comprehensible is unprovable and
unfortunately typical of the things you write.

<<After 5000 years and 7000 miles of separation.>>

We've been through this before.  You have never given any rational measure of
rate of language change.  I don't believe there can be any real certainty
about the rate of change among the IE languages.  I respect the opinions of
real linguists on this list regarding their insights about such things, but I
must note that there has been differences in the past between qualified
opinions.

An objective observer would have to conclude this is something not yet
solvable scientifically.  And it is something about which reasonable persons
may differ.  Reasonably.

You normally compare "cognates" and an isolated (typically religious) phrase
to show how "close" the IE languages are.  I've been reading up on the work
of the Australian linguists and there was something relevant to all this
mentioned by Harold Koch at ANU.  He wrote the following regarding work where
the comparative method had been used to reconstruct languages in various
parts of Australia [Western Australia (O'Grady 1966, Austin 1981), Cape York
Peninsula (Hale 1964, Sutton 1976, Black 1980, Dixon 1991), New England
(Crowley 1976 and This volume), and Central Australia (Koch )]:

----"In many of these cases, certain languages had undergone radical sound
changes while close relatives remained unchanged. Thus the proto-forms for a
subgroup often turn out to be identical to forms surviving intact in other
languages of the subgroup." (from "Comparative linguistics and Australian
prehistory" in "Understanding ancient Australia: perspectives from
archaeology and linguistics." Melbourne: Oxford University Press (1997))

To my surprise, I was told the time of separation between some of those
related language subgroups were estimated as being as much as 3000 years or
more.

This would be equivalent (given a final dispersal date of 4500BC for PIE or
*PIE) to a language containing duplicate of PIE forms co-existing along side
of, say, Mycenaean in 1500BC.  How is it possible to be confident about
estimating rate of change considering such information?

<<Or are words uncannily stable when it suits your argument, but change like
bandits when that's convenient? >>

No.  And I know you know what I'm talking about.

Meanings can change radically.  Phonology seems to be a very different story.

Regards,
Steve Long