Rate of Change

[Larry Trask]

--On Friday, June 1, 2001 11:20 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[replying to Joat Simeon, on similarities among early IE languages]

> 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.

I'm sorry, but I can't agree.  Resemblances, close or otherwise, have
nothing at all to do with comparative linguistics.  The evidence for
genetic relationship consists wholly of systematic correspondences, and
resemblances are irrelevant.  Of course, the presence of resemblances aids
human beings in spotting possible genetic links.  And, in practice,
languages seldom undergo such dramatic phonological changes as to
obliterate resemblances while preserving correspondences.  But, if we did
find a case of this, we could cope with it.

And some of the Australian languages discussed below come tolerably close
to this state of affairs.  Certain of the Pama-Nyungan languages have
undergone such dramatic phonological changes that words in them look very
little like their cognates in related languages that have not undergone
such dramatic changes.  Australianists were at first baffled by the
position of these strange-looking languages, but then Barry Blake -- in an
undergraduate dissertation -- spotted the clear patterns underlying the
superficial absence of resemblances, and the problem languages then proved
to be easily assignable to Pama-Nyungan.  The main casulaty here was our
ideas about possible phonological changes, which took something of a
hammering.

> 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))

I think there may be a misunderstanding here, resulting from Koch's
unfortunate choice of words.  Koch is not, I'm pretty sure, claiming that
certain languages have changed dramatically while other and closely related
languages have not changed *at all*.  Rather, he is only reporting that
some related languages have failed to undergo the rather dramatic changes
observed in their relatives, and that certain *individual* words may remain
unchanged in one language while undergoing dramatic changes of form in a
close relative.

This is hardly new.  Recall Merritt Ruhlen's favorite example: Romanian
<nepot> 'nephew', virtually unchanged from PIE *<nepo:t-> 'nephew'.  But
this is probably the only Romanian word which has remained unchanged since
PIE.

> 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.

I am puzzled by this.  I can find no such statement in Koch's article.
Moreover, Evans and Jones, in an article in the same volume, conclude that
Proto-Pama-Nyungan cannot be assigned a time depth greater than 5000 BP,
and so a figure of 3000 years for the time depth of a rather low-level
branch of the family does not look plausible.

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

Er -- what?  Phonology can't change radically?  But Koch's very point,
cited above, is that certain Australian languages have undergone such
dramatic changes in phonology that their words no longer even appear to
resemble their cognates in closely related languages.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)