Rate of Change

Rich Alderson alderson+mail at panix.com
Mon Jun 4 18:30:57 UTC 2001


On 1 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote:

> 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?

No, it's equivalent to finding forms in Old Lithuanian (c. 1500 CE) which
correspond to Vedic Sanskrit (c. 1200 BCE)--which, of course, no linguist will
argue we do not.

You have taken a _pars pro toto_ approach here:  Koch says "forms" and you have
understood him to mean "entire languages".  I sincerely doubt that linguists
studying the Australian languages have found what you want them to have found;
if they have, I would first have to suspect them of a pre-Schleicher style of
reconstruction methodology, rather than to throw out what we *do* know about
the Indo-European languages.

[ here quoting from "a message dated 6/1/2001 1:34:38 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com" ]

> <<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.

Meanings do not change as fluidly as you want them to:  You wish to have the
word which means "red deer" in all daughter languages, even those spoken where
the fallow deer is present, to have once meant "fallow deer", because the red
deer is not present in Anatolia.  (Mr. Stirling has pointed out that words for
horse, ox, yoke, etc., have not undergone any such radical change.)  Ockham
calls for a simpler explanation, such as "The fallow deer was not present in
the IE homeland".

								Rich Alderson



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