Rate of Change

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/4/01 4:48:13 AM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> 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.

-- actually, in their earliest attested forms, the languages are
transparently quite closely related, both lexically and in terms of syntax;
it's much more easily apparent than, say, for instance, the relationship
between modern English and German.

Try doing a list of basic vocabulary (kinship terms or numerals, for
instance).  Or sentences having to do with elementary activities; "Ten horses
of my father are pregnant", or "My mother gives me cows to plow the field",
"I eat porridge with my teeth", etc.

And Italic and Greek aren't even particularly close _as early IE languages or
language-families go_.

> You have never given any rational measure of rate of language change.

-- What you are asserting is that for 5000 years, _all_ areas of changed more
slowly than _any_ IE language has in the time we can observe them directly.

Ie., you are claiming that _all_ IE languages before a certain date changed
more slowly than the _most_ conservative IE language of which we know,
Lithuanian.

This is roughly equivalent, to use an analogy, to claiming that the freezing
point of water was different back then and then challenging people to prove
that it wasn't.

You can't just say "well, because linguistic change is uneven over time, maybe
the languages all changed very very slowly back then" and expect to be taken
seriously.

>I don't believe there can be any real certainty

-- you're confusing certainty in terms of knowing exactly what happened in
_each_ IE language and comparative ranges using _all_ the IE languages.  The
fact that one languge is at the extreme end of a curve says nothing as to the
distribution of the others on the curve, nor to the implications of that.

We can't say "lexical items are lost at a rate of X per millenium"; we can
say "change occurs roughly with the range of X", and then compare this to a
postulate or hypothesis and determine whether or not it correponds to the
general range of the possible.

As opposed to blithely assuming that you can arbitrarily assume rates of
change in prehistory completely outside the _range_ of rates of change
observed since.  1000 years is 1000 years, whether it occurs from 6000 to
5000 BCE, or from 0 to 1000 CE.

> 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.

-- not to the degree you're doing, which is unreasonable.

> You normally compare "cognates" and an isolated (typically religious) phrase
> to show how "close" the IE languages are.

-- false statement.  Actually I usually prefer items related to family
relationships and basic technologies.

Incidentally, by putting "cognates" in quotation marks, are you trying to
imply that there is something questionable about the concept of cognates?

This would be exceedingly strange.