Rate of Change

[Herb Stahlke]

There's an almost trivial sense in which Steve has to be right, but I think
he's taken his case beyond that point.  Having worked on Niger-Congo languages,
especially those of the eastern half of West Africa, I've been faced with the
question of where to begin.  The comparative method hasn't been applied to a
lot of these languages, although that is changing.  So how do you decide what
to compare.  At least heuristically, you want to give yourself the best chance
you can of being able to get somewhere with the comparative method, and so
Africanists have frequently used methods not based on regular sound
correspondences to find a place to start.  As Bill Welmers used to say, "You
get to the point where you know that these language can't be unrelated."  Of
course, he would also add that you then start using the comparative method to
work out the relationships and make sure they're there.  We're dealing with
different orders of hypothesis.  Using some careful lexicostatistics gives you
a reasonable hypothesis, but then applying the comparative method takes you to
a much stronger one.  As I said, this is an almost trivially obvious point.

Herb Stahlke

>>> larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk 06/08/01 05:06AM >>>
--On Wednesday, June 6, 2001 1:06 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> To say that I can't back up to that starting point, where everything is at
> best similarities and resemblances -- before any judgments about genetic
> relationships would have been made -- is to queer the game.  It makes the
> comparative method immune to critical analysis.

> I suspect part of the problem begins back when no analysis has yet been
> done and there can be nothing but resemblances between two languages.
> That's where the presumption starts that there WILL be only one genetic
> relationship and therefore there should be only one original systematic
> correspondence between the languages.  If you start by presuming that all
> "genetic" relationships can only relate to one parent, than all your
> results will tend towards that presumption, whether true or not.

Not so, I'm afraid.  The comparative method cannot possibly reconstruct an
ancestor that never existed -- not if it's competently applied, anyway.
Incompetent attempts are prominent in the fringe literature, of course, but
these are simply laughed away by professional linguists.