Rate of Change: A Closer Look

JoatSimeon at aol.com JoatSimeon at aol.com
Thu Jun 14 07:50:20 UTC 2001


In a message dated 6/13/01 11:03:54 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> I must be firm in pointing out that "rate of change," as Prof Trask is using
> it, has little scientific validity - at least without confirmable numbers
> that anybody can double-check.

-- anybody can acquire the necessary knowledge base to know what Professor
Trask is talking about.

You can even reinvent it yourself.

It will take about twenty years, and you'll have to learn a round two dozen
languages or so (a hundred would be better),  and you'll be redoing stuff
that thousands of others have done before you, but you can do it, if you want
to.  Just as anyone can drop weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa and time
weather the heavy ones hit before the light ones.


> I helped prepare a presentation before a board of physicists at the National
> Science Foundation a few years back.

-- linguistics is a descriptive-historical field, not an experimental one.
It's much more like paleontology than physics; digging up fossils, not
working with subatomic particles.   We describe what happened in the past,
not things which can be repeated at will in a laboratory.  This limits the
degree of quantification which can be done.

> If they expect this kind of specificity about "rates of change" in quantum
> mechanics and animal behavior experiments, they can expect it in historical
> linguistics.

-- no, they can't.  This is not an experimental science.  The field of data
available is of an entirely different order.

Give us a time machine and a tape recorder, and we can obtain results similar
to those of physics.

As it is, we're more like a technical kind of historian or archaeologist,
ferreting through scraps of waste-paper and bits of bone and doing
connect-the-dots.

It's been demonstrated repeatedly that the comparative method of historical
linguistics works; it has predictive power.  Many times we have found new
evidence anticipated beforehand using this method.

But it isn't physics.

> If we are talking about sound changes that separate two daughter languages,
> we should be able to show that those specific sound changes took a certain
> number of years, days, hours and with historical evidence.

-- no, the best we can do is to say that the observable languages indicate that
rates of change vary between a low of X, a high of Y, and average around Z.

When you talk about changes to a language, you're talking about thousands of
discrete events, most of them irreversably lost to entropy.

Quantification is necessarily fuzzy in this field.  It doesn't mean that
there are no boundaries and that anything goes; it just means that the
evidence is, by its nature, imprecise.

We have ranges of possible rates, not _a_ rate.  We can say, "this is
probable, that is improbable, the other thing is for all practical purposes
impossible because it would require a concentration of highly unlikely
chances".

> 2.  An example.  In biology, we talk about the rate of mutation.

-- not applicable.

> So what does body hair tell us about "rate of change?" 

-- not an applicable analogy, even remotely.

_Everything_ in a language eventually changes.  Eventually, it changes so
much that relationships are no longer detectable.

By way of contrast, even a bacterium and a human being share a fair number of
genes are are demonstrably related.

Presumably Basque and English have a common linguistic ancestor _somewhere_;
it's just so far back in time that all detectable links have vanished in the
steady "churning".

Remember, that the _form_ of a word bears no _necessary_ relationship at all
to its semantic _function_.  It's an arbitrary symbol.  Thus a language can
change _totally_, and still fulfill all the same functions it did before.
This is not true with genes.

Degree of _overall_ similarity is a good rough-cut indicator of how long
languages have been separated, and is in fact analagous to the
comparative-DNA tests used to determine the time-depth of the evolutionary
relationship between related animal species.

You can use this method with a high degree of accuracy.  Take a quick look
at, say, two Slavic languages, or two Romance ones, and then a Slavic and
Germanic or Germanic and Romance, or a Slavic, Romance and Germanic.

You will get precisely accurate _relative_ chronology from such a cursory
investigation; without any historical data besides the languages themselves,
you can immediately tell that the common ancestor of Romance is not far away
in time, that Common Slavic is even closer, that the common ancestor of any
Germanic language and any Slavic or Romance one is much further away in time
than that.

> 4. As I said, this is not meant to be disrespectful of linguistic
> expertise.

-- well, it certainly sounds that way.  If you want to talk about
linguistics, you have to come at it from the inside.  You're attempting to
apply inappropriate methodologies, and to do so without the necessary
knowledge base.



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