Rate of Change: A Closer Look

[Larry Trask]

--On Tuesday, June 12, 2001 1:03 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> But of course if Prof Trask's use of "Uniformitarian Principle" was
> metaphorical or casual, and not meant to imply any real level of
> scientific certainty, then I can have no objection to it.

No.  My use of the term was not metaphorical or casual.  I intended to use
it in the same sense that it has in any other discipline.  In particular, I
meant this:

In the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, we must assume that the
following is true:

Languages and speakers in the remote past did not behave differently from
the way languages and speakers have behaved in the historical period.

To reject this position is to make historical linguistics impossible.  If
the Uniformitarian Principle is rejected, then there is no obstacle to any
far-fetched hypothesis about the remote past that anybody might want to put
forward.  Without the UP, we could claim that PIE spread across Europe and
then remained everywhere unchanged for 5000 years, or we could claim that
Proto-Germanic was an artificial language invented by a Polish oculist, or
we could claim that every IE language is the direct result of PIE in the
inept mouths of substrate-speakers.  Without the UP, historical linguistics
would be no more orderly or principled than a Michael Moorcock fantasy
novel.  We need it.

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)