Genetic Descent

[David L. White]

        I am, like the Enchanter Tim, a busy man, but I will oblige.

> --On Monday, May 14, 2001 8:30 am -0500 "David L. White"
> <dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

> [LT on Thomason and Kaufman]

>>> Hmmm.  May I know where in their book T and K assert that "anything
>>> goes"? My reading of the book reveals only the more cautious claim that
>>> we cannot know what happens in language contact until we look.

>>         Somewhere in the intro.  Hasty perusal has not revealed where.

> I'm afraid I still can't find any such statement.

        Well, I can, on p. 14:  "... any linguistic feature can be
transferred from any language to any other language."  No restrictions are
mentioned, and TK consistently fail to note that not everything that could
conceivably occur actually does.

> [A small intervention. I am grateful to Hans-Werner Hatting for his
> information on Anglo-Romani, which concludes by observing that Anglo-Romani
> is indeed a variety of English.  As it happens, this conclusion is endorsed
> by Sarah Thomason in her new book Language Contact: An Introduction,

        So even the mixed language crowd now admits that a language which
has grammar from source A and (non-grammatical) lexicon from source B is a
form of language A?  That is pretty much what I have been saying.

> [on my example of Takia, which has retained Austronesian morphemes but
> borrowed grammatical patterns wholesale from the Papuan language Waskia]

>>         It is Austronesian, and not much of a puzzle, except for TK, who
>> must try to figure out, without any very clear standard, whether it is 1)
>> Austronesian, 2) Papuan, or 3) a new "mixed" language.

> First, why is it Austronesian?  By what criterion does the origin of
> morphemes wholly outweight the origin of morphological patterns?  Isn't
> this rather arbitrary?

        Categories can be transferred rather easily.  We do not call Old
Lithuanian a mixed langage between Baltic and Finnic, or a form of Finnic,
merely because it created (if I am remembering correctly) an allative.  All
this means is that the language was evidently imposed on a large number of
Finnic speakers at some point.  (That there is substantial Finnic or Uralic
sub-stratal influence in Baltic and Slavic is asserted by TK, by the way,
though I do not recall that they mention this partiuclar example.)  Mere
borrowing of categories does not affect genetic descent.

> Second, why is it incumbent upon T and K to classify Takia, or any
> language, in such a rigorous way?  Why aren't they free to decide "none of
> the above"?

        What would "none of the above be"?  The three possibilities given
above exhaust those that are reasonable.  And since when is the equivalent
of a mental coin toss to be preferred to a clear standard?  Since borrowing
of categories, without borrowing of specific morphmes to express these, is
not relevant, the case in question is practically indentical to the case of
Anglo-Romani.

> Anyway, I now want to talk about another language, discussed by Thomason in
> her new book.  That language is Laha, spoken in the Moluccas, where the
> locally dominant language is a variety of Malay, which is distantly, but
> not closely, related to Laha.  The principal investigator here is James T.
> Collins:

>   J. T. Collins. 1980. 'Laha, a language of the central Moluccas'. Indonesia
>   Circle 23: 3-19.

> The lexicon of Laha is largely native, though partly borrowed from Malay.
> But the grammar is almost 100% Malay, with only a few fragments of native
> Laha grammar surviving.  So, my question for David White is this: is Laha a
> variety of Malay, or not?  Since the grammar is almost entirely Malay, it
> would seem that he must answer "Yes; it's Malay."

> But now consider the following.  The Laha are reportedly regarded by
> themselves, and by others, as a distinct ethnic group with a distinct
> language.  All Laha-speakers are also fluent in Malay, but other speakers
> of Malay do not speak Laha.

        The Romani are regarded by themselves, and by others, as a distinct
ethnic group with (where it survives) a distinct language.  All Anglo-Romani
speakers are fluent in English, but other speakers of English do not speak
Anglo-Romani.  Why come to a different conclusion in the two cases, unless
coin tossing is the latest fashion?

> The conclusion of Collins, and of Thomason, is
> that Laha has developed as follows: it started out as a language entirely
> distinct from Malay, but, under enormous pressure from Malay, it has
> gradually, in piecemeal fashion, absorbed more and more Malay grammar,
> until today the grammar is almost entirely Malay, and only a few bits of
> Laha grammar survive -- for the moment, since it is possible that these few
> fragments will also give way to Malay grammar in the future.

> Therefore, using David White's criterion, Laha has changed from being a
> language entirely distinct from Malay to a mere variety of Malay.

        If the fantasy scenario envisaged above is to be taken as a fact.

> Is this
> reasonable?  Earlier, David rejected a similar scenario for another
> language as impossible in principle.

> So, the possible conclusions:

> (1) The speech variety called 'Laha' has indeed changed from being one
> language to being another.

> (2) Laha has always been, and remains, a language distinct from Malay, even
> though it has imported almost the entirety of Malay grammar.

        It is a language distinct from Malay but descended from Malay.
Sudden re-lexification, as probably happened in both Anglo-Romani and Mednyj
Aleut, can create this.  Such developments are unusual and should be
recognized as distinct from the more normal sort of genetic descent, where
mutual intelligibility across generations always exists, but, as Thomason in
effect admits in her interpretation of Anglo-Romani, do not constitute
non-genetic descent.

> (3) Collins and Thomason are completely wrong in their interpretation, and
> Laha must have had some other origin.

        Probably.  If piecemeal borrowing of parts verbal morhpology, which
woyld seem to be possible under Thomason's scenario, is possible, we should
(hopefully) be able to find some examples of the process caught in the act,
resulting in mixed verbal morphology.  Unless Laha is one (and so far I have
seen no evidence to show that it is), I can still assert that there are not
any.

> Thomason expressly endorses position (2), as does Collins.  Native speakers
> of Laha also take position (2).  Apparently Moluccans who don't speak Laha
> also accept position (2).

        What the naive natives think has nothing to do with anything.  It is
fairly easy to find naive natives in the English-speaking world who think
that English is a Romance language.

> David, what's your view?

        The scenario envisaged by Collins and Thomason is just that:  a
scenario envisaged.  It is not a fact.  I would need to know what the "few
bits of Laha grammar" are.  If they involve finite verbal morphology, then
what I have been saying is wrong.  (Though pointing out that TK's examples
did not in fact show this would still hardly be an outrage.)  If they
involve nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology, or
(worse yet) mere categories, then what I have been saying is not wrong.
Malay, by the way, is by typology if not history a semi-creole, so I would
also like to know what the parts of "Malay grammar" that have supposedly
been imported supposedy are.  But, operating in the semi-dark (Thomason is
routinely vague about the facts of her example languages), I see no reason
to think that the situation is not comparable to Anglo-Romani or Mednyj
Aleut, which are surely not mutually comprehensible with English or Russian
respectively (or for that matter Romani or Aleut), but which nonetheless can
be identified (even by Thomason, in the first case) as forms of "abruptly
re-lexified" English or Russian.

Dr. David L. White