From hubeyh at montclair.edu Wed Mar 3 02:17:25 1999 From: hubeyh at montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 21:17:25 -0500 Subject: ProtoWorld Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Abstract Research into Prehistoric Ethnogenetic Processes in East Europe by Valentyn Stetsiuk (Book I) The first book of the whole work is comprised of two parts. The research methods are described in the first part, and the results are given in the second part. The research is based upon a historic-comparative analysis of vocabulary of diverse language families. The final results are correlated with archeological facts. The research was carried out by the application of a method which was worked out by the author and was called the „grafic-analytical method". The main principles are briefly explained by the example of the Slavic languages in the article (1). The method evoked some interest among linguists but generated diverse opinions. Specifically a critical article was published in the Moscow leading linguistic newspaper (2). An expanded description of the method and concept postulates on which it is based are given in the offered work. An essence of the method consists of the construction of a grafical model (scheme) of near-related languages interrelation. This model is constructed on a postulate of the reverse-proportional dependence („oberneno proporcijna zalezhnist'", in Ukrainian) between quantity of common words in pairs of related languages and that distance on which areas of formation this languages from common ancestor language were found in that previous time. A count of the quantity of common words in language pairs has been done on the basis of an „isogloss" table-dictionary which had been created for each researched language family. The table-dictionaries follow this structure: words of the same language are placed in vertical columns; the words which relate to the same isogloss are found in horizontal lines. It is important to take into consideration that not all isoglosses have a corresponding match in all languages. Many isoglosses have the appropriate words in some languages only. If all the languages have the appropriate words for the same isogloss (all square are full), then this isogloss belongs to a common lexical stock of the language family. The common lexical stock has not been taken into the calculation, because it concerns a chronology mainly to the time of existence of the common ancestor language from which these languages were developed. All words belonging to the same isogloss, approximate each other in content (substance) and have phonetic accordance in sound composition. The construction of the model of the language words quantity in language pairs. The model looks as a graf, which has as so much knots how much of languages we have. Indeed each knot is an area of points, each of them is an end of a segment of which length is corresponded to a quantity of common words in language pairs. These segmets connect pairs of all areas. The construction of the model goes in some approximation. When the model construction is ready, one looks for a place on a geographical map for it. The form of the model could not be broken therefore it is not easy to find the suitable place on the map. One has to find a such area configuration, which corresponds to the our model. Each area of language formation must have distinct borders, which hinder linguistic contacts between inhabitants of these areas and so help to form separate laguages from the previos common language. The borders of the areas can be rivers, mountchains, swamps. Near 70 languages from 7 language families or language groups (Nostratic, Indo-european, Finn-Ugric, Turkish, Iranian, Germanic and Slavic) were researched by the author with this method. The table-dictionaries for each language family or language group were created on ground of etymological and two-language dictioraries. One-two thousands of words were taken from each language for these tables, the quantity of common words in language pairs has been calculated upon them and 7 language-models have been created later. How it shows as the result of the researches, all the researched languages form a family tree with some levels of sinchronical branching. At least 6 Nostratic languages developed from the previos common language on the lowest level (old Indo-european, Altaic, Uralic, Semitic-Chamitic, Kartvelic and Dravidic). The place for their formation has been founded in Fore Asia (6 areas near the lakes Van, Sevan and Urmija as well near the mountains Ararat, Aragac, the rivers Kura, Araks, Choroh, Great Zab, Little Zab etc). The borders between the areas are mountchains. This natural borders separate six states now - Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Irak and Iran. Some other facts from researches of diverse scientifists to support of this chois have been added in the work. Three groups of the old Nostratic tribes migrated to East Europe later (7 thou. years ago). Their late languages as a part of the three previos great language families have been researched on the level two. The grafical models of them help us to find the areas of the settlement of the Indoeuropean, Finnic-Ugric und Turkish peoples in the East Europe between Volga-, Dniepr- and Visla-river. The modern Indoeuropean; Finnic-Ugric und Turkish begann to form here in areas between numerous tributaries of great river Volga, Don, Dnieper, Vistula in III-rd mill. B. C. The old Indoeuropean languages had been formed from the common language in the Dniepr-basin - Greec, Italic, Armenian, Celtic, Thrakish, Frigish, Illirian, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Tocharian, Indian, Iranian, Chettish. The old Finnic-Ugric languages begann to form in areas between Volga and Don. The old Turkish languages begann to form in areas between Dnieper and Don. The separate Iranian, Germanic, Slavic languages were researched on the level three. The areas of their formation were founded in Dnieper- and Don-basin too. The Indoeuropean peoples of these languages lived here after the other Indoeuropean peaples migrated to West and South Europe and to Asia back. Much other linguistic and archeological facts can confirm this arrangement as the result of the researches and are added in the work. The first book end on the chronological level I-st mill. B. C. The later development of the ethnogenetic processes will been iven in the second book. The work is written in Ukranian, has 100 pages (7,6 print sheets), 6 maps, 12 pictures, 11 tables, 12 pages of quoted publications. References 1. Stetsiuk V.M. Opredielenie mest poselenij drevnich slavian grafoanaliticheskim metodom. - Izvestia AN SSSR. Serija literatury i jazyka. 1987. Nr 1. Moscow. (In Russian). 2. Juravlev V. F. K probleme rasselenia drevnich slavian: o tak nazyvajemom „grafoanaliticheskom metode". - Voprosy jazykoznanija. 1991. Nr2. Moscow. (In Russian). About the method The applied models of related languages are a modification of a special graf. The peculiarity of this graf is that all its knots without exeption are connected between themselves with ribs and these ribs have fixed, certain length. This graf can be applied at description of spatial associations of objects with common features which quantities between object pairs are depended from the distance between these object pairs. Specially it can be used in linguistic, archeology, biology etc, also where objects have enough common features. The tables-dictionaries being input into computer can help us to separate not etymologized words in diverse languages , to unit them in groups and to reconstruct „dead languages" with the aid of these words. There are very many Indian languages in America. One can determine their relationship and locate their old native lands with using the grafic-analytical method. Also, one can reconstruct in this way the process of settling of America . Valentyn Stetsiuk Gr. Skovorody str. 9/7, Lviv, 290010, Ukraine tel., fax. 380-322-427414 tel. private 380-322-766258 e-mail: valentyn at icmp.lviv.ua [CILAkorot.ZIP] - 337K, download the zipped Internet version Word format, 70 pages. -- -- M. Hubey Email: hubeyh at Montclair.edu Backup:hubeyh at alpha.montclair.edu WWW Page: http://www.csam.montclair.edu/Faculty/Hubey.html <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Mon Mar 8 02:41:30 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 21:41:30 -0500 Subject: Counting, Probability Theory, and the Birthday Paradox, #1 Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> I have this feeling that we have to re-do something we started, partly for the benefit of the newcomers, and partly for the benefit of the old-timers (no insult intended). This re-enforcements is a necessary part of learning. Social scientists often get angry that not everything can be read like a novel. Probability theory is basically fine-tuned commonsense instead of raw commonsense. What I mean by that is that the basics of probability theory follow from common sense but the untrained mind extrapolates incorrectly. If this happened in logic it is called a 'paradox'. Such names do not exist in probability theory, (from now on PT or something like it.) PT is normally taught starting with set theory not the way it was developed. It is usually due to the fact that most students taking such courses are mathematicians and they find it easier (after years of training) to just get the axioms and then build up from there. We started here using intuition. The part of PT that many other people (especially social scientists) are familiar with and also use, is called statistics. Well, a "statistic" is really a number derivable from a population of things. For example, the mean of the population is a "statistic". The sample mean (the mean of a random sample taken from a population) is also a statistic. Statistics is obviously based on PT, because that is the underlying basis of it. But it is often better to start off with some examples. The basics are this: 1. probability it defined in at least two ways. 1.a) frequency definition 1.b) hokus-pokus definition 1.c) mathematical definition 2. then we use these probabilities by combining them in various ways. There are really only two ways 2.a) addition or OR 2.b) multiplication or AND 1.a) this is a limiting definition of sorts. For example, we imagine an experiment in which a "fair" coin is N times. Then, the probability of heads, written as P(H) is the fraction of the total that the coin comes up heads as this number N approaches infinity. First, nobody can throw a coin an infinite number of times. So we have to only imagine it. Secondly, as we toss the coin many times and keep a running ratio of H/N (where H=number of heads, N=total throws) we will see that as N increases this ratio gets closer and closer to 0.5 as we expect. 1.b) That is where the hokus-pokus definition comes in. In such problems we simply are either "given" P(H) or we make a determination outside of probability theory based on symmetry arguments etc. 2.c) the mathematical definition formalizes this concept. We say that there is a thing called a sample space. That is the space of all possibilities. Obviously this is a set. And every element of the set has some number associated with it, say wi (that's w subscript i) such that when you add up all the wi, you get 1. This is a normalization condition. That is because we consider probability to be a fraction. If P(E)=0 then this event is the "impossible event". If P(E)=1 then this event is the "sure" or "certain" event. Therefore, if we divide up the space of possibilities of an experiment into N sets and then add them all up, we must get 1. That is because we are saying that one of those things must happen, certainly. In the case of Heads and Tails, (disregarding the possibility of the coin standing on its side) there are two choices, H or T. Therefore we must have 1) P(H) + P(T)=1 One of them must happen; that is certain. The readers must have noticed that I sneaked in something here into eq.(1). That something is that I did not say what '+' is. IT is in section 2, and the '+' corresponds to what is meant by "logical OR'. So eq (1) means that the coin will come up heads OR tails. What is clear and certain here is that we have to have some way of knowing that P(H)*P(T) is not 1/4 but zero. A coin cannot come up showing both tails and heads, but applying the multiplication rule above blindly would/could lead us to believe that. Some of what we do has to come from "commonsense". However we can fix this like this. Often unsolvable (or seemingly unsolvable) problems become easier to solve and to understand if we generalize them. Suppose we generalize this coin to an unfair coin. Then the probability of heads could be some number x, between 0 and 1 i.e. 0< =x <=1. Then the probability that it is not heads is 1-x. Therefore probability of both heads and tails could be (note "could") x*(1-x). This is still wrong, but it gave us fuzzy logic. In some cases, things are not so clear cut and we want results like above. In our case, we have to think of the sample space as being divided into two mutually exclusive sets so that they both can't happen. So here are two problems intimately related to many things being discussed right now in historical linguistics. These problems can't be solved so simply, but what is need to solve them is not beyond high school math. We did this before, and we can muddle through it again. It's better the second time around, they say :-) Here they are: they are related to each other. 1. A marksman takes shots at a target so far away that we are not sure that he will hit a bullseye. Suppose his probability of hitting the bullseye is p. (Now, p is just a number here, a number greater than or equal to 0 and less than or equal to 1. We normally would write this as 0 <= p <= 1. In books the < sign and the = sign are put on top of each other so that it doesn't look like we have a representation of an arrow in <=) a) What is the number of shots that he will [probably have to] take before he hits the target (bullyseye)? b) What is the probability that out of 10 shots he will hit 6? 2. The probabilities of birth of a male (boy) or a female (girl) are approximately equal. Let's say that they are and that the probability of the birth of a boy and the birth of a girl are both 1/2 each. A couple have 5 children. a) What is the probability 2 boys and 3 girls? b) What is the probability of at least one boy? c) What is the probability of getting 3 girls and then a boy? (Problem 2.a does not ask for the probability of 2 boys being born first, and then 3 girls or vice versa. The order does not matter. Any combination of 2 boys and 3 girls will do.) For those who are bored or tired, this is pretty much near what you need to be able to do what is necessary to do some of the simple calculations you see in articles like Cowan, Bender, or Rosenfelder's article. A little bit more will allow you to read Ringe's book. If you want to read Embleton's book, you have to switch to statistics (which we can touch upon). -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 01:38:48 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 20:38:48 -0500 Subject: Mitochondria Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Mitochondrial evidence has been considered to be the definite answer to many problems of the biological and social sciences for a while. There was some disturbing news in Science News years ago that mtDNA could be passed from the father but it was buried away. Meanwhile the news that was created by mtDNA (e.g. African Eve), and its relative African Adam (obtained from the Y-chromosome) are still around. This issue (5 March 1999) of Science (journal of the AAAS) has a special on Mitochondria. The article on p. 1435 has some really disturbing news for the believers. First, the mtDNA clock is off. Mutations occur at different rates and the numbers don't tally with other evidence. Second, there is the possibility of recombination with the father's contribution, so there is a distinct possibility that there was no such woman as the African Eve (literally speaking) and that today's distribution of the mtDNA could have occurred via a recombination with the male contribution. Third, some type of substitutions in the DNA are more likely to occur, so that the concept of uniform and constant mutation is out the window. With all of these caveats many "presently" believed-in theories are also sunk. Examples are given in the article (which I debunked on lists on USENET) such as the famous experiment from a year ago in which it was "proven" that the Neandertals separated from modern humans 600,000 years, and these are now "theories" that have gone out the window. The other example is the "African Eve" who lived about 200,000 years ago which I criticized on sci.lang within weeks after it was printed. Times are getting more exciting. I think social scientists and biologists are about to discover "diffusion" equations, Ito stochastic differential equation, and Fokker-Planck methods. I worked on these during my PhD and never thought I'd see them again. Recently I saw whole books on finance (derivatives) which are full of Ito calculus and Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov methods and Brownian motion. These are really a part of stochastic processes and we got tantalizingly close to this topic the last time around. Summer is almost here (well, at least spring is here) and if we start again, we might get to this topic by summer. It looks like historical linguistics is now ready for the diffusion equation, as is biochemistry and some social sciences. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 22:21:54 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:21:54 -0500 Subject: mama and papa and reruns Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> One of the problems with the comparative method, which I listed on one of my previous posts is the fact that a particular set of words which satisfy phonetic resemblance to a set of the type {ana, ama, anna, amma, atta, ....} is not used in the comparisons. The reason for this is that these words are said to be 'infant talk', or 'baby talk'. This point of view is further justified by a kind of a back-compatibility argument of finding such words in many languages. Of course, the fact that words satisfying such phonetic resemblance criteria occur in so many languages is the strongest evidence yet for various "lumper" theories. I should mention that similar "lumper" vs "splitter" arguments also rage in paleontology, especially the paleontology of hominids. I want to present very strong evidence that this argument (that infant talk creates phonetic resemblances accross language families and that these words should not be used in comparisons) has no merit other than to work against lumper programs and to make the splitter's work look much better than it really is. I will only post snippets from this article: "Baby Talk", USN & WR, 15 June, 1998. I know that USN&WR is a newsweekly and not a scientific journal. That makes the anti-lumper baby-talk arguments even more' useless; after all, if this knowledge has now spread to the masses, what purpose does it serve to continue in linguistics? ======================snippets================================= p.50 Within a few months of birth, children have already begun memorizing words without knowing their meaning. The question that has absorbed-- and sometimes divided--linguists is whether children need a special language faculty to do this or instead can infer the abstract rules of grammar from the sentences they hear, using the same mental skills that allow them to recognize faces or master arithmetic. ... An infant's brain, it turns out, is capable of taking in enormous amounts of information and finding the regular patterns contained within it. ... Infants can perceive the entire range of phonemes, according to Janet Werker and Richard Tees, psychologists... ... Yet children begin to note word boundaries by the time they are 8 months old, even they though they have no concept of what most words mean. p. 52 [Saffran and Aslin] reported that babies can remember words by listening for patterns of syllables that occur together with statistical regularity. ... In the past, psychologists never imagined that young infants had the mental capacity to make these sorts of inferences. p.53 Findings like Newport's are suggesting to some researchers that perhaps children can use statistical regularities to extract not only individual words from what they hear but also the rules for cobbling words together into sentences. =======================end snippets=============================== What this means is that infants learn the so-called "baby-talk" words which are not allowed in comparisons of languages long before they begin to talk. This means that the baby-talk arguments have it backwards. Infants learn to babble what they hear from parents. So if infants are babbling "dadda", "dad", "daddi", "mommi", etc they are not making them up but most likely have already heard them often and are trying to imitate their parents. There are mailing lists in which people are still repeating the same old falsehoods. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 22:26:12 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:26:12 -0500 Subject: Crowley: Book Review Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> This is not a book review. This is just a bunch of snippets from Crowley's book. I will reply to this to add my comments, and that will be the book review. In this post, if you see anything in square brackets [...] it is probably my addition. -------------------------Crowley-------------------------------- Crowley, T. (1992) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, Oxford University Press, NY. p.37 The concept of lenition is not very well defined, and linguists who use the term often seem to rely more on intuition or guesswork than on a detailed understanding of what lenition means. p. 48 ..I will define the concept of phonetic similarity. Two sounds can be described as being phonetically more similar to each other after a sound change has taken place if those two sounds have more phonetic features in common than they did before the change took place. If a sound change results in an increase in the number of shared features, then we can say that assimilation has taken place. p. 73 A phonetic description of a language simply describes the physical facts of the sounds of the language. A phonemic description, however, describes not the physical facts, but the way these sounds are related to each other for speakers of that language. It is possible for two languages to have the same physical sounds, yet to have very different phonemic systems. The phonemic description therefore tells us what are the basic sound units for a particular language that enables its speakers to differentiate meanings. p.88 ...you have to look for forms in the various related languages which appear to be derived from a common original form. Two such forms are cognate with each other, and both are reflexes of the same form in the protolanguage [PL]. p.89 In deciding whether two forms are cognate or not, you need to consider how similar they are both in form and meaning. If they are similar enough that it could be assumed that they are derived from a single original form with a single original meaning, then we say that they are cognate. p.93 Having set out all of the sound correspondences [SC or RegSC] that you can find in the data, you can now move on to the third step, which is to work out what original sound in the protolanguage might have produced that particular range of sounds in the various daughter languages. Your basic assumption should be that each separate set of sound correspondences goes back to a distinct original phoneme. In reconstructing the shapes of these original phonemes, you should always be guided by a number of general principles: (i) Any reconstruction should involve sound changes that are plausible. (You should be guided by the kinds of things that you learned in Chapter 2 in this respect.) (ii) Any reconstruction should involve as few changes as possible between the protolanguage and the daughter languages. It is perhaps easiest to reconstruct back from those sound correspondences in which the reflexes of the original phoneme (or protophoneme) are identical in all daughter languages. By principle (ii) you should normally assume that such correspondences go back to the same protophoneme as you find in the daughter languages, and that there have been no sound changes of any kind. p.95 (iii) Reconstructions should fill gaps in phonological systems rather than create unbalanced systems. Although there will be exceptions among the world's languages, there is a strong tendency for languages to have 'balanced' phonological systems. By this I mean that there is a set of sounds distinguished by a particular feature, this feature is also likely to be used to distinguish a different series of sounds in the language. For example, if a language has two back rounded vowels (i.e. /u/ and /o/), we would expect it also to have two front unrounded vowels (i.e. /i/ and /e/). p. 98 (iv) A phoneme should not be reconstructed in a protolanguage unless it is shown to be absolutely necessary from the evidence of the daugher languages. p.109 ..But what do our reconstructions actually represent? Do they represent a real language as it was actually spoken at some earlier time, or do our reconstructions only give an approximation of some earlier language? ....according to this point of view, a 'protolanguage' as it is reconstructed is not a 'language' in the same sense as any of its descendant languages, or as the 'real' protolanguage' itself. It is merely an abstract statement of correspondences. ...Other linguists, while not going as far as this, have stated that, while languages that are related through common descent are derived from a single ancestor language, we should not necessarily assume that this language really existed as such. The assumption of the comparative method is that we should arrive at an entirely uniform protolanguage and this is likely to give us a distorted or false view of the protolanguage. In some cases, the comparative method may even allow us to reconstruct a protolanguage that never existed historically. p.110 ..One frequently employed device in these sorts of situations is to distinguish the protophoneme by which two phonetically similar correspondence sets are derived by using the lower and upper case forms of the same symbol....Another option in these kinds of situations is to use subscript or superscript numerals e.g. /*l1/ and /*l2). p. 119 [Internal Reconstruction chap. 6] There is a second method of reconstruction that is known as internal reconstruction which allows you to make guesses about the history of a language as well. p.123 ...you would normally consider using internal method only in the following circumstances: (a) Sometimes, the language you are investigating might be a linguistic isolate i.e. it may not be related to any other language (and is therefore in a family of its own). In such a case, there is no possibility of applying the comparative method as there is nothing to compare this language with. Internal reconstruction is therefore the only possibility that is available. (b) A very similar situation to this would be the one in which the language you are studying is so distantly related to its sister languages that the comparative method is unable to reveal very much its history. This would be because there are so few cognate words between the language you are working on and its sister languages that it would be difficult to set out the systematic sound correspondences. (c) You may want to to know something about changes that have taken place between a reconstructed protolanguage [RPL] and its descendant languages. (d) Finally, you may want to try to reconstruct further back still from a protolanguage that you have arrived at by means of the comparative method. The earliest language from which a number of languages is derived is, of course, itself a linguistic isolate in the sense that we are unable to show that any other languages are descended from it. There is no reason why you cannot apply the internal method of reconstruction to a protolanguage, just as you could with any linguistic isolate, if you wanted to go back still further back in time. ...this method can only be sued when a a sound change ahs resulted in some kind of morphological alternation in a language. Morphological alternations [MA] that arise as a result of sound changes always involve conditioned sound changes [CSC]. If an unconditioned sound change [USCh] has taken place in a language, there will be no synchronic residue of the original situation in the form of morpological alternations, so the internal method will be completely unable to produce any results in these kinds of situations. [more on intermediate changes leading to false reconstructions..] p. 129 [Grammatical, Semantic, and Lexical Change, chap. 7] The number of individual phonemes of a language ranges from around a dozen or so in some languages, to 140 or so at the very most in other languages. p.132 There is a tendency for languages to change typologically according to a kind of cycle. Isolating languages tend to move towards agglutinating structures. Agglutinating languages tend to move towards the inflectional type, and finally, inflecting languages tend to become less inflectional over time and more isolating. ..[diagram].. Isolating languages become agglutinating in structure by a process of phonological reduction. By this I mean that free form grammatical markers may become phonologically reduced to unstressed bound form markers (i.e. suffixes or prefixes). p.134 ...languages which are agglutinating type tend to change towards inflectional type. By the process of morphological fusion, two originally clearly divisible morphemes in a word may change in such a way that the boundary is no longer clearly recognizable. [defn of portmanteu morphemes]. p.135 Finally, languages of the inflectional type tend to the isolating type; this process is called morphological reduction. It is very common for inflectional morphemes to become more and more reduced, until sometimes they disappear altogether. The forms that are left, after the complete disappearance of inflectional morphemes, consist of single phonemes. p.136 There is, in fact, a fourth type of language: those having polysynthetic morphology. Such languages represent extreme forms of agglutinating languages in which single word correspond to what in other kinds of languages are expressed as whole clauses. Thus a single word may include nominal subjects and objects, and possibly also adverbial information, and even non-core nominal arguments in the clause such as direct objects and spatial noun phrases. p. 137 Polysynthetic languages can develop out of more analytic (i.e. nonpolysynthetic) languages by a process of argument incorporation. p. 144 Words in languages can be grouped into two basic categories: lexical words, and grammatical words. Lexical words are those which have definable meanings of their own when they appear independently of any linguistic context: elephant, trumpet, large. Grammatical words, on the other hand, only have meanings when they occur in the company of other words, and they relate those other words together to form a grammatical sentence. Such words in English include the, these, on, my. Grammatical words constitute the mortar in a wall, while lexical words are more like bricks. p.145 The change from lexical word to grammatical word is only the first step in the process of grammaticalization, with the next step being morphologisation i.e. the development of a bound form out of what was originally a free form. In fact, morphologisation can involve degrees of bonding between bound forms and other forms as it is possible to distinguish between clitics and affixes. A clitic is a bound form which is analysed as being attached to a whole phrase than to just a single word. An affix, however, is attached as either a prefix or a suffix directly to a word. p.168 [Subgrouping chapter 8] Similarities between languages can be explained as being due either shared retention from a protolanguage, or shared innovations since the time of the protolanguage. If two languages are similar they share some feature that has been retained from a protolanguage, you cannot use this similarity as evidence that they have gone through a period of common descent. The retention of a particular feature in this way is not significant, because you should expect a large number of features to be retained this way. However, if two languages are similar because they have both undergone the same innovation or change, then you can say that this is evidence that they have had a period of common descent and that they therefore do belong to the same subgroup. You can say that a shared innovation in two languages is evidence that those two languages belong in the same subgroup, because exactly the same change is unlikely to take place independently in two separate languages. By suggesting that the languages have undergone a period of common descent, you are saying that the particular change took place only once between the higher level protolanguage and the intermediate protolanguage which is between this and the various modern languages that belong in the subgroup. [problem of multiple scales!] p.168 While it is shared innovations that we use as evidence for establishing subgroups, certain kinds of innovations are likely to be stronger evidence for subgrouping than other kinds. ...subgrouping rests on the assumption that shared similarities are unlikely to be due to chance. However some kinds of similarities between languages are in fact due to chance, i.e. the same changes do sometimes take place quite independently in different languages. This kind of situation is often referred to as parallel development or drift. ... In classifying languages into subgroups, you therefore need to avoid the possibility that innovations in two languages might be due to drift or parallel development. YOu an do this by looking for the following in linguistic changes: (i) Changes that are particularly unusual. (ii) Sets of several phonological changes, especially unusual changes which would not ordinarily be expected to have taken place together. (iii) Phonological changes which correspond to unconnected grammatical or semantic changes. ... If two languages share common sporadic or irregular phonological change, this provides even better evidence for subgrouping those two languages together as the same irregular change is unlikely to take place twice independently. p. 171 [Lexicostatistics and Glottochronology] Lexicostatistics is a technique that allows us to determine the degree of relationship between two languages, simply by comparing the vocabularies of the languages and determining the degree of similarity between them. This method operates under two basic assumptions. The first of these is that there are some parts of the vocabulary of language that are much less subject lexical change than other parts, i.e. there are certain parts of the lexicon in which words are less likely to be completely replaced by non-cognate forms. The area of the lexicon that is assumed to be more resistant to lexical change is referred to as core vocabulary (or a basic vocabulary). There is a second aspect to this first general assumption underlying the lexicostatistical method, and that is the fact that this core of relatively change-resistant vocabulary is the same for all languages. The universal core vocabulary includes items such as pronouns, numerals, body parts, geographical features, basic actions, and basic states. Items like these are unlikely to be replaced by words copied from other langauges, because all people, whatever their cultural differences, have eyes, mouths, and legs, and know about the sky and clouds, the sun, and the moon, stones, and trees and so on. Other concepts however may be culture-specific. ... The second assumption that underlies the lexicostatistical method is that the actual rate of lexical replacement in the core vocabulary is more or less stable, and is therefore aboutg the same for all languages over time. In peripheral vocabulary of course, the rate of lexical replacement is not stable at all, and may be relatively fast or slow depending on the nature of cultural contact between speakers of different languages. This second assumption has been tested in 13 languages for which there are written records going back over long periods of time. It has been found that there has been an average vocabulary retention of 80.5 percent every 1,000 years. p.173 [basic or core vocabulary] The most popular list of this length is known as the Swadesh list, which is named after the linguist Morris Swadesh who drew it up in the early 1960s. p.181 Once the percentage of cognate forms has been worked out, we can use the following mathematical formula to work out the time depth, or the period of separation of two languages; t = log C/(2*logR) In the formula above, t stands for the number of thousands of years that two languages have been separated, C stands for the percentage of cognates as worked out by comparing basic vocabularies, and R stands for the constant change factor mentioned earlier (the value in this formula is set at 0.85). p.183 Firstly, there is the problem of deciding which words should be regarded as core vocabulary and which should not. Obviously, it may be possible for different sets of vocabulary to produce differing results. Another difficulty involves the actual counting of forms that are cognate against those that are not cognate in basic vocabulary lists from two different languages. ... Lexicostatisticians in fact rely heavily on what is often euphemistically called the inspection method of determining whether two forms are cognate or not in a pair of languages. What this amounts to is that you are more or less free to apply intelligent guesswork as to whether you think two forms are cognate or not. ... Of course, two different linguists can take the same lists from two different languages , and since there is no objective way of determining what should be ticked 'yes' and what should be ticked 'no', it is possible that both will come up with significantly different cognate figures at the end of the exercise. [p. 186 example of languages of Milne Bay area of Papua New Guinea] [minimal spanning tree can be drawn from these figures] p. 201 [causes of language change ] One famous linguist Otto Jesperson made a great deal of the importance of simplity as a factor in bringing about sound change: I am not afraid of hearing the objection that I ascribe too great a power to human laxness, indolence, inertia, shirking, easy-goingness, sluggishness, or whatever other beautiful synonyms have been invented for 'economy of effort' or 'following the line of least resistance'. The fact remains that there is such a tendency in all human beings, and by taking it into account in explaining changes of sound, we are doing nothing else than applying here the same principle. Despite the obvious appeal of this argument as a major factor in explaining language change, there are also several problems associated with it. The first is that it is extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible, to define explicitly what we mean by 'simplicity' in language. Simplicity is clearly a relative term. p. 212 [observing language change, chapter 10] The concept of linguistic indeterminacy also relates to the idea of the linguistic system as used by Saussure. He argued that in describing a language (i.e. phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, clauses, and so on) and describing the ways in which these units interrelate (i.e. the grammatical rules for putting them together for making up larger units). In talking about describing the system of a particular language, Saussure is implying that for every language, there is one -- and only one -- linguistic system. p. 215 One of the most influential linguists of the past few decades, Noam Chomsky, expresses this view when he said that a grammar should describe an 'ideal speaker-hearer relationship', and it should ignore factors from outside the language itself (such as formality of a social situation). But language is not an ideal system at all. p. 227 [problems with traditional assumptions, chap. 11] Jones emphasized that it was similarities in the structure of the Indo-European languages, rather than it was similarities between words, that were important in determining language relationships. This observation led to a new intellectual climate in the study of language relationships, as scholars started looking instead for grammatical similarities between languages to determine whether or not they should be considered to be related. Lexical similarities, it was argued, were poor evidence of genetic relationship, as similarities between practically any word in any two languages can be established with enough effort. p. 232 In reconstructing the history of languages, you therefore need to make the important distinction between a systematic (or a regular) correspondence and an isolated (or sporadic) correspondence. This is a distinction that I did not make in Chapter 5 when I was talking about the comparative method, but it is very important. p. 256 [Language Contact, chapter 12] The influence of one of the linguistic systems of an individual on the other linguistic system of that individual is referred to in general as interference. Interference can occur in the phonological system of a language, in its semantics, or in its grammar. Phonological interference simply means the carrying over of the phonological features of one language into the other as an accent of some kind. ... p. 257 Semantic interference can also be referred to as semantic copying, as loan translation, or as calquing. A calque (or a semantic copy or a loan translation) is when we do not copy a lexical item as such from one language into another, but when just the meanings are transferred from one language to the other, while at teh same time we use the corresponding forms of the original language. p. 260 There is a significant body of literature on the subject of linguistic diffusion and convergence, which is based on the assumption that languages can and do influence one another. The term diffusion is used to refer to the spread of a particular linguistic feature from one language to another (or, indeed to several other languages). p.262 The diffusion of grammatical features in this way has caused some linguists to question further the validity and basic assumptions of the whole comparative method. Some languages appear to have undergone so much diffusion in the lexicon and the grammar that it can be difficult to decide which protolanguage they are derived from. According to the comparative method as I have described it in this volume, it is possible for a language to be derived from only a single protolanguage, yet some linguists have found it necessary to speak of mixed languages, which seem to derive from two different protolanguages at once. p.270 Many linguists have been struck by the fact that pidgin and creole languages often show strong parallels in their structure with their substrate languages than their superstrate languages. p.312 [cultural reconstruction, chapter 13] While many attempts at paleolinguistic comparisons fall far short of scientific respectability, the writings of Johanna Nichols since the mid-1980s have attracted considerable interest among some linguists, as well as archaeologists and others interested in establishing relationships at much greater-time depths than is possible using the comparative method. Nichols' approach is more akin to population science in that she does not aim to study the evolution of individual languages, or even closely related groups of languages. Rather she aims to study the history of 'populations' of languages. By this, she means that she considers large groupings of languages together, dealing not with particular features of individual languages, but broader general features of language groupings. Thus, she considers for example, the languages of Australia or Africa as a whole. She pays attention not to whether structural features are present or absent, but to what are the statistical frequencies and distributions of features are within these larger populations of languages. Such linguistic markers are considered to be akin to biological markers in that they can be used to identify affinities between populations at considerable time-depths. She argues that if, in the languages of a continent (or some other large geographical area) a feature shows up with a high frequency, this distribution is not something that is due to recent diffusion. When several markers of this type are shared, this is taken as being indicative of historical affinity. Of course, such features must be known to be typologically unrelated. ... The actual application and interpretation of Nichols' method is complex and it is unlikely to become the standard model by which individual historical linguists will attempt to study linguistic relationships. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 22:30:28 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:30:28 -0500 Subject: Guidelines Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Guidelines For Posting To : ------------------------------------------------ The study of language covers a broad range of questions, and is likewise relevant to many fields of study. The neuroscientist who explores the biological basis of language, the psychologist seeking a more comprehensive view of the nature and dynamics of language, and the historical linguist who dreams ultimate goal of classification of and agreement on all the languages of the world, something akin to the Human Genome Project, all work with closely related and overlapping subjects, and all stand to benefit from and contribute to a common pool of knowledge. The rapid growth of information technology has made possible rapid exchange of information regarding languages. Whereas only a short time ago only the field linguist could have hoped to get information on some languages, native speakers, and linguists specializing in various languages can now be virtually brought together with ease. Parallelling this development in information technology has been the interest in making historical or comparative linguistics more rigorous and dependent upon and based on mathematics similar to the study of syntax and grammar of language. However, this forum can often lead to heated dialog on the nature of the language. In the interest of fostering constructive dialog on a very complex subject, the following guidelines should be observed when posting: 1. The basic aim of the lists is to encourage discussion and exchange information on research on quantitative aspects of language and other relevant disciplines in the sciences and humanities; with the aim of understanding the use, misuse and abuse of quantitative methods in linguistics and identification of such bogus quantitative results that exist in the literature. 2. As the overall goal of this discussion is communication toward the advancement of knowledge, it is expected that the disagreements do not lead to useless flaming, and heckling. 3. Please keep in mind that the study of language crosses many disciplinary boundaries. Anything related to language may be discussed on this list however the preferences are for quantitative methods and models since there are many other lists available for discussion of other aspects of linguistics. Formal Language Theory is understood in this context to be a part of quantitative methods since it is a branch of mathematics and computer science as well as linguistics. Feel free to draw from research including posts on other lists or websites, however focus on what it means for quantitative linguistics, and theory, not the specific details of the language or specific words, lexemes, morphemes. 4. The list is not moderated. So far it has worked rather well, proving that social science mailing lists need not be moderated. In a strange way, this list also shows the solution of the problem of policing lists in linguistics. By making it quantitative, the useless riff-raff can be easily self-filtered. Noise-makers and hecklers do not want to be on quantitative lists. That is why they don't exist in physics, computer science, engineering, chemistry, or math lists. 5. Please don't exceed about 60 characters per line. Use spaces for paragraphs liberally, it makes it easier to read on the monitor. However, please do not put a long signature list. It is understood to be sign of immaturity on the Internet. Only put your name, email address, and a website that may be necessary. Avoid quoting previous messages any more than absolutely necessary --we've already read them once. Please do not use AOL type quoting. Use the quoting that uses angular brackets >, as everyone else. Leave only enough on the post to show what the other(s) may have said. 6. The mailing-list server is majordomo. To subscribe or unsubsribe send email to the address majordomo at csam.montclair.edu and in the body of the mesage put whichever is appropriate: subscribe language unsubscribe language If you have problems feel free to contact the list-owner; huibeyh at montclair.edu -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 22:36:26 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:36:26 -0500 Subject: Binomial Distribution and Ringe Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> H. Mark Hubey wrote: > > > Here they are: they are related to each other. > > 1. A marksman takes shots at a target so far away that we are > not sure that he will hit a bullseye. Suppose his probability of > hitting the bullseye is p. (Now, p is just a number here, a number > greater than or equal to 0 and less than or equal to 1. We normally > would write this as 0 <= p <= 1. In books the < sign and the = > sign are put on top of each other so that it doesn't look like > we have a representation of an arrow in <=) > > a) What is the number of shots that he will [probably have to] take > before he hits the target (bullyseye)? Here is the solution to this part. It gives us a new probability density called the geometric density. The continuous version of it is the exponential density. We are thinking of a series of experiments of the type; S FS FFS ... FFFFFFFS Note that there is only one S (i.e. success) and all the other tosses before it are F (failure). So this is the "time to success" density (or distribution). Any of these can happen if the marksman takes shots. The question is which is more likely to happen? To compute that we have to average all these possibilities. But before we do that we should write the probability density in the form that one usually sees it; P(S)=((1-p)^x) * (p) That is x failures (of probability 1-p each) followed by a single success of probability p. > b) What is the probability that out of 10 shots he will hit 6? This is related to the above. Superficially it seems like we want to change the above formula to something like P(S)= ((1-p)^4) * (p)^6 so that we have 4 failures and 6 successes out of 10. But this is only one possibility of obtaining 6 successes and 4 failures. IOW, this is something like FFFFSSSSSS. But we have to consider other possibilities such as SSSSSSFFFF. To do this we have to find all possible ways of obtaining 6 successes and 4 failures. This brings up the problem of permutations and combinations. To do that let's start with ways of arranging N objects along a line. For example if we want to find arrangements of {a,b,c} by trial and error we can see that the possibilities are abc,acb,bac,bca,cab,cba which totals to 6. In general we can total the number of permutations by noting that for the 1st position we have N possibilities. After having made that choice we have N-1 possibilities left, and so on. So for N objects the number can be computed via N*(N-1)*(N-2)....3*2*1 This is read as N-factorial and written as N!. For N=3, we obtain 3*2*1 which is 6. The more difficult aspect of this is to compute the number of possibilities if we arrange N objects R at a time. To do that we proceed similarly. For the 1st place we have N choices, for the 2nd place we have N-1 choices, etc. However, we have to stop this before when we get to the Rth place, so the formula becomes N*(N-1)*(N-2)*...*(N-R+1) There is an easier way to write this, in terms of factorials. N! P(N,R)=---------- (N-R)! Now a combination C(N,R) can be obtained from P(N,R) by dividing by R! because in the definition of combination the order is not significant. And finally we get to the famous Binomial Distribution which is f(S)= C(N,S)*(p^S)(1-p)^(N-S) p^S is the probability of S successes. (1-p)^(N-S) is the probability of (N-S) failures out of N tries (i.e. S successes and N-S failures) and the C(N,S) is the combination that distributes the S successes out of N tries into the various possibilities. This is the formula used by Ringe in his work. This is the formula that is used by Rosenfelder on his website. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Fri Mar 12 03:57:07 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 22:57:07 -0500 Subject: Crowley: Book Review Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Here is the review: > -------------------------Crowley-------------------------------- > > Crowley, T. (1992) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, Oxford > University Press, NY. > > p.37 > The concept of lenition is not very well defined, and linguists who use > the term often seem to rely more on intuition or guesswork than on a > detailed understanding of what lenition means. It is very well defined now. For those who cannot obtain my book, they should note that they will be able to read it in the pages of the Journal of the International Quantitative Linguistics Association with a name like "Vector Speech Spaces via Dimensional Analysis" or something resembling it. Crowley has a disarming candor in this book which no doubt derives from his knowledge of the field and his love of it. There is no "black magic" in this book. He either explains it clearly or explains that nobody really knows, or that people guess, etc (except in cases where he errs !). :-) > p. 48 > ..I will define the concept of phonetic similarity. Two sounds can be > described as being phonetically more similar to each other after a sound > change has taken place if those two sounds have more phonetic features > in common than they did before the change took place. If a sound change > results in an increase in the number of shared features, then we can say > that assimilation has taken place. Now here is a perfect example of candor, intelligence, creativity all rolled into one. First, he has apparently discovered the concept of similarity all on his own. He cannot exactly put his finger on it but it is clear that he is talking about distance. And this distance is indeed the simplest such distance metric, the one based on distinctive features. If all the distinctive features are binary, then this distance is simply the number of bits that differ between two phonemes. This distance metric is used in computer science for distances between bitstrings and is called the Hamming metric after the first person to have used it. For more on this you can look at my book [Hubey,1994] and you will also find other (more accurate and more precise) distance metrics. The final result of all these spaces (metric spaces) is the vector spaces via dimensional analysis that is mentioned above. I think it is my greatest contribution in the whole book. Unfortunately a few linguists whom I asked thought that this particular chapter was snake oil. That's how things go in life! > p. 73 > A phonetic description of a language simply describes the physical facts > of the sounds of the language. A phonemic description, however, > describes not the physical facts, but the way these sounds are related > to each other for speakers of that language. It is possible for two > languages to have the same physical sounds, yet to have very different > phonemic systems. The phonemic description therefore tells us what are > the basic sound units for a particular language that enables its > speakers to differentiate meanings. This is reasonably typical and yet also something that hides a great truth; there is great confusion in the literature on what these things mean. I propose that words acoustic, perceptual and articulatory be used instead of phonetic. It would go a long way toward clearing up the confusion in the field. Then we could rename phonetic and phonemic as "absolute" and "relative" as well as "low-precision/accuracy" vs "high-precision/accuracy" descriptions. This accords reasonably well with the facts in linguistics. > > p.88 > ...you have to look for forms in the various related languages which > appear to be derived from a common original form. Two such forms are > cognate with each other, and both are reflexes of the same form in the > protolanguage [PL]. Here is truth and candor; "appear to be derived". > p.89 > In deciding whether two forms are cognate or not, you need to consider > how similar they are both in form and meaning. If they are similar > enough that it could be assumed that they are derived from a single > original form with a single original meaning, then we say that they are > cognate. More truth and candor: "similar in both form and meaning". This again is nothing but "distance" staring us in the face again, and again, and... > p.93 > Having set out all of the sound correspondences [SC or RegSC] that you > can find in the data, you can now move on to the third step, which is to > work out what original sound in the protolanguage might have produced > that particular range of sounds in the various > daughter languages. Your basic assumption should be that each separate > set of sound correspondences goes back to a distinct original phoneme. > In reconstructing the shapes of these original phonemes, you should > always be guided by a number of general principles: > This is the only place where I have actually seen principles actually listed in mostly clear terminology. > (i) Any reconstruction should involve sound changes that are plausible. > (You should be guided by the kinds of things that you learned in Chapter > 2 in this respect.) This again must be "empirical". What else can "plausible" mean? It means mostly that if it has been deemed plausible already (because someone has found it to exist, or has convinced others that it existed) then you can use it the same way. Of course, there are other ways. > > (ii) Any reconstruction should involve as few changes as possible > between the protolanguage and the daughter languages. General principle called Ockham's Razor (sometimes Occam's Razor) and often called the "Parsimony Principle". It's a general principle that people use for no other reason than the fact that it exists. > It is perhaps easiest to reconstruct back from those sound > correspondences in which the reflexes of the original phoneme (or > protophoneme) are identical in all daughter languages. By principle (ii) > you should normally assume that such correspondences go back to the same > protophoneme as you find in the daughter languages, and that there have > been no sound changes of any kind. If the sound changes resemble the [in]famous random walk (Brownian motion) then if we divide up the changes into intervals, the greatest amount will be "no-change" because the random walk has zero mean and that is where it gets its maximum. > p.95 > (iii) Reconstructions should fill gaps in phonological systems rather > than create unbalanced systems. > > Although there will be exceptions among the world's languages, there is > a strong tendency for languages to have 'balanced' phonological systems. > By this I mean that there is a set of sounds distinguished by a > particular feature, this feature is also likely to be used to > distinguish a different series of sounds in the language. For example, > if a language has two back rounded vowels (i.e. /u/ and /o/), we would > expect it also to have two front unrounded vowels (i.e. /i/ and /e/). This is another general principle that is in use. It is called "symmetry". There is a whole book written on it [Van Fraasen] , and things like this have already been used already in physics. Maxwell's Equations (of electromagnetics) came out of symmetry considerations during the last century and he predicted in 1860s what was confirmed experimentally in the 1890s. For whatever reason, nature seems to like symmetry. But it is not exactly clear what he means by "balance". It seems (from my reading of books on linguistics) that there is a kind of a mental chemical elements table-like thing and it is this table that linguists somehow mentally try to fill in. But there are many ways in which symmetry arguments pop up and many of these can be seen in, you guessed it, my book [Hubey,1994]. (It was rejected by some anonymous reviewer for a publishing company and I am really upset at what he wrote. Too bad I can't find out who he is and then check what mathematical work he has actually accomplished in linguistics and see if it amounts to anything worth writing about. My guess is that he does not comprehend or that he wants to publish some of these ideas himself while keeping mine unknown. Nobody will be ever able to figure out who did what until decades later and by that time his name will be attached to my work. It does sound like I am paranoid :-) but I don't believe that anyone can be that incompetent and still pretend to be doing mathematical work in linguistics. I can teach this to college students.] > p. 98 > > (iv) A phoneme should not be reconstructed in a protolanguage unless it > is shown to be absolutely necessary from the evidence of the daugher > languages. > > p.109 > > ..But what do our reconstructions actually represent? Do they represent > a real language as it was actually spoken at some earlier time, or do > our reconstructions only give an approximation of some earlier language? > ....according to this point of view, a 'protolanguage' as it is > reconstructed is not a 'language' in the same sense as any of its > descendant languages, or as the 'real' protolanguage' itself. It is > merely an abstract statement of correspondences. > ...Other linguists, while not going as far as this, have stated that, > while languages that are related through common descent are derived from > a single ancestor language, we should not necessarily assume that this > language really existed as such. The assumption of the comparative > method is that we should arrive at an entirely uniform protolanguage and > this is likely to give us a distorted or false view of the > protolanguage. In some cases, the comparative method may even allow us > to reconstruct a protolanguage that never existed historically. This is yet another one of those great truthful discussions and even better one that touches upon some of the deeper issues of what diachronic linguistics is about. > p.110 > ..One frequently employed device in these sorts of situations is to > distinguish the protophoneme by which two phonetically similar > correspondence sets are derived by using the lower and upper case forms > of the same symbol....Another option in these kinds of situations is to > use subscript or superscript numerals e.g. /*l1/ and /*l2). Great usage. These devices, like using Greek letters, script letters, German frakturs, bold, italics, letters with bars, arrows, underwiggles, subscripts, superscripts, etc have all been employed in mathematics and physics for similar reasons. IT would probably be best to use script upper case letters actually (something like Dingbat script). > p. 119 [Internal Reconstruction chap. 6] > > There is a second method of reconstruction that is known as internal > reconstruction which allows you to make guesses about the history of a > language as well. It seems like this is comparative construction applied to the same language by looking for clusters of words derived from the same root. > > p.123 > ...you would normally consider using internal method only in the > following circumstances: > > (a) Sometimes, the language you are investigating might be a linguistic > isolate i.e. it may not be related to any other language (and is > therefore in a family of its own). In such a case, there is no > possibility of applying the comparative method as there is nothing to > compare this language with. Internal reconstruction is therefore the > only possibility that is available. > > (b) A very similar situation to this would be the one in which the > language you are studying is so distantly related to its sister > languages that the comparative method is unable to reveal very much its > history. This would be because there are so few cognate words between > the language you are working on and its sister languages that it would > be difficult to set out the systematic sound correspondences. > > (c) You may want to to know something about changes that have taken > place between a reconstructed protolanguage [RPL] and its descendant > languages. > > (d) Finally, you may want to try to reconstruct further back still from > a protolanguage that you have arrived at by means of the comparative > method. The earliest language from which a number of languages is > derived is, of course, itself a linguistic isolate in the sense that we > are unable to show that any other languages are descended from it. There > is no reason why you cannot apply the internal method of reconstruction > to a protolanguage, just as you could with any linguistic isolate, if > you wanted to go back still further back in time. > > ...this method can only be used when a a sound change ahs resulted in > some kind of morphological alternation in a language. Morphological > alternations [MA] that arise as a result of sound changes always involve > conditioned sound changes [CSC]. If an unconditioned sound change [USCh] > has taken place in a language, there will be no synchronic residue of > the original situation in the form of morpological alternations, so the > internal method will be completely unable to produce any results in > these kinds of situations. All excellent explanations. Truthful. To the point. No black magic here. IT would have been so much better if he could have introduced some ideas on how to evaluate this data objectively and rigorously. > [more on intermediate changes leading to false reconstructions..] > > p. 129 [Grammatical, Semantic, and Lexical Change, chap. 7] > > The number of individual phonemes of a language ranges from around a > dozen or so in some languages, to 140 or so at the very most in other > languages. > > p.132 > There is a tendency for languages to change typologically according to a > kind of cycle. Isolating languages tend to move towards agglutinating > structures. Agglutinating languages tend to move towards the > inflectional type, and finally, inflecting languages tend to become less > inflectional over time and more isolating. ..[diagram].. > Isolating languages become agglutinating in structure by a process of > phonological reduction. By this I mean that free form grammatical > markers may become phonologically reduced to unstressed bound form > markers (i.e. suffixes or prefixes). > p.134 > ...languages which are agglutinating type tend to change towards > inflectional type. By the process of morphological fusion, two > originally clearly divisible morphemes in a word may change in such a > way that the boundary is no longer clearly recognizable. > [defn of portmanteu morphemes]. > p.135 > Finally, languages of the inflectional type tend to the isolating type; > this process is called morphological reduction. It is very common for > inflectional morphemes to become more and more reduced, until sometimes > they disappear altogether. The forms that are left, after the complete > disappearance of inflectional morphemes, consist of single phonemes. This is worth discussing in detail probably in some other list because it is a very interesting and complex problem. But the fact that he writes about it and also gives such clear scenarios for belief in the possibility of such occurrences speaks loudly for his understanding of the issues of diachronics. > p.136 > There is, in fact, a fourth type of language: those having polysynthetic > morphology. Such languages represent extreme forms of agglutinating > languages in which single word correspond to what in other kinds of > languages are expressed as whole clauses. Thus a single word may include > nominal subjects and objects, and possibly also adverbial information, > and even non-core nominal arguments in the clause such as direct objects > and spatial noun phrases. > > p. 137 > Polysynthetic languages can develop out of more analytic (i.e. > nonpolysynthetic) languages by a process of argument incorporation. Excellent again. By doing this he has pointed to a way of creating some kind of a scale between say, zero and one, which we write as [0,1] meaning an interval between 0 and 1. This means that we can now treat typology as a variable that takes values in [0,1]. Since both probability theory and fuzzy logic take values in [0,1] we now have the means to create mathematical models and test them. > p. 144 > Words in languages can be grouped into two basic categories: lexical > words, and grammatical words. Lexical words are those which have > definable meanings of their own when they appear independently of any > linguistic context: elephant, trumpet, large. Grammatical words, on the > other hand, only have meanings when they occur in the company of other > words, and they relate those other words together to form a grammatical > sentence. Such words in English include the, these, on, my. Grammatical > words constitute the mortar in a wall, while lexical words are more like > bricks. Great analogy. > p.145 > The change from lexical word to grammatical word is only the first step > in the process of grammaticalization, with the next step being > morphologisation i.e. the development of a bound form out of what was > originally a free form. > > In fact, morphologisation can involve degrees of bonding between bound > forms and other forms as it is possible to distinguish between clitics > and affixes. A clitic is a bound form which is analysed as being > attached to a whole phrase than to just a single word. An affix, > however, is attached as either a prefix or a suffix directly to a word. I prefer words like postfix, prefix, infix. > p.168 [Subgrouping chapter 8] > > Similarities between languages can be explained as being due either > shared retention from a protolanguage, or shared innovations since the > time of the protolanguage. If two languages are similar they share some > feature that has been retained from a protolanguage, you cannot use this > similarity as evidence that they have gone through a period of common > descent. The retention of a particular feature in this way is not > significant, because you should expect a large number of features to be > retained this way. > > However, if two languages are similar because they have both undergone > the same innovation or change, then you can say that this is evidence > that they have had a period of common descent and that they therefore do > belong to the same subgroup. You can say that a shared innovation in two > languages is evidence that those two languages belong in the same > subgroup, because exactly the same change is unlikely to take place > independently in two separate languages. By suggesting that the > languages have undergone a period of common descent, you are saying that > the particular change took place only once between the higher level > protolanguage and the intermediate protolanguage which is between this > and the various modern languages that belong in the subgroup. [problem > of multiple scales!] > > p.168 > While it is shared innovations that we use as evidence for establishing > subgroups, certain kinds of innovations are likely to be stronger > evidence for subgrouping than other kinds. ...subgrouping rests on the > assumption that shared similarities are unlikely to be due to chance. > However some kinds of similarities between languages are in fact due to > chance, i.e. the same changes do sometimes take place quite > independently in different languages. This kind of situation is often > referred to as parallel development or drift. The concept of distance automatically takes care of this problem. For example suppose we are looking at a protolangauge (PL) that has five features. Let us represent this as [1,1,1,1,1]. Now suppose three of the languages derived from this PL have A=[0,0,1,1,1], B=[0,1,1,1,0] and C=[1,1,1,0,0]. Now the distances between these are: d(A,B)= 3, d(A,C)=4, and d(B,C)=3. The maximum distance possible is 5, so we can obtain the similarities; s(A,B)=2, s(A,C)=1, s(B,C)=2 As can be seen from their features, B and C have jointly innovated the last feature, whereas A and B have jointly innovated the first feature. Now A and C have not jointly innovated anything and their similarity is 1 whereas the others are higher. To make it clearer we can simply compute their distances from the PL d(A,PL)=2, d(B,PL)=2, and d(C,PL)=2 and therefore on the similarity scale we have s(A,PL)=s(B,PL)=s(C,PL)=3 So they are all equally removed from PL whereas their relationships to each other is seen in the s(..) measures. > ... > In classifying languages into subgroups, you therefore need to avoid the > possibility that innovations in two languages might be due to drift or > parallel development. YOu an do this by looking for the following in > linguistic changes: > > (i) Changes that are particularly unusual. > (ii) Sets of several phonological changes, especially unusual changes > which would not ordinarily be expected to have taken place together. > (iii) Phonological changes which correspond to unconnected grammatical > or semantic changes. > ... > If two languages share common sporadic or irregular phonological change, > this provides even better evidence for subgrouping those two languages > together as the same irregular change is unlikely to take place twice > independently. Unfortunately, "unusual" here is not defined clearly. Does it mean "not occurring empirically" amongst the world's languages? > > p. 171 [Lexicostatistics and Glottochronology] > > Lexicostatistics is a technique that allows us to determine the degree > of relationship between two languages, simply by comparing the > vocabularies of the languages and determining the degree of similarity > between them. This method operates under two basic assumptions. The > first of these is that there are some parts of the vocabulary of > language that are much less subject lexical change than other parts, > i.e. there are certain parts of the lexicon in which words are less > likely to be completely replaced by non-cognate forms. The area of the > lexicon that is assumed to be more resistant to lexical change is > referred to as core vocabulary (or a basic vocabulary). It seems here that these assumptions belong only to those who practice lexicostatistics. Is that really true or is it only they who clearly state their assumptions while some of the others might be just muddling along? Or is it that now there are a plethora of beliefs and assumptions? > There is a second aspect to this first general assumption underlying the > lexicostatistical method, and that is the fact that this core of > relatively change-resistant vocabulary is the same for all languages. > The universal core vocabulary includes items such as pronouns, numerals, > body parts, geographical features, basic actions, and basic states. > Items like these are unlikely to be replaced by words copied from other > langauges, because all people, whatever their cultural differences, have > eyes, mouths, and legs, and know about the sky and clouds, the sun, and > the moon, stones, and trees and so on. Other concepts however may be > culture-specific. This can easily be fixed up. Just create another parameter snd use this parameter to change the first parameter. > ... > The second assumption that underlies the lexicostatistical method is > that the actual rate of lexical replacement in the core vocabulary is > more or less stable, and is therefore aboutg the same for all languages > over time. In peripheral vocabulary of course, the rate of lexical > replacement is not stable at all, and may be relatively fast or slow > depending on the nature of cultural contact between speakers of > different languages. This second assumption has been tested in 13 > languages for which there are written records going back over long > periods of time. It has been found that there has been an average > vocabulary retention of 80.5 percent every 1,000 years. This number can easily be changed for other languages based on more intelligent guesswork and model building. Indeed it should be done. > > p.173 [basic or core vocabulary] > The most popular list of this length is known as the Swadesh list, which > is named after the linguist Morris Swadesh who drew it up in the early > 1960s. > > p.181 > Once the percentage of cognate forms has been worked out, we can use the > following mathematical formula to work out the time depth, or the period > of separation of two languages; > > t = log C/(2*logR) > > In the formula above, t stands for the number of thousands of years that > two languages have been separated, C stands for the percentage of > cognates as worked out by comparing basic vocabularies, and R stands for > the constant change factor mentioned earlier (the value in this formula > is set at 0.85). Too bad he does not show where it comes from. > > p.183 > Firstly, there is the problem of deciding which words should be regarded > as core vocabulary and which should not. Obviously, it may be possible > for different sets of vocabulary to produce differing results. > > Another difficulty involves the actual counting of forms that are > cognate against those that are not cognate in basic vocabulary lists > from two different languages. > ... > Lexicostatisticians in fact rely heavily on what is often > euphemistically called the inspection method of determining whether two > forms are cognate or not in a pair of languages. What this amounts to is > that you are more or less free to apply intelligent guesswork as to > whether you think two forms are cognate or not. More candor. Yes, guesswork. OR should we call it a belief. Or should we call it an axiom or postulate. Why not? > ... > Of course, two different linguists can take the same lists from two > different languages > , and since there is no objective way of determining what should be > ticked 'yes' and what should be ticked 'no', it is possible that both > will come up with significantly different cognate figures at the end of > the exercise. > [p. 186 example of languages of Milne Bay area of Papua New Guinea] [minimal spanning tree can be drawn from these figures] Yes, I sketched on into my copy of the book. We can easily get a tree from this data. I can sketch it out if anyone is interested. It could be a good MS thesis. > p. 201 [causes of language change ] > > One famous linguist Otto Jesperson made a great deal of the importance >..... > Despite the obvious appeal of this argument as a major factor in > explaining language change, there are also several problems associated > with it. The first is that it is extremely difficult, perhaps even > impossible, to define explicitly what we mean by 'simplicity' in > language. Simplicity is clearly a relative term. Yes, and complexity is also difficult to define, but there is a whole field and science of complexity now, and simplicity can be defined from complexity. In fact, a measure of complexity appropriate for linguistics is desperately needed for many reasons. > p. 212 [observing language change, chapter 10] > > The concept of linguistic indeterminacy also relates to the idea of the > linguistic system as used by Saussure. He argued that in describing a > language (i.e. phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, clauses, and so on) > and describing the ways in which these units interrelate (i.e. the > grammatical rules for putting them together for making up larger units). > In talking about describing the system of a particular language, > Saussure is implying that for every language, there is one -- and only > one -- linguistic system. This is also another excellent idea. Unfortunately, many linguists seem to only repeat the words and not do anything about this. In fact, there is a way to do this, and some of it will be in my next paper. I already wrote about this on many lists, but unless someone did something about this and published it somewhere I did not see, there is nothing being done about it. This idea takes its clearest form in thermodynamics where we have intensive and extensive parameters. I wrote about this in my newest book for social scientists and especially linguists. I will be looking for a publisher soon. I hope I dont' get the same kind of review. I will have to have the IEEE or some other nonlinguistic entity publish it if this continues. Maybe I will have to do it myself. AT least it will be there for others to read 100 years from now. > p. 215 > One of the most influential linguists of the past few decades, Noam > Chomsky, expresses this view when he said that a grammar should describe > an 'ideal speaker-hearer relationship', and it should ignore factors > from outside the language itself (such as formality of a social > situation). But language is not an ideal system at all. Yes, more "idealization" like ideal gases, frictionless pulleys, massless springs etc of physics. A necessary evil. > > p. 227 [problems with traditional assumptions, chap. 11] > > Jones emphasized that it was similarities in the structure of the > Indo-European languages, rather than it was similarities between words, > that were important in determining language relationships. This > observation led to a new intellectual climate in the study of language > relationships, as scholars started looking instead for grammatical > similarities between languages to determine whether or not they should > be considered to be related. Lexical similarities, it was argued, were > poor evidence of genetic relationship, as similarities between > practically any word in any two languages can be established with enough > effort. Here again we run into the same problem. What is a structure? Is there no mathematical model of these "structures"? Yes there are. PLenty of them, about 400 pages worth. [Hubey,1994]. > > p. 232 > In reconstructing the history of languages, you therefore need to make > the important distinction between a systematic (or a regular) > correspondence and an isolated (or sporadic) correspondence. This is a > distinction that I did not make in Chapter 5 when I was talking about > the comparative method, but it is very important. Good heuristic way to do probability theory. > > p. 256 [Language Contact, chapter 12] > > The influence of one of the linguistic systems of an individual on the > other linguistic system of that individual is referred to in general as > interference. > > Interference can occur in the phonological system of a language, in its > semantics, or in its grammar. Phonological interference simply means the > carrying over of the phonological features of one language into the > other as an accent of some kind. > ... > p. 257 > Semantic interference can also be referred to as semantic copying, as > loan translation, or as calquing. A calque (or a semantic copy or a loan > translation) is when we do not copy a lexical item as such from one > language into another, but when just the meanings are transferred from > one language to the other, while at teh same time we use the > corresponding forms of the original language. How about if people spent 300 years speaking two languages until the two languages "fused". Is that possible? I know people (ignorant ones) who speak 2-3 languages and they speak them all the same way. I can imagine how a whole village of these 1,000 years ago could have created a new language from 2-3 other languages without trying. > p. 260 > There is a significant body of literature on the subject of linguistic > diffusion and convergence, which is based on the assumption that > languages can and do influence one another. The term diffusion is used > to refer to the spread of a particular linguistic feature from one > language to another (or, indeed to several other languages). > > p.262 > The diffusion of grammatical features in this way has caused some > linguists to question further the validity and basic assumptions of the > whole comparative method. Some languages appear to have undergone so > much diffusion in the lexicon and the grammar that it can be difficult > to decide which protolanguage they are derived from. According to the > comparative method as I have described it in this volume, it is possible > for a language to be derived from only a single protolanguage, yet some > linguists have found it necessary to speak of mixed languages, which > seem to derive from two different protolanguages at once. This is probably another important development and it is good that Crowley writes about this. At least now the poor student does not go away with the feeling that all is carved on stones. > p.270 > Many linguists have been struck by the fact that pidgin and creole > languages often show strong parallels in their structure with their > substrate languages than their superstrate languages. Extremely important for language mixing. Similar to the way in which we can create degrees of typology we can also think of language contact in degrees. From one extreme in which only the superstrate wins to the other extreme in which the substrate wins out we have a whole continuum of types/degrees of changes. So all languages can then be considered to be "mixed language" but to different degrees. This problem is even better than the present problem. > p.312 [cultural reconstruction, chapter 13] > > While many attempts at paleolinguistic comparisons fall far short of > scientific respectability, the writings of Johanna Nichols since the > mid-1980s have attracted considerable interest among some linguists, as > well as archaeologists and others interested in establishing > relationships at much greater-time depths than is possible using the > comparative method. > > Nichols' approach is more akin to population science in that she does > not aim to study the evolution of individual languages, or even closely > related groups of languages. Rather she aims to study the history of > 'populations' of languages. By this, she means that she considers large > groupings of languages together, dealing not with particular features > of individual languages, but broader general features of language > groupings. Thus, she considers for example, the languages of Australia > or Africa as a whole. She pays attention not to whether structural > features are present or absent, but to what are the statistical > frequencies and distributions of features are within these larger > populations of languages. > > Such linguistic markers are considered to be akin to biological markers > in that they can be used to identify affinities between populations at > considerable time-depths. She argues that if, in the languages of a > continent (or some other large geographical area) a feature shows up > with a high frequency, this distribution is not something that is due to > recent diffusion. When several markers of this type are shared, this is > taken as being indicative of historical affinity. Of course, such > features must be known to be typologically unrelated. > ... > The actual application and interpretation of Nichols' method is complex > and it is unlikely to become the standard model by which individual > historical linguists will attempt to study linguistic relationships. Nichols is doing with mathematics what other linguists do with words. Here Crowley fails to understand what Nichols is doing but only to a degree. He does, however, have at least a good understanding of the importance of what she is doing, which is much more than what many other linguists are apparently capable of. Here endeth the review! -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 17 03:20:56 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:20:56 -0500 Subject: test Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> test -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 17 03:30:54 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:30:54 -0500 Subject: Linguistics and Circularity Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> IT has been two years, he still hasn't understood what circular reasoning means. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "H. Mark Hubey" Subject: Re: linguistic features and Circularity Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 18:50:21 -0500 Larry Trask wrote: > > --------------------Original message------------------ > > On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > > > 5. Over the long-period, beyond what standard linguistics > > methodology allegedly cannot have anything to say, we have to use > > other methods to arrive at unconventional (but logical and rational) > > conclusions. Why is it that only some features of languages are used > > for geneticity when languages have so many other characteristics? > > Because only certain features are valuable in recovering ancestry. This happens to belong to the generalities concerning methods of HL. We have a case like this: A: I am Napoleon and this is general Marat who can verify it. B: I am General Marat as Napoleon said, and I verify that he is Napoleon. This is the circularity which for some reason does not seem to get through although I have been explaining for years now since the days on the language evolution list. It is related to a form of argument which a linguist pulled when he wrote to me: "This method says that languages A and B are related but we know it is not so." This method of course, was, the use of unobjectionably objective mathematics. OF course, it is backwards, aside from being circular. IT goes like this: 1. We have some heuristic rules which we use. 2. According to these heuristic rules, IE languages are all genetically related. 3. Then using this idea backwards: since the IE languages are proven to be genetically related, we now know using this knowledge that the heuristics rules are the one and only one way of "recovering ancestry". Mr. Trask, I am not going to make the other mistakes I made on other lists and let this get out of hand. NO evasion, no bluffing, no argument by repetetion, no argument from ignorance. Only the blunt truth. Which part of this is not clear? Perhaps we can now discuss these heuristic rules. And please no arguments of the type "it is obvious". Let us at least do a little background reading like epistemology, philosophy of science, or even a little logic even if not probability theory. PS. I deleted the rest of the red herrings. I will reply to them separately and under a separate thread so we don't continue to get mixed up in endless labrynths and confusion. Please answer the post directly. Which part don't you understand? -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 17 03:41:20 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:41:20 -0500 Subject: Linguistics and Logic Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> More fun reading. Since the linguistics community itself does not clean up its own house, it looks like it has to be cleaned by outside forces. Rocket scientists (which is a euphemism for physicists and electrical engineers) completely changed Wall Street, but they won't do the same for linguistics because there is no money in it. A stray pseudo-rocket scientist (yours truly) has decided that he will overcome forces of darkness in linguistics single-handedly :-) This is just the beginning. Enjoy. BTW, just in case it is not yet clear, this and the previous post were rejected by the moderator. People still wonder how Nazis or Communists grab power and hold it. It's easy, as can be seen. You need some well-meaning and ignorant collaborators who adore you. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "H. Mark Hubey" Subject: Re: linguistic features and Logic Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 19:19:40 -0500 Larry Trask wrote: > > There are countless inflectional systems available for use in >languages, > and countless possible phonological forms for expressing any given > meaning. Consequently, data in these areas are typically useful in > recovering ancestry. As I promised, here is a separate thread. Your argument is of the type: there are countless white people, so whiteness cannot be used as a marker of geneticity. But of course,it can be. I am white and my whiteness is from my parents and is genetic. Even if 80% of the world's humans are white, whiteness is still genetic. And there are not "countless inflectional systems". There are more people than inflectional systems, and they are finite. I don't know about you but I am doing science, not metaphorics or English literature and certainly one cannot create science via hyperbole. It is quite useful of course for political demogoguery and poetry. Additionally, the word "inflectional" as usually used by people like you also applies to agglutinational. Because of that Comrie suggests that the word "fusional" should be used. I like to use "infixing" and reserve postfixing for agglutination where only postfixes/suffixes are used. And finally, the "inflectional" systems might have arisen only once and mostly IE or AA. One can see in von Soden, who thinks precisely the opposite of your claim, i.e. that something as rare and strange as inflection probably was invented only once and spread and that this makes AA and IE relatives in the long past. Obviously most of this is detail that should be discussed after the basics are agreed upon. I wrote this only because there is a tendency in discussions in linguistics to constantly go off on a tangent and get buried in useless detail, for example the "lack of initial r in Akkadian and Hittite". I read this in a book on Hittite from OI or Puhvel (I don't recall which) and which I posted recently to sci.lang. Besides all this, what we call Sumerian or Akkadian comes from accross and over centuries so that the languages would have changed. Of course, if the fact that they were changing was due to the substratum then all of that has to be taken into account. The lack of initial liquids or their overall weak representation in the ME before IE and AA has too much evidence to be shoved aside by evasion. We will get to this again, I am sure, after the general ideas get through. > > (See Crowley,1992 and especially Nichols' works on this.) > > But Nichols's work is not really intended to set up language >families: her purposes are otherwise. I'm afraid I don't know > what "Crowley (1992)" might be, but, if it's the earlier > edition >of Terry Crowley's HL > textbook, I don't understand why it's being cited. A thief was hawking a stolen carpet. He yelled out "who will give me a hundred dinars for this?" in the bazaar. Someone approached him and bought the carpet. A compatriot approached him later and asked "Why did you sell that for a hundred dinars?" "Uhhh," said the thief "Is there a number bigger than 100?" Idries Shah, in one of his books on Sufis. What you see in Nichols' work is not what I see. This phenomenon is related to a logical fallacy called "argument from ignorance" and should be called "argument from lack of imagination". People think they understand something if they have seen it many many times or someone can create an analogy to something they have seen many many times. That means if we have a "model" of some kind we feel good about it. People don't really have any idea how trees work, but they are not amazed because there are so many of them and they have seen them so often. But if they see a computer doing graphics or talking they are amazed. I have seen many airplanes fly but they amaze me all the time despite the fact that I have a PhD in engineering. Bertrand Russell was heckled after a speech by someone who said something like "we all know that nothing can stay up in the air. Do you expect us to believe that the earth stays up in the sky without support? Everybody knows that it is supported by a giant turtle." Russell thought finally he had an answer "well then, tell me, what makes the turtle stay up in the sky?" "Ehh," said the womAn, "you can't fool me like that. Everyone knows, that it is turtles all the way down." During the last century when the first train was making its way thru Germany the train had stopped in some village. The curious villages gathered around looking at the locomotive. One of them approached the engineer and said "We've been thinking. We think there is a horse inside that locomotive." The engineer went thru the explanation of expansion of steam, Carnot cycles, etc. The villagers walked away and talked amongst themselves and then came back and one of them said "We don't believe that stuff about energy, pressure, entropy and all that. We still think that there is a horse inside the locomotive." Exasparated the engineer asked "Tell me then, what makes the horse go?". The peasants talked to each other for a while and came back "There are four little horses inside the hooves." This is the problem of "exorcising the ghost from the machine". Arguments of the type you have been trying for the last N years do not impress me at all. They still don't. AFter we first understand why the heuristic method works (if it does) and where are its faults, and where are its weaknesses and how it can be improved and how we can use propositional logic and probabilistic logic correctly to infer things we can discuss these. I think for the time being, all they do is distract. I skipped the rest. They can be dealt with later. I first offered data assuming that you could put the pieces where they belong. Since it doesn't work, we have to first discuss other things until we reach the point where the importance of the data and where it belongs and how it affects conclusions can be better appreciated. Please do not write things to digress. Let's stick to the main problem at hand. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 17 03:44:26 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:44:26 -0500 Subject: Prize Offering Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> > Subject: $100 PRize Offer > Message-ID: > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > content-length: 1220 > > I hereby offer $100 to anyone who can convince Larry Trask to > join the mailing list and see how far bluffing can > take him on this list without a moderator to play bodyguard > for him. > > This is a bona fide offer, and I will gladly pay. > > You are hereby given permission to circulate this email as > far and as wide as you might want to. > > The truth of the matter is that R.L. Trask actually insults > the linguistics community when he gets away with what he does. > He does so because he knows very well that his audience is > ignorant and he can pull wool over their eyes. This will become > obvious eventually to everyone except fellow dinosaurs. > > He did this once on Histling with the Birthday PRoblem and > once with Marilyn and the Goat. My response got deleted because > it was perfectly well-suited to the con-man bluff on his part. > > Enjoy the show. The fun is just beginning. Last time I took > time off from my work, I started an electronic newsletter and > almost completely wrecked a mailing list which was run by > buffoons. I have finished my 5-yr book. It can be found on the > Barnes & Noble website for sale (The Diagonal Infinity, World > Scientific). Now I will have a little bit more time to devote to > linguistics. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Sat Mar 20 04:45:24 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 23:45:24 -0500 Subject: Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis (dates) Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > > >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > > >Linear Ware Culture raced ahead of agriculture. > > -- nyet. LBK spread rapidly, and so did agriculture -- all the way from > Hungary to northern France in a few centuries. That left a lot of > uncultivated ground in between, and of course hunting continued right down to > historic times as a supplement, gradually decreasing in importance. > > Bottom line: they were farmers. It took less than 500 years for farmers to > colonize the entire loess soil belt. This shouldn't be surprising. A human > population faced with an open land frontier doubles every 25 years or so. > > 1,000 > 2,000 > 4,000 > 8,000 > 16,000 > 32,000 2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 25*64=1,600 years. Starting with Adam and Eve, and doubling every 25, after 64 doublings is 1,600 years and the population is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 because that is what 2^64 is computed to be. > -- and that's in only 150 years and starting from a very low base. Can't get much lower than Adam and Eve. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Thu Mar 25 02:50:10 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 21:50:10 -0500 Subject: [Fwd: [Fwd: MONTY HALL GAME ODDS....]] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Just in case, someone brings up this Monty Hall problem again, here is the solution. We might even discuss Bayes Theorem (formula). Some philosophers are Bayesians and reason using probability theory instead of logic. So the usage of this formula is very important. Disclaimer: I hope the solution is correct :-) > From: Ben Bullock > Organization: http://www.hayamasa.demon.co.uk/ > Newsgroups: sci.stat.math > I've corrected this solution to the Monty Hall problem. > > I do believe that this solution is correct. > > This solution is partly based, by the way, on one found in a book > called `Understanding Statistics' by Upton and Cook, which is a book > for teaching A-level statistics published by Oxford University Press. > > The `Monty Hall' problem > ======================== > > In a certain game show, behind one of three doors 1, 2 and 3 is a > valuable prize. A contestant must pick one door to open. Only if he > picks the right door will he win the prize. The contestant picks one > door. The host then opens one of the two doors which the contestant > didn't pick, and shows the contestant that there is no prize behind > it. He then asks the contestant if he would like to switch to the > remaining, unopened, door, instead of the one he first picked. What > should the contestant do? > > The paradox > =========== > > Argument 1 (`no point switching') runs as follows: > > ``If the prize was equally likely to be behind any of the doors, then > opening one of the wrong doors only shows the contestant that the > prize is not behind that door. Therefore it is equally likely to be > behind either of the other doors.'' > > Argument 2 (`always switch') runs as follows: > > ``Two out of three times the contestant picks the wrong door. In > those cases, the host will show him the other wrong door. If the > contestant always switches to the other unopened door, he will be > switching away from an empty door to the prize door 2 out of 3 times. > If he doesn't switch, he will loose 2 out of 3 times. So he will have > better odds of winning if he always switches''. > > Which of these arguments is right? > > The solution > ============ > > Neither of the above two arguments is exactly wrong or exactly right. > Both of them contain a hidden assumption about what the host will do. > (This is a good counterexample which shows the danger of `hand waving' > arguments such as the above two). To correctly understand this > problem it is necessary to use Bayes' theorem. > > Suppose that the contestant chooses door 3 initially, and that the > host opens door 2 (in any other case the result is the same, just by > relabelling doors). The chance of the prize being behind door 3, > given that the host opened door 2, is, by Bayes theorem, > > P(O2|P3) P(P3) > P(P3|O2) = -------------- > P(O2) > > P(O2|P3) P(P3) > = ------------------------------------------------ (1) > P(O2|P1) P(P1) + P(O2|P2) P(P2) + P(O2|P3) P(P3) > > where the events are > > O2: host opens door two, > P1: prize is behind door 1, > P2: prize is behind door 2, > P3: prize is behind door 3. > > If the prize is behind door 2 the host won't open door 2 of course: > > P(O2|P2) = 0 > > If the prize is behind door 1 the host must open door 2: > > P(O2|P1) = 1 > > The probabilities of the prize being behind the different doors are > > P(P1) = P(P2) = P(P3) = 1/3. > > If we abbreviate P(O2|P3), the chance of the host opening door 2 when > the prize is behind door 3, as > > P(O2|P3) = p, > > then > > 1/3 p > P(P3|O2) = ----------- > 1/3 p + 1/3 > > p > = ----- > 1 + p > > from equation (1) above. If the host opened door 2, the prize must be > behind either door 1 or door 3, so > > P(P1|O2) + P(P3|O2) = 1 > > and > > P(P1|O2) = 1 - P(P3|O2) > > p > = 1 - ----- > 1 + p > > 1 > = -----. > 1 + p > > Now, the contestant doesn't know what p is: it can be anything between > 0 and 1. Consider the possibilities: > > If p = 0, > --------- > > in other words, if the host never opens door 2 when the > prize is behind door 3, then the probability that the prize is behind > door 1, given that the host opened door 2, > > 1 > P(P1|O2) = ----- > 1 + 0 > > = 1, > > so the prize *must* be behind door 1. > > If 0 < p < 1, > ------------- > > then > > 1/(1+0) > P(P1|O2) > 1/(1+1), > > or > > 1 > P(P1|O2) > 1/2, > > in other words, the prize is more likely to be behind door 1 than door > 3, and so although we are not sure where the prize is, there is a > benefit to changing doors. > > If p = 1/2, > ----------- > > in other words, if the host is equally likely to pick either door 1 or > door 2 to open when the prize is behind door 3, then > > 1 > P(P1|O2) = ------- > 1 + 1/2 > > = 2/3. > > This is the hidden assumption in argument 2 above. > > If p = 1, > --------- > > in other words, if the host will certainly open door 2, not door 1, > when the prize is behind door 3, then P(P1|O2) = 1/2, and there is no > benefit in switching. This is the hidden assumption in argument 1 > above. > > The contestant's `best guess' > ============================= > > The `best guess', given that the contestant does not know the value of > p, is to switch, since even in the case p = 1 this does not decrease > his chance of winning, and in the case p < 1 it increases it. > > -- > Ben Bullock (home page http://www.hayamasa.demon.co.uk/) <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Mon Mar 29 00:00:17 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 19:00:17 -0500 Subject: McCray Review & Discussion Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> This is not a review. Comments may be posted. When comments get posted, then it can be considered to be a review. ------------------------cut here --------------------------------- McCray, Stanley, (1988) Advanced Principles of Historical Linguistics, American University Studies, Linguistics, Vol. 6, Peter Lang Publishing, New York p.1 Linguistics, like any other science, has been riddled through with various dogmatic practices and methodological subdivisions. Although it may be claimed that the formulation of theories ultimately contributes to new insights about language, it seems nevertheless that the proliferation of models which are sometimes repetetive, sometimes contradictory, sometimes meaningless, has done little to alleviate the linguist's frustration over the lack of a cogent way of looking at languages which is at least as impressive in its treatment of the data as it is in its metatheoretical elegance. p. 3 First, if any universal principles about language are to be unearthed, how wide a body of evidence should be used? Obviously, no one person is competent to deal with all the world's languages. Yet even within a particular group of languages, the question is how much to include in an analysis comes up again and again. Second, how far can linguistics progress beyond explaining ungrammatical utterances or reconstructing isolated pieces of language? Third, what is the source of the methodological limitations in constructing linguistic theories? Finally, how well does linguistic science fit into the overall structure of scientific and philosophical discourse? ... The goal of this work is to suggest at least a "methodological mindset" which may ultimately provide some answers. p.6 It is a well-known fact that, even though the word "system" dominates many discussions of present day linguistics, the concept is one that is not always easy to make precise....Therefore if the motto of modern synchronic linguistics must be `language is both a system', the motto of of diachronic linguistics must be `language is both a system and not a system'. The desire to reject the notion of system in language is documented in more recent proclamations. Note, for example, Lass 1980: "In fact, even though `system' is used very loosely in describing various aspects of language, it seems doubtful that the term in the mathematical sense, is appropriate; its use in linguistics can never be anything more than a false -- if sometimes useful -- metaphorical extension. I do not think that languages are systems in the technical (systems-theoretical) sense, or that they can be profitably viewed diachronically if they were." Based on these two citations, it seems that the only difference in these views separated by twenty years (in which both general and linguistic science have seen many advances) is that whereas Steblin-Kamenskij views the notion of system as a "vague" concept (a strange statement from an obviously well-educated man who must have been aware of the history of science), Lass, on the other hand, feels that it is not the concept itself that is vague, but rather the way linguistics uses it that leaves something to be desired. Both scholars, however, appear to agree that it is impossible to talk about system in historical linguistics. Obviously, both men offer their statements in reaction to the time-honored principle of the systematicity of language which was emphasized for the first time (at least by Western scholars) by de Saussure in his outline of a series of constructs for synchronic linguistics. Given though the enormous amount of research about language structure, and in view of well-attested rule-governed linguistic phenomena, it seems rather odd that in our age two such scholars should reach the rather depressing conclusion that language, in certain significant manifestations, may not represent a system at all. Such a conclusion, if valid, causes out the common assertion that linguistics is indeed a science. I find particularly interesting the comments of Lass, whose thesis against the systematicity of language is made, at least in part, with reference to some of the ideas expressed in an important work by Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1967). Writing on the development of what he calls the general systems theory, he outlines a series of axioms he views applicable not only to the physical sciences, but to the social sciences as well. .. [von Bertalanffy's ideas] First and foremost is the notion of system in general and the structure of language in particular. A system may be defined as a set of elements tied together by empirically verifiable interrelations. This is, obviously, a loose and general definition. Von Bertalanffy defines it thus: "A system can be defined as a set of elements standing in interrelation. Interrelation means that elements p stand in relation R, so that the behavior of an element p in R is different from its behavior in another relation R'. If the behaviors in R and R' are not different, there is no interaction, and the elements behave independently with respect to the relations R and R'". It is evident that human languages are systems in this regard. For example, while any two languages may share certain features (such as front rounded vowels, genitive case, perfective aspect, etc.), the precise relation of these features to other elements will differ in the two languages. Such a notion of interrelation lies at the heart of linguistic science because it defines the structural integrity around which a language is constructed. Moreover, it is the concept of systemic integrity which is, as we shall see in the course of this book, one of the most important ideas for linguistics, comparative or otherwise. ... p.10 For example, Hamp (19740 observed: "Most instances of really interesting linguistic change involve multiple changes of various sorts: phonological, syntactic, semantic" (141). In a later (1981) piece, he observed that reconstruction must take into consideration all levels of grammar: "At present, we know relatively little about the relation between changes in different areas of linguistic structure", (1984:301). p. 11 Linguists are quite fond of citing Kuhn in the hope of giving scientific legitimacy to their theorizing; rejection of the alternative possibilities offered by the general systems approach runs counter to Kuhn and scientific thinking in general. It has happened too often, in both synchronic and diachronic studies, that, once certain methodological lines have been drawn, communication between various factions becomes at best polemic, if it continues at all. p.12 it is important, given this, to review some basic facts about language: 1. Language represents a rule-governed system. The subsystemic components may be described under phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and the lexicon. 2. Although the notion of interrelation amongst elements has not been overtly stated, it is nevertheless within common parlance to discuss such notions as morphophonemics, morphosyntax, phonotactics, etc 3. Many of the relationships (and let it be known here that I use the term "relationship" as a generic term denoting both relations and functions, which must be distinguished) described under 2 may be accounted for by means of laws and rules. Some of these latter, however are problematic. 4. In addition to the pure linguistic subsystems and their interactions, tehre exist several other important systemic components which are at least as complex in their own right. These are the psycho-biological and the socio-linguistic. 5. The nature of interaction between elements described under (1) and (4) may be accounted for in formal terms. p.14 The reader will note, I hope, that I shun a distinction between "description" and "explanation" in this work - I believe that a more general "accounting for" is more useful. I do this because most of the discussion regarding the difference between description and explanation in linguistics is quite trivial when compared to the task at hand. Extended debate over whether we should be trying to describe or explain something leads merely to another proliferation of essentially useless metatheory of the type: "How does one go about talking about something?" Such ruminations, when carried to the ridiculous extremes documented in present-day linguistics and semiotics, only give rise to pseudo-intellectual, quasi-scientific circumnavigation of the core of data that should constitute the focus of the discussion. p. 62 Now, the use of typology is a difficult thing. For one, what constitutes plausible typology? Again, there is the danger of relying too heavily upon those with which one is most familiar... Note, for instance, the use of typology as seen in Schmalstieg(1980). One of the most intriguing aspects of this study is his use of examples from outside of Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Georgian, etc - in judging the validity of his statements regarding PIE structures. Yet, in defending his view that PIE developed, rather than lost inflection, he makes this rather curious statement: "On the grounds of language typology, it will probably be objected that languages we know tend to lose inflectional endings rather than to gain them. As I have pointed out.....language typology and universals are very weak arguments" (23). Thus, here he has suddenly grown suspicious of the very type of argumentation he had employed quite effectively (and which he goes on to employ) throughout his work..... But, I believe that his hesitation in categorically accepting typological arguments results from two facts. The first is that typological evaluations should be carried out from inside out, i.e. we should compare the reconstruction first to the typology of the particular language family under legitimate investigation, thence to a macro-group closer in structure, and finally to a more remote one, and so forth. Thus typologies radiate out, from the most known linguistic structures to the least. This procedure is especially valuable in reconstructing remote periods of a language, since random sampling of world langauges may cause on to reconstruct something that has little relevance to the original structure of the macro-dialectal group in question. Second, the use of typologies in itself is not sufficient as an evaluative principle, since it seems that several methods should be used in any sytematic evaluation for the purposes of cross-checking. The implementation of typological evidence can be unreliable because too wide a body of comparative evidence may at once confirm and refute various arguments, as we have already seen. And, even if we believe that there exists an overwhelmingly convincing typological trend, who can say whether or not that trend was always in force in an earlier stage of the language. p. 67 Generally, traditional views of PIE phonology have posited larger phonemic inventories than more recent formulations. The role of secondary combinatory phenomena is greatly reduced in these methodologies. This orientation is represented in the work of ..... Szmerenyi(1970). p.68 The laryngeal theory has come to have as many refutors as it has followers. Schmalstieg (1980) offers an alternative to both traditionalist and laryngealist views. This theory depends heavily on the sequencing of layers of pre-PIE and various slices of PIE before dialectical differentiation. p.71 Finally, the typological argument bears against the theory, at least in the opinion of Szmerenyi(1967) who notes that laryngeal theory assumes an original vowel system consisting of one vowel. Although it has been argued that certain Caucasian languages have such vocalic systems, he argues that the exact patterning is not the same in the two language families; in fact, he observes that most Caucasian languages possess more than one vowel. ..... Thus, Hittite material notwithstanding, few sure confirmation of the laryngeal theory exist. Nevertheless, the partial confirmation provided by Hittite does, in some cases, provide, attractive possibilities for the positing of the existence of certain pre-historic consonants. p.81 As we have seen above, certain researchers do not believe in an original separation between noun and verb, and from this point of view the following conclusions have been drawn: 1) PIE was an agglutinative language 2) PIE was a reduced-type ergative language 3) PIE was a topic prominent language. I think that (1) is fairly reasonable to assume if one believes in an early monothematic structure. The basic assumption behind (2) and (3) is that traditional distinction between subject and object is not relevant. p. 82 >From the standpoints of typology and diachronic recapitulation, these non-traditional notions may be justified especially as regards (1) since many IE languages show evidence of agglutination of particles - indeed, I feel that this interplay with particles is quite important for IE syntactic and semantic proto-structure .. Anderson, J.M. and C. Jones (1974) Historical Linguistics I. Amsterdam: North Holland. Hamp, Eric (1974) The major focus in reconstruction and change. In Anderson and Jones, 1974b, 58-67. Lass, Roger (1980) On explaining linguistic change. Cambridge: University Press. Schmalstieg,Wm. (1980) Indo-European linguistics: a new synthesis. University Park: Penn State Press. Steblin-Kaminskij, M.I. (1982) Myth: the Icelandic Sagas and Eddas. Ann Arbor:Karoma. Szmerenyi, O. (1967) The `new' look of Indo-European, Phonetica, 17. 65-69. Von Bertalanffy, Ludwig (1967) General systems theory. New York:Braziller. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Mon Mar 29 01:03:43 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 20:03:43 -0500 Subject: Lass, part 1 of 3: Electronic Virtual Review Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> This was meant originally to be a review of the book for the Linguist, but when I finished typing in the parts I wanted to make comments on, it was already 80 KB. It was too long and nothing that long could be published in the Linguist. I probably will be tied up with other things this summer and beyond, so I decided instead to 'release' this to . I would like to make comments on these later, but everybody else is welcome to do so. The material in braces {..} is probably all mine and was meant to leave markers for myself. ----------------------Part 1 of 3 ------------------------ Lass, Historical Linguistics, 1998. p. 25 The cornerstone of historical rationality is this simple proposition: there are no miracles. This reflects the epistemological stance generally called uniformitarianism: the principles governing the world (=the domain of enquiry) were the same in the past as they are now. General Uniformity Principle Nothing that is now impossible in principle was ever the case in the past...The principle can (with some risk and a lot of tact) be taken further. Not only did nothing impossible ever happen, but in general the most likely things have always been the most likely to happen. There is a second or derivative Uniformity Principle, which is statistical or probabilistic: Principle of Uniform Probabilities The general distribution of likelihood in a given domain was always the same in the past as it is now. Again, this must not be taken simplistically. The likelihood of a resident of New York being a Yiddish-speaker in 1800 was not the same as it is now, that of a Londoner having a telephone was zero in 1856, but is quite high now, and so on. p.28 General Uniformity Principle No linguistic state of affairs (structure, inventory, process, etc) can have been the case only in the past. Uniform Probabilities Principle The (global, cross-linguistic) likelihood of any linguistic state of affairs (structure, inventory, process, etc) has always been roughly the same as it is now. ... Now one possible objection to this kind of uniformity argument (cf. Matthews 1981, Lass 1986a:233ff) must be taken account of. It goes like this: how good really is `the best of our knowledge'? Surely nobody has examined all the languages spoken in the world at present (not to mention all past ones, including those that vanished without a trace, and all future ones). {This is where the model is really needed. The probabilities and etc come from the model. i.e. low number of phonemes in the past, etc, consonant-clusters in Europe etc} Therefore the argument is not based on knowledge at all, but on ignorance; it's only failure to recognize the obvious (even necessary) limitations of our knowledge of the `total set of human languages' that allows this smugness. The counterargument is essentially philosophical. All human knowledge is flawed, provisional and corrigible, which is what makes scholarship of any kind worth doing. p. 104 {Relatedness, ancestry and comparison} p. 105 Any one could be true for a given case: there are coincidences, like Modern Greek mati and Malay mata `eye'...or Rumanian and Lau (Austronesian) dori `to desire'. p.106 Chance (a last, not first resort if we're looking for an interesting architecture) is virtually ruled out by multiple sets with strong internal resemblance, but none to other such sets....We are left with common ancestry. As a first approximation, a family is a set of languages with enough marked and pervasive similarities for us to want to consider them to be `genetically related'. That is, a language family is a lineage, which means there was a common parent. Oversimply, they were once the same language. The idea of linguistic `descent', i.e. monogenesis and subsequent differentiation is an ancient one; the locus classicus in the Judeo-Christian tradition is the Babel story. p.108 The notion of some kind of relationship between languages other than monogenesis, specifically the possibility of multiple (unrelated) lineages seems to have taken root after the introduction into the west of Hebrew grammatical studies in the sixteenth century (Percival 1987).... We ought to note also that the idea of relatedness [of Conrad Gesner] was based on essentially (as with Jones) on phenotypic resemblances, even cultural ones. One of the triumphs of later comparative method was the transcendence of a superficial (phenotypic) notion of `similarity', and the development of a quite different methodology, based to be sure on `shared properties', but not on obvious similarities. It was this (largely but not exclusively: there are clear adumbrations in Sajnovics for instance) nineteenth-century innovation that made truly genetic approach to language filiation possible. p. 109 ...while metaphors of `parenthood', lineal relationship, etc are useful and indeed necessary in historical linguistic discourse, the unmarked form of linguistic parentage is parthenogenetic. We assign languages to a family first because they (intuitively) have so many have consistent similarities that we reject chance or borrowing as the causes; but we also recognize that the family members are still sufficiently distinct to be named as individuals. Different sets establish different language families. Historically, similarities of the requisite type suggest common ancestry; differences within similarity-sets suggest, in Darwin's famous phrase, `descent with modification'. p.110 Evolving systems (probably in any empirical domain) are characterized by what is known in mathematical theory of (nonlinear) dynamical systems (popularly `chaos theory') as `sensitive dependence on initial conditions'. The smallest differences in initial conditions may, in the later development of any pair of sublineages starting from (essentially) the same point have enormous consequences. In biotic and cultural systems, this connects with a property called path-dependency: `isolated populations... must tend to diverge even when they start from the same initial condition and evolve in similar environments' (Boyd & Richerson 1992:186). The key here is `similar': given any initial isolation whatever, and sufficiently complex and hence contingentlcy-laden landscape over which the original split populations develop, no two evolutionary trajectories (as wholes) will ever be identical. Since the very fact of initial `isolation' (whatever causes it) means that the initial conditions will always be slightly diffferent, linguistic evolution will by definition be subject to massive contingency, which guarantees its genuine historicity. {He's adding this bit about isolation etc. the connection to nonlinear DEs is neither immediate nor obvious. He does not explain how these systems can be represented as trajectories} {we can consider members of a language family simply as sample functions of a stochastic process in N dimensions! Why do we have to give each sample function a name ?} Historicity then implies some kind of `irreversibility'. {No, it does not. He makes this up. Explain the Einstein Brownian motion problem and Fokker-Planck, Kolmogorov, and entropy.} On the macro-scale this is indeed the case for linguistic evolution: there are frequent `repetetions' of sorts but (except at a certain micro-scale..) they are never total..... {Are there only two scales? what are they based on?} Historically evolved entities at a certain scale (see below) are contingently individual, hence not repeatable; the topography of the epigenetic landscapes over which they emerge and d___lop is too complex and locally differentiated to allow exact repetition. The arrow of evolutionary time (biological, linguistic, cultural) is not of course thermodynamic (entropy-increasing); but it is qualitative. {Hard to understand what he means!} And historicity itself acts as its own guarantee of both continuity and ever-increasing differentiation, because any given state is the product of all prior one.... Irreversibility and increasing differentiation (in short historical `uniqueness') then may be functions of the complexity of initial conditions or system structure or both. This criterion seems to fail at one linguistic micro-level: in phonological change. Here the vocabulary of elements is (comparatively) small, and what look like exact repetitions are indeed not uncommon. We often seem to get evolutionary reversals or retrograde changes, where some phonological category X goes to Y (and to Z...) and then X or Y is generated again. p.113 In biosystematics of the type called cladistic (<><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Mon Mar 29 01:06:05 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 20:06:05 -0500 Subject: Lass: Part 2 of 3; Electronic Review Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Lass, Historical Linguistics, 1998. -------------Part 2 of 3 -------------------------------------- p. 215 The Nature of Reconstruction This chapter deals in more detail with phonological reconstruction, and includes some consideration of the rather different kinds of problems that may arise outside of phonology. p.217 [an example} So given correspondences of the type {p,f,0} we ought to make two reconstructive assumptions (regardless of the attestation in our corpus} 1. A correspondance {C,0} where C is some non-glottal voiceless consonant implies a pathway C > h > 0. 2. Therefore the zero-dialects went through an /h/ stage. ...A theoretical imperative generates occult complexity, which surfaces as history.,,,In this case I invoe a fairly conventional lenition hierarchy (Lass & Anderson 1975;ch.5) which can be illustrated with the velars: ... These are the guiding assumptions 1. Ceteris paribus, movement down the hierarchy is more likely than up. 2. The lower a segment is on the hierarchy, the more likely a further descent (`inherent weakness', or zero as attractor) 3. Generally, changes tend to proceed one step at a time (assuming the `steps' represent from one `universal category space' to another. Historical evidence for these particular constraints is close to overwhelming (Lass 1978:ch.6) but the type-residues left by historical change in particular instances may look quite different. This is one of the crucial historical/synchronic dividing lines: change can leave or distorted or misleading traces in the data which require principled sorting. What warrants this procedure ('principle overrides data') is that at least in particular cases, and in enough of them, it has considerable empirical backing. Again and again, so often that we're inclined to think of it as the norm, if we look hard enough we find material that justifies the hidden sequences in particular cases. And the more such successes we have, the more confident we can feel about invoking the techniques in cases with less information. Fortunately, the micro-dialectology and micro-history of many languages will provide the information we need; though when a family is represented by a small number of distantly connected and highly differentiated languages the relative roles of principle and data are skewed in the direction of the former. p.221 Quanta and phonetic gradualism: a few suggestions I have been making a pitch for the venerable principle of gradualism (nature non facit saltum). In biology it is associated with Darwin, and is enshrined in the general preference in modern evolutionary theory for `micro-mutation' as opposed to `saltation' as the source of major apomorphies, even radical taxonomic distinguishers (Gould 1983,Ayala 1983) It would be nice to have a hard theory of the size of the units or `quanta' of phonological change...What is a permissible step in change depends on some antecedent theory of primitives. If the smallest theoretically significant phonological primitive is the (binary) distinctive feature (Jacobsonian, or Chomsky/Hallean, or whatever), then obviously no changes can be any smaller than the size of such a feature. p. 228 Projection again: conventions and justification 1. process naturalness 2. system naturalness 3. simplicity 4. phonetic legality 5. family consistency 6. oddity condition 7. portmaneau reconstruction p.237 Many Uralic languages show a phenomenon called `consonant gradation', in which particular consonants in certain syllable-configurations have different `grades'.... p.238 But there are two apparent violations of the `one-step' principle of descent down the hierarchy: /p/ > /v/ involves two stages, and /k/ > 0 traverses the entire hierarchy in one step. There is an apparent difference between what must have been the historical situation, and its synchronic residue... p.270 Phonetic realism: the art of coarse transcription {example given of pig...} Coarsely, this means that if we met a Proto-Indo-European speaker we'd expect that his word for `pig' would begin with some kind of voiceless labial stop. A symbol like [p] in this case is a claim that a decent phonetician would want to use IPA [p] in notating at least a good part of the initial stretch of this utterance (and hence for the type of which the utterance would furnish a token); and that there would be no real temptation to use symbols like [t,k] on one dimension or [b,beta,w] on another. p.272 Mary Haas (1969:31) observes that `any language is an actual or potential protolanguage'. This of course is trivially true: if a language survives across even one generation it is the protolanguage for the undoubtedly somewhat changed language of the next. p. 277 Chap 6 Time and Change p.278 What people think of as `changes' can be grouped under five major topoi, each of which might have a classical or antique, or at least literary slogan; 1. Change as loss 2. Change as (neutral) change of state of flux 3. change as creatio ex nihilo; `In the beginning God created the Heaven and earth.' 4. Change as degeneration: `Change and decay in all around I see.' 5. Change as progress:`Till we have built Jerusalem/In England's green and pleasant land.' Types 4 and 5 may just be ideologically colored versions of 1-3. In the first, changes the serious ontological matter: one individual or type or natural kind becomes another, there is a transsubstantiation or trans-individuation.... In the second type, there is no state change, but merely `substitution' of another (normally pre-existent or potentially pre-existent) state. This one is adumbrated in Sweet (1900:ch3), magisterially laid out in Hoenigswald(196) and carried to its apogee in Katicic (1970). Sweet distinguishes what he calls `organic' change (phonetic change due to mishearing, mis interpretation ,assimilation, gradual phonetic drift, etc.) from external change e.g. analogy, and the like. Katicic (1970:ch 3) on the other hand pushes the substitution idea to its ultimate conclusion; even internal phonetic change is a 'change in relations between languages and communities rather than a change in the languages themselves'. Since all language varieties belong to an atemporal (apparently quasi-platonic) universal variety set, all change can be construed as substitution; all conceivable outcomes exist in posse. A history doesn't show change at all, but rather a succession of different languages, which can be seen as`one language with some internal variety'. Unlike Sweet (or Hoenigswald), and like Saussure but more so, Katicic manages to get rid of time and history completely; history (in the week sense in which there could be said to be any at all) is just permutation of what is essentially there already and always has been. Problems of filiation and the like are resolvable to operations on the universal variety set that lead to `restricted diversity'. p.281 Historians, like all other linguists, are practitioners of the `Galilean style' (Botha 1982); they work with categories of high abstraction and idealization. But it's not always clear (maybe not even to all historians themselves) just how far the abstractions go; sometimes we can learn interesting things by looking behind the idealizations, and finding out what we lose by getting what we gain from them. p.290 Linguistic Time (Arrows and cycles) The modern physical sciences now recognize both types of: reversible or classical (Newtonian) time, and non-reversible or thermodynamic time. Reversible time in physics is not normally construed as cyclic; though specific reversibilities can lead to equilibrium, which may be. p.291 Whereas under a thermodynamic regime (say you the current order of the universe on the heat death interpretation), entropy increases in a close system and leads to a static equilibrium, maximal disorder, etc. This has been a basic philosophical problem in physics since the 19th-century, when classical dynamics, in which time is reversible, came into an apparent conflict with the irreversibility associated with the second law of thermo dynamics, and the idea of entropy. ... the idea that there is an immutable substrate or background to all or temporal experience is compelling, since it imposes the special kind of order on the universe; one could see the same kind of motivation in Katicic's position as in Parmenides's or Newton's or Einstein's; if timing change on illusions, the universe has a `ground' that blacks in the presence of general line transformation. Such visions animate not only larger scale philosophical or Cosmo logical schemata, but may manifest more locally, in linguists attitudes toward their own subject matter, particularly as it unfolds in time. The issue of the direction and linguistic evolution has been of interest since antiquity; as early as Plato's Cratylus the idea was broached that if the first Namer named things by nature and not by convention, the form/meaning fit has become (unidirectionally) less transparent. p.292 During the 19th and 20th centuries, three more or less articulated views of the shape of linguistic history have emerged, each for its radical proponents the result of some kind of directional law. These overall metaphysical characterizations seem to be of two general kinds: 1. Uniform directionality.. There are three main types: (a) positive (Progressivism): languages evolve a particular optimizing direction, becoming more efficient or simple or sophisticated or whatever. ... (b) negative (decay): languages move from a perfect type towards some less perfect one: e.g. Bopp (1833) from analytic into a synthetic, for Jesperson the opposite. (c) non-evaluative: there simply are directions, either in actual glottogenesis (from a primitive state) or in the evolution of languages, but those do not necessarily have anything to do with quality (perhaps Humboldt 1882). 2. Cyclicity. Languages moves through life-cycles like organisms (cf Davies 1987); they may have periods of youth, maturity, and senescence (as in 1b), but recycle over and over, e.g. each great type comes around again after language has passed through the others in some particular series: e.g. isolating> agglutinative > inflecting/fusional, etc (von der Gabelentz 1981), at a local rather than a global level Meillet 1912.) Few scholars now would believe that any of these principal legislates for language change overall: there are no global directionalities fixed by natural law. Individual histories (or parts of them) can be any one of the above. Though, especially in the work growing out of the tradition of grammaticalization studies started by Meillet (1912) and revived recently by Elizabeth Traugott, Bernd Heine and others (Traugott & Heine 1991), Hopper & Traugott 1993), certain directions are increasingly being singled out as major or overwhelming. p.293 The history of any dynamic system can be mapped as a trajectory in a multidimensional space (phase space) where each point in the space represents a possible system state. By a dynamic system, I mean any evolving ensemble where variation of parameter setting produces a change of state. Under this (relatively standard) mathematical definition, not only a mechanical or thermodynamic systems (e.g. a swinging pendulum, convection in a needed fluid) dynamical, but so are evolving populations, whether systems and even valued sets generated by completely abstract equations, where changing the numerical values satisfying some control parameter produces an evolution. Such evolution was maybe partly linear, or at least show continuous change, but may then settle into other configurations.... Dynamical systems in general can be characterized as tending to move towards regions in phase space called attractors: an attracted as a region 'such that any point which starts nearby gets closer and closer to it' (Stewart, 110). In simple and rather loose terms, and attractor is region into which a system tends to set up, and in which it remains unless it is dislodged in some special way. The most common or typical attractors are single point attractors or sinks, and limit cycles. The precise mathematical definitions is not at issue here, since this is a heuristic rather than mathematical discussion; what counts is the image of an evolving system as a kind of flow in some n-dimensional space, and the existence of regions in that space towards which the flow tends to converge. P. 294 Such imagery and terminology are very general, and apply to innumerable evolving systems, both purely abstract and physical. This kind of language was originally developed for talking about quantifiable mathematical systems, but that are (at least so far) non-quantifiable systems that exhibit this same type of behavior, or at least have properties similar enough so that we can informally but appropriately borrow the terminology. The point of such borrowing is that terminology's neutral with respect to content though the system; to put another way, a general dynamical description is a syntax without semantics. Such a neutral expository language allows us to talk about the shapes of historical developments without an ontological commitment, and may lead us see things that we would not otherwise, or at least see things differently. The larger -- scale philosophical implications of this point will be taken up in 7.6; for now I am interested mainly in the utility of the notion of trajectories and related concepts for talking about histories as trajectories in time. Their function for moment is defining types of temporal configurations that seem to repeat, and serving as a source of generalized images for visualizing them as trajectories. Sinks and limit cycles are what might be called typical or ordinary attractors. But there is another type, appearing in system after system, which is rather different properties. Such a strange attractive user region in phase -- space (typically found when a system is far from equilibrium) in which the behavior on the system becomes increasingly unpredictable and chaotic, and parameter values less and less orderly, and less and less likely to repeat. But within such attractors are often occur what are called windows of order in which orderly phenomenon are apparently self generated out of the chaos... That is (deterministicaly) chaotic systems can generate their own order. It is becoming increasingly clear, both in chaos theory and the developments now often grouped under complexity theory (Lewin 1993) that the edge of chaos regimes in all sorts of natural (and artificial) systems in which self regulation and order are generated out of apparent disorder (this is sometimes referred to as autopoiesis). The evidence for this kind of temporal trajectory isn't relevant for the historical linguists, because RMON other things he suggests that there simply are rather general system types that behave in certain ways, regardless of what the systems are composed of, or who happens to be using them. P. 295 Many evolutionary pathways in language change seem to lead to sinks... a good example is the set of phenomenon now usually grouped under the general heading of grammaticalization. For instance (cf. Givon 1971, Comrie 1980, Campbell 1990c) it seems that case markers typically (even according to Givon and some others exclusively) evolve out of grammaticalized free nouns, along the pathway, Noun > Postposition > Clitic > Case-marker. The step along this pathway seems irreversible or nearly so; once a now has become a pulse position it can't become one out again, a case market cannot detach itself than become a postposition. {examples from Kannada, Estonian, Hungarian} {note Sumerian noun-adjective could have given rise to agglutination} P. 296 Developments so this kind can be construed as paths along a chreod leading to a point attractor.. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Mon Mar 29 01:10:33 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 20:10:33 -0500 Subject: Lass: Part 3 of 3: Electronic Review Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Lass, Historical Linguistics, 1998 The comments inside braces {...} are probably all mine and were meant for memory jogging and markers. -------------------Part 3 of 3 --------------------------- P. 298 (cycles) Long-term cycles of change are familiar from the histories of many (I would suspect most) languages. In these cases particular items or categorical structures appear, disappear (through loss or transformation) then we appear, and such alterations can go on for indefinite periods (this is beautifully laid out in von der Gabelentz 1891). These cycles are interesting because there's clearly no particular necessity that either the states represented should appear at all. If for instance a line which develops a particular contrast, then loses it, then develops of again, it is obvious that neither the state with it nore the one without it is preferable, since the languages seem to get along perfectly well in both. {phonological change i.e. Brownian motion--> Gaussian, Einstein--> most don't change..} P. 299 Cycles of course may pose was severe problems for reconstruction since one has to know where in the cycle what is to know what direction was moving in. what they are also interesting in themselves: why should such (quasi)-periodic attractors exist at all? 1 possible answer is that so many linguists info, are in essence simply the manifestations of one of a pair of binary choices, so that in effect if a change is to occur at all in a particular domain, it will virtually always have to involve exiting one state and entering the only other one there is. Many linguistic states therefore can only be construed as points on the limit cycle, and the cyclicity will always be capable of emerging to the historians field of view. It least in principle; whether in fact depends on the period of the attractor. Some may have such long periods at one cannot tell them from point attractors, or even stable conditions that existed forever: a language state may be so long-lasting that it looks like stasis, and may or may not be. It seems that we have no way of telling. There are however certain good candidates for limit cycles, as there are for point attractors. The significant point is that identifying regimes which are likely to the cyclical demystifies cyclicity: there is no need for anything occcult or mysterious, given a system which is unstable to begin with. {examples of cycling of vowels, short long etc.} P. 300 One particularly interesting kind attractor, somewhere between a cycle in point, his or have called the center of gravity phenomenon. A center of gravity is a kind of limit cycle of relatively long period, in which the system, however much may wander about in the interim, continually returns to particular values for some parameter, or favors recurrence of particular output types or processes. { more examples} P. 301 That is, language is often display, either for the whole of their histories or for specific periods, apparent preferences for certain kinds of change, or certain developmental patterns... in a variety, in which groups of changes appear to move in a certain direction, or towards a goal, has been familiar and problematical at least since the 1920s, under the rubric of drift, laterly also conspiracy (Sapir, etc). This is the kind of change that can be construed as autocatalysis. In a drift sequence of classical kind, what appears to happen from a macro perspective is that (some subsystem of) a language tends to move in a particular direction, so that the end point of an evolutionary sequence is a fairly major state change (e.g. a language starts out phonemic and ends up without it, starts out OV and ends up VO). To this has been interpreted (mistakenly) as a kind of orthoGenesis or directed evolution (notoriously by Lass, which I regret...) {examples given} P. 302 Any possible language state (at micro or macro levels of resolution) can become any other;.... Much changes ran them or semi random tinkering, or play with options available in the category space (6.4). Both thereof within histories possible some directions on larger scales, which appear on the finer scale as individual grammaticalizations (e.g. noun >clitic>...) or on a larger scale as conspiracy or drift. >From most important point that ought to emerge from this discussion is that the landscape or dynamical system image makes any form of teleology superfluous.!!!!! It is the combination of initial conditions and the interaction with abstract control parameter is that determines the shape all systems wondering us through its phase space. This has been very well put by Cohen & Stewart (1994:31). A dynamic does not necessarily imply a purpose. Darwinian evolution as a dynamic, but organisms do not seek to evolve. The existence of attractors does not implied that dynamical systems are goal seekers: on the contrary, they are goal-finders, which only recognize what the goal is when they have found it. P. 303 Language histories (especially those primarily embodied in written corpora, which are the easiest to look at) often appeared to show long period of stasis, followed by bursts of innovatory activity... both the stasis and a burst of activity may be real... A history off a language-states is of course only as far as our sampling intervals: the bigger they are, the > degree of manifest change; and or conversely, the more likely the apparence of stasis. P. 304 what we have been such cases is pseudo-stasis due to post settlement homogenization. On the other hand, there is genuine stasis, even in non-literary languages, anyone may be called variational stasis. P. 305 Otto Jesperson once remarked (1992:418) that "transformation is something we can understand, while a creation out of nothing can never comprehend up by the human understanding"... In principle, there was seem to two basic types of possible innovation: transformation of inherited material, and innovation from zero or invention or relative vs. radical or absolute innovation.... You've seen that languages (ceteris paribus, as always) innovate preferential he by utilizing (including transforming) existing material; as a second recourse they borrow; as a third they just might (in certain domains anyhow) invent in. there seems to be a preference hierarchy (which also serve as a guy to likelihood in reconstruction, as directional pathways do): phonological change > morphosyntactic change by analogy or reanalysis > morphosyntactic borrowing > absolute invention. Relative or transformative innovation is generally amenable to reconstruction (if not always of the strict kind). Absolute innovation involves even more than the emergence: it involves the forging ex vacuo of new material. Thus it should in principle be possible to find cases, even in the histories of well-known languages, where there is no ancestors but zero. The argument for this type of innovation is not empirical, but transcendental: but it is one worth following a, as it has not, as far as I know, been pushed to its limits. It's why should innovation from zero the possible, or why should we even think of it? There is a historical argument, which, interestingly, is the same whether one believes in monogenesis (like the flakier adherents of Protoworld) or polygenesis (perhaps the safer option) for human language. Is clear that all the characters of proto-world or where you care to call it, or on a poly genetic view, the characters all the original proto languages for each (established) family, must at some point represents absolute innovation. That is, while languages as (say) the type of software or capacity may be mono genetic, individual languages and therefore families are the results of polygenesis, the software operating on and/or creating material to fulfill the capacity. It doesn't matter in this sends whether it happened once or any indefinite number of times. This is probably, and typically speaking, the non-issue, since the time-depths involved are so vast that we have no technologies for exploring them. There is no way to find out when the noun phrase was invented.... English is separated from its putative ultimate parent Proto-Indo-European by any reasonable estimates some 8000 years; yet there is not one piece of inflexion or generational material that English has now or ever had that cannot be traced back to the parent language. p. 314--biology, rna, imperfect copying etc P. 316 Exaptation... This "missing term in the science of form" as they called it (Gould and Vrba) denotes the co-optation doing evolution of structures originally developed for other purposes. Classical examples are the co-op station of feathers.... Exaptation, that is, is opportunistic: it is a kind of conceptual renovation, as it were, of material that is already there, but either serving some other purpose, or serving no purpose that all. Thus perfectly good structures can be exapted, as can junk of various kinds. I am convinced (see further 7.6-7) that there is such a thing as a theory of historically evolve systems, and other virtually any subsystem to meet certain criteria is going show, that look like junk deposition. In other words, human cultural evolution, (or of the evolution of human cultural artifacts, which is almost virtually not the same thing), like the evolution of biological systems, is based at least partly on bricolage, cobbling, jerry-building, what everyone to call it; pieces also systems are always falling off and if not lost out of recycled, often in amazingly or general and clever ways... P. 317 if a piece of juncture arise, for any reason, there are three things one can do with it: pleaded as it is; get rid of it; or recycle it been used for something else. Languages like organisms display all three strategies. P. 319 It is important to distinguish exaptation from analogical and similar processes, or abduction. P. 325 people have tried to explain why it linguistic change should occur ever since they first became aware of it. There are two major some issues: (a) why should any change that all occur? and (b) why should some particular observed (type of) change have occurred? Question at present has no agreed on technical answer ... P. 326 the usual focus in the literature has however been not on wide change cars off unexplained particular changes or change types under larger rubrics with some supposed theoretical warrant. There seem to the two polar positions on explicability. ... Explanation is a complex motion, with many possible construals... Taking into account in the source of objects that had been called explanations in various sciences and pseudo-or quasi sciences there seem to the three basic or canonical conceptual types: 1. Causal explanations. 2. Functional explanations. 3. Genetic or historical explanations. ... we might add a fourth category, which could perhaps be seen as subcase of two; rational explanations. This category, under one guise or another, could be considered the type for hermeneutic explications of various kinds: any attempt at the explanation or exegesis extrapolating from, `the common experience of being human' could eventually fall under this heading, since what underwrites them all abduction based on something like empathy or understanding, which in the end amount to a kind of a anamnesis. P. 329 if a strong D-N type seems to the usual of the language change; histories of contingent domain, there are no laws of the requisite power, if there any kind that all. Probabilistic explanations can be applied in case of tendencies or likelihoods but they are peculiarly unsatisfactory, in that they typically reduce at best to tautologies: whatever is more likely to happen is more likely to happen, and our surprise at the occurrence is to that extent diminished.... If languages as historical objects are indeed systems with sensitive dependence on initial conditions than micro-level prediction is impossible, since the initial conditions are in principle either unknowable or unspecified with the requisite degree of precision; though after the fact explications of a quite delicate kind may be feasible.... We are then left with a seventh week explanations of different times, involving such notions as function, reason, etc..... A further variant is the invisible hand explanation in which people do rational things but in the course of doing them achieve some unintended goal.. The discussion above may seem rather limiting; probably reason is that I'm trying (as I did somewhat all successfully in Lass 1980) through distinguish between explanation is a technical term in academic discourse, and some of its looser everyday uses.... p.311 Some writers, while still making a distinction between weak and strong explanations, attempt to group all exegetical activities under the same heading...(see Heine)..; he is willing to use the term explanation whenever any of the following goals have been achieved: 1. Description of a phenomenon is an example of a more general phenomenon. 2. Seeing facts in a wide context or in the larger pattern. 3. Imparting organized knowledge, i.e. knowledge of relation between various facts.. {see Futuyma 1995.. discussions of testability of evolutionary hypothesis} p. 332 it's now indicate that a half since I launched a full frontal attack and what seemed to be the false tensions of most times explaining linguistic change (Lass 1980). That both in retrospect was a bigger could, course depositors assault on all forms of explanation other than those fitting D-N or covering law model... P. 333 in fact the explanatory commencement of restored or sciences (if one can called them that) is a special and rather different sort from that in the natural sciences. As du Preez says of psychoanalysis, taking is a paradigm case to the hermeneutic discipline: the explanation of any actual event is a long narrative about circumstances... it does not fit into the hypethetico-deductive format. The interface, it is like history, which also has generalizations, is explanatory, and attempts to discover the origins of events in circumstances, but cannot be predictive. On the other hand (and this is relevant to the discussion that follows), in psychoanalysis narratives may be falsifiable (in some details) as theories in the natural sciences. But because of the complexity of the narrative... because although many options on tone and incident one can rarely falsify a narrative as a whole. The notion of what might constitute a falsification is crucial, as we will see below. P. 334 To use Peirce's famous beanbag example, deduction induction and abduction all involve the Triad of rule, case, and result, but inference moves in different directions.... Abduction on the other hand involves inferring the case from rule and result: Rule: all beans from this bag to our white. Result: these beans are white. Case: these beans are from this bag. P. 335 there is a fundamental problem here: other peoples all abductions (unlike their correct deductions) may fail to convince, since the nature of the particular abduction depends a contingent attributes of the abducer.... Abduction, says Sebeok (1983: 9) enables us to formulate a general prediction, but with no warranty of a successful outcome; key like Pierce does not seem to mind this, but there are strong objections, from a number of points of view. P. 336 (hermeneutic explanation) I reject completely the view (especially in the historical context) that Pateman outlines under the heading of the hermeneutic challenge (1987: tenf) the concept of dependent existence of cultural objects implies that the proper scientific attitude towards them is the hermeneutic one in which we attempt to understand their meaning, and that explanation of them and all the relations of human agents to them will be given in the vocabulary on beliefs, reasons, motives, and purposes rather than in the make a mechanistic vocabulary of causes and laws. At least I decree that clauses and the laws may be inappropriate, but the others are even more so, at least in any reality other than pragmatics. Abandoning predictive or deductive explanation apparently leads us only with untrustworthy post hoc strategies of explications. This would not in itself necessarily be a bad thing, if it were not for one troublesome fact: because of the quirkiness of abduction(among other things), the convincing force of any hermeneutic explanation depends on a number of disparate and contingent variables; and not all of them seem to be satisfactorily handled in any given instance, and may not in the genre itself. These include (a) the ingenuity of explainer; (B) the interpretation's coherence with the rest of the explainee's putative knowledgeable of the domain; and (c) most importantly to explainee's willingness to accept the interpretation (which may as we will see involve a good deal more than the satisfaction of simple logical criteria, including aspect and temperament of practice). There is something you didn't simply dialogic about such explications, which is not the case in the positivist mode; there if you accept the rules of the game in the first place you have no problem with particular instances. Hermeneutic interpretations then are epistemically very different from other types, and in that one has a choice not to accept, since neither logical deduction nor any other kind of valid inference is primarily at issue. All such explanations by permissive, not binding on the explainee. (A good deductive explanation, even if it's boring, does have the one excellent property that no sane explainee can reject it.) P. 338 genetic linguistics, according to Anttila (1989: 23.2) deals of history and human action; therefore paramedics is the only viable metatheory, since the subject matter is maximally open systems in which mechanistic prediction is impossible. So in history... piecing together a possible past is guessing through indexes, where the laws involved somehow relate to the common experience of being human, and results are traces of human action. Elsewhere Anttila says that reconstruction... means piecing together a possible chain of events, a state affairs, i.e. inferring the case. The inference involved is abduction (and induction...) not deduction, and the frame this classical hermeneutic anamnesis (reenactment through interpretation and understanding) not natural science. P. 339 I find impossible to make out what some of the terms that Anttila or pateman use could possibly mean in the context of historical linguistics. How can one understand or get an intention behind or discover the meaning or shift from .... P. 340 The point of hermeneutics appears to be the discovery and formulation of meaning. ... see Sir Medawar's elegant hatchet-job on psychoanalytic theories. P. 342 a classic and persistent example is the claim that optimal sound -- meaning correspondence is biunique, formulated by Anttila as the slogan `one meaning one form'. The reasoning for ironing out of alternations.. is that `the mind shuns purposeless variety'...(MSPV principle) P. 345 (new stuff... principle of isomorphism... regularization.... strict one-to one symbolization is possible only in closed systems such as formal (mathematical) languages...) P. 346 change in principle, given the data we have, be random rather than motivated, and the results would probably look pretty much the same.... Crucially, the notion of preference here is pseudo-statistical, no more than universalization of an intuition.... Virtually all collections of data often sort that I go of our tendentious, gathers to make specific points and appearing only in the context of sketches of short store of periods, or sense of examples designed to illustrate the operation of MSPV.... Crucially, the notion of preference here is pseudo-statistical, no more than the universalization of intuition. P. 352 in a recent attempt to argue for the speaker-centred and non-structuralist account of language change, in which Speaker interaction is the primary locus and determinant, James Milroy (1992) argues against the system based views of language. He suggests that if languages are machines, ... then variation and change ougth to be dysfunctional, and thus not only inexplicable but counterpredicted. ((Suggested notion of system is excessively restrictive)).. P. 353 {systems} relate complex biological systems, for instance, clearly are not, but they do not lose any of their systematicity in this way. It is only in what might be called a folder adaptation as model of the organism... it is not generally clear, as Gould has been arguing in detail for over a decade that animals for instance, while certainly functional systems, are often quite sloppy ones. Parts are Jerry-built and cobbled together out of other parts,.... {function and dysfunction} for any complex system regular feature doesn't have to be either functional or dysfunctional;... It may affect the precisely the non-functionality of such characters that is the primary enabler of change (Lass 1990a).. {Redundancy and noise..} It is in this light that we probably want to interpret linguistics variability. Languages are imperfectly in replicating systems and therefore throw up variants during replication; the fact of variation itself is neutral. If a variant were to be genuinely dysfunctional in some serious and compromising sense, the chances are that its survival would be prejudiced. So it's perfectly possible that both variation and change itself (as a result) are neutral: even selection does not necessarily have to select event which is better adapted. In any case, that are even in biology modes off apparent selection that are not in the Darwinian sense genuinely selective or adaptive (Kimura 1983). All of these possibilities, given the much better understood the nature of variation and change in organisms, need to be considered before any claim for function can be made for variation or change. A final point on systems. Milroy's dichotomy between a system and a means of communication is incoherent. Once we allow for non- physical systems, any means of communication that is to work as such most in fact be a system; not only a system, but one that its share (within certain bounds) by all users. P. 355 In Lass(1980) idle to the general argument against functional explanation, which was later attacked by ML Samuels, and others (SAmuels 1987).. This argument largely concerned so-called homophonic clash and the danger of merger neither of which I am willing to accept as rational motivations for change, on precisely the same grounds with that I rejected MSPV.. Let's consider a classical and family of functional explanation, linguistics change (with apparently a more solid basis than MSPV, but still essentially hermeneutic, in that it attempts to provide a reason why some things should happen). ... According to the neogrammarian principle...(useful and largely correct) position as a basis, cases that appear to violate the condition are interesting, and require explanation. P. 361 in summary, a conceptual basis for functional explanation is underwritten by five in plausible assumptions: 1. That exist functional and dysfunctional language states in the normal of things, i.e. all language states are not equifunctional 2. Speeches can have intuition is about the efficiency or a phonology, etc. all their language for its communicational tasks (unless one is true this can't be) 3. Speakers can make comparisons between the present (structural) state of language and some as yet unrealized one, and opt for one or the other. 4. Following from 3,speakers can have any global structural intuition about their language. 5. Speeches can change of the alignment on the basis called any toned information in 1-4: hence change can be a motivated behavior. These assumptions all involve the category mistake endemic in both the generativist child -- as -- little -- linguist and hermeneutic rational-agent models: confusing ordinary speakers for whom languages by and large in non-focal historical given those special speakers for whom making language focal is a professional concern. P. 363 Curiously, then, individual list theory used actually neutralize the individual proper, since they must make all individuals in affect interchangeable. What ultimately happens is this: the larger picture of historical change is interpreted as if it all occurred in an individual speaker... this individual picture is than projected onto a collective language history, which becomes sum of a set of individual acts so alike that anyone can stand for the type. (heat bath and thermodynamics) P. 365 As Bickerton (19791:461) has pointed out, typical patterns we observe see impossible ' unless something, somewhere is counting environments and keeping a running score of percentages'. And individual list interpretation of demand that each speaker not only keep track of his own scores, but proposal other members all the group, so that if one speaker goes off of the rails, he can adjust his own school or to maintain the average. And sense he does this also with interlocutors from outside the community, if you must be able to keep his scores right even when there is no feedback from other community members. Bickerton doesn't think we can attribute this kind of sophisticated running competition to individual, nor do I. But as he says" something" must be adjusting individual behaviors to conform with certain norms. I am not at all short what this might be (or if there's anything better at all other than some mathematical property of such systems of competing variants of themselves); but it clearly is not a generalized individual's behavior can be hermeneutically understood or re-enacted. It is difficult to see how this kind of things can be accommodated except in a view of language has been at least partly transcendental or meta-personal, on system with which speakers interact, but which used in some sense outside them, and extra mental reality. (field theory). But one conclusion seems to emerge fairly strongly from the preceding arguments, which reflects badly on the hermeneutic challenge. Rather than introducing a truly human element into the explanation of linguistics change, hermeneutic explications is able to function only as a totalitarian uniformizing imposition, since it is based on the problematic assumption that one man's mind can stand for the minds of all others. It brings us back two days before Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog introduced the notion of orderly heterogeneity. P. 366 Agents: structure, pragmatics and invisible hands p.367 that he is, there are too quite distinct time dimensions needed to talk about language.... Change occurs over geological time, beyond the capacity of human staff, since no active density consequences on his actions.... This is the geological time dimension, where speeches are not conscience all that rolled improper dating variation, and indeed can't be: the analysis on thrift, says Sapir (161) is certain 'to be unconscious, or rather unknown to the normal speaker'. P. 370 A modest ontological proposal I conclude that hermeneutic or functionalist explanatory strategies are not very satisfactory. And this is sold because of a fundamental mistake about the nature of what is to be explained. This mistake is considering language change to the something that speeches to rather than something that happens above languages. P. 373 compare this spread all language change to level respiratory virus in an epidemic. We want to the disease spread throw population typically in the same kind of exponential curve that characterizes lexical diffusion. {prob dens again}. P. 374 more generally: there are many phenomenon and the world that are properties of particular kinds of systems, rather than the entities that happen to make up the systems. Exponential growth curves this triable by a certain kind of logistic equation are typical among extraordinary number of natural and cultural phenomenon although most diverse kinds, in such diverse fields as population genetics, the study of predator-prey relationships and epidemiology, and may well be simply a universal property of the growth off variant populations on the certain classes of conditions rather than all the particular objects including those classes. (Fibonacci, Pi, Planck's constant) etc).. The pervasiveness of abstract system types in different domains makes it dangerous to argue with the kind of specificity Milroy does that a particular sort of propagation must necessarily take its origin from the local nature of the population through which it moves, rather than from the nature of a process type, which may be a piece of world structure as its were, rather than an attribute of a particular kind of lower-order object in the world. {nonsensical or ignorant}. p.375 {about replication and genetics} So in a quasi-species sequence spaces each individual genotype its computable as being a certain distance (in terms of differing nucleotide sequences) from each other one, and the spread of genotypes into a sequence space has the form, as Eigen puts it, of a cloud. {prob density again). What happens if we construe all language as this kind of object, which exists needed in any individual Morton collective to, but rather as an area in an abstract, vastly complex, multidimensional phase space.... For one thing, we can start to talk about variation and change the same way we do for other populations: all language is a population called variants moving through time, and subject of selection... p.378 any imperfectly replicating (i.e. evolving) system throws up a (random or near random) scatter of variants or imperfect copies overtime.... {examples, drift, conspiracy?...vector, attractor....) p.382 speciation and the growth of new populations typically involved what population geneticists call bottlenecks; when any subset of a polymorphous or variable population splits off form the ancestral stock, it will carry with it only that subset of variant characters that it possesses.... So there is a major sense in which the development of a new language represents, paradoxically, a decrease in variation. .... If the description given above is valid, then in fact, monogenesis (at any level from the origin of language to that of a particular low-level dialect cluster) virtually entails contingent properties of the population being transmitted in bulk and amplified via bottlenecks. Such properties often have long viability periods. For example the first personal marker /-m-/ has its survived in Indo-European for it least some 8-10,000 years. P. 384 I am rather asking here under what guise it might be most profitable to look at human languages as a system in time, and what kinds of consiliences fallout from a particular view. P. 385 Milroy and others have argued eloquently (and in part successfully) for embedding the historical study of language in a social matrix: Andersen,Anttila, Pateman, Keller and Ikonen have argued (to my mind less successfully) for incorporating accounts of human meaning, interpretation, action etc. P. 388 nothing in linguistics anyhow really seems to be that original; the line I've been pursuing his bowl in principle is not in detail... (Davies) in this view, language change was seen, like geological change, to be the result of powerful non-human forces, in which human goals and actions and no part: the speaker no more controlled the vast movements of linguistics change than the farmers interventions control the formation of geological strata. Output was not of course structuralist but historical, though its focus was on large scale autonomous systems; but the tension between autonomous or naturalized and speaker-centred or psychologistic (or actional) orientations is old and recurrent. And the end both outputs are probably complementary; given enough history, the paucity of major choices makes all innovations reactionary. Looking back on this chapter, and parts of the rest of the book, it seems that a great deal of the discussion and not been so much about the ostensible subject matter as about epistemological style. In particular, the polemic in this chapter has been about incommensurable difference in approach to the subject (and some peripheral connections) that seems in his own way as important as any substantive matter is actually dealt with. {dichotomy--physics etc} I suppose what I find most objectionable about Anttila, Shapiro and others of the romantic persuasion is that they lack sobriety; and they are enthusiasts.... The fundamental error although it hermeneutic approach is that it attempts to get inside something that because of its demands historical extension may not have an inside at all.... It abrogates the scientists primary responsibility: to free investigation and knowledge from human emotional attitudes, to step back to the position of a spectator who is not part of the world on the study. References: Anttila, Raimo, (1972) and introduction to restore and comparative linguistics, Macmillan Company,New York Baldi, P. (ed) 1990 Linguistic change and reconstruction methodology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bomhard, A. 1990 A survey of the comparative phonology of the so-called `Nostratic' languages, in Baldi 1990:331-58 Boyd & Richerson, (1992) How microevolutionary processes give rise to history in Nitecki & Nitecki 1992:179-210. Cohen & Stewart (1994) The Collapse of chaos: discovering simplicity in a complex world, London: Penguin. Kimura, M. (1983) The neutral theory of molecular evolution, Cambridge University Press. Lass, R. (1980) On explaining language change, Cambridge University Press. Medawar, P. (1984) Pluto's Republic, Oxford University Press Milroy, J. (1992) Linguistic variation and change, Oxford:Blackwell. Nichols, J. (1992) Language Diversity in Space and Time, University of Chicago Press. Samuels (1987) -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 31 13:50:49 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 08:50:49 -0500 Subject: Proving Negatives Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> I see this phrase often. I don't understand what it means. I have this feeling that it has to do with a point of view in Philosophy of Science. PoF has gone thru many stages. The first, and earliest stage is attributed usually to Bacon and may be termed Baconian. It is the usual high school rant about, hypothesis/theory, experiment, etc. The experiment was supposed to verify the theory. That does not work out according to laws of logic. So someone attempted to change "verification" to "confirmation". The experiment was supposed to "confirm" the theory. That does not work out either. That was done clearly by Hempel in the so-called RAven Paradox. It goes like this; the statement "Ravens are black" can be written as R => B (where => stands for "material implication" of logic). According to confirmationism, every time we see a raven that is black, this added further confirmation to the statement R => B. But the contrapositive of this statement ~B => ~R (where the tilde indicates negation) which is equivalent to the original statement says "If it is not black, it is not a raven". But then this says that everytime we see an object that is not black, such as a red corvette, or a yellow banana, we are also "confirming" the statement "ravens are black"! So "confirmationism" is as bad as "verificationism". The only thing left, as vigorously propounded by Popper is "falsificationism" which means essentially that a scientific statement can only be falsified. So the acid test for a statement being a scientific statement (not necessarily true) is that it be at least falsifiable in principle. So a statement like "elephants are pink" is a scientific statement in the sense that if we can find a non-pink elephant we can falsify the statement. Obviously, "elephants are not pink" is also falsifiable since to falsify it we need only to find a pink elephant. How does a "negative" not get proven? Maybe some people mean a statement like this; "the sun will always rise in the east". That can be falsified only if we can wait an eternity. But this is the problem of induction, which is what all the sciences (aside from math) have to face, and that includes physics and all the engineering that follows from it. So that problem is not about negatives but about induction. Induction itself causes no problems for math since it is a type of mathematical proof. Induction causes problems for sciences other than math. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From hubeyh at montclair.edu Wed Mar 3 02:17:25 1999 From: hubeyh at montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 21:17:25 -0500 Subject: ProtoWorld Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Abstract Research into Prehistoric Ethnogenetic Processes in East Europe by Valentyn Stetsiuk (Book I) The first book of the whole work is comprised of two parts. The research methods are described in the first part, and the results are given in the second part. The research is based upon a historic-comparative analysis of vocabulary of diverse language families. The final results are correlated with archeological facts. The research was carried out by the application of a method which was worked out by the author and was called the ?grafic-analytical method". The main principles are briefly explained by the example of the Slavic languages in the article (1). The method evoked some interest among linguists but generated diverse opinions. Specifically a critical article was published in the Moscow leading linguistic newspaper (2). An expanded description of the method and concept postulates on which it is based are given in the offered work. An essence of the method consists of the construction of a grafical model (scheme) of near-related languages interrelation. This model is constructed on a postulate of the reverse-proportional dependence (?oberneno proporcijna zalezhnist'", in Ukrainian) between quantity of common words in pairs of related languages and that distance on which areas of formation this languages from common ancestor language were found in that previous time. A count of the quantity of common words in language pairs has been done on the basis of an ?isogloss" table-dictionary which had been created for each researched language family. The table-dictionaries follow this structure: words of the same language are placed in vertical columns; the words which relate to the same isogloss are found in horizontal lines. It is important to take into consideration that not all isoglosses have a corresponding match in all languages. Many isoglosses have the appropriate words in some languages only. If all the languages have the appropriate words for the same isogloss (all square are full), then this isogloss belongs to a common lexical stock of the language family. The common lexical stock has not been taken into the calculation, because it concerns a chronology mainly to the time of existence of the common ancestor language from which these languages were developed. All words belonging to the same isogloss, approximate each other in content (substance) and have phonetic accordance in sound composition. The construction of the model of the language words quantity in language pairs. The model looks as a graf, which has as so much knots how much of languages we have. Indeed each knot is an area of points, each of them is an end of a segment of which length is corresponded to a quantity of common words in language pairs. These segmets connect pairs of all areas. The construction of the model goes in some approximation. When the model construction is ready, one looks for a place on a geographical map for it. The form of the model could not be broken therefore it is not easy to find the suitable place on the map. One has to find a such area configuration, which corresponds to the our model. Each area of language formation must have distinct borders, which hinder linguistic contacts between inhabitants of these areas and so help to form separate laguages from the previos common language. The borders of the areas can be rivers, mountchains, swamps. Near 70 languages from 7 language families or language groups (Nostratic, Indo-european, Finn-Ugric, Turkish, Iranian, Germanic and Slavic) were researched by the author with this method. The table-dictionaries for each language family or language group were created on ground of etymological and two-language dictioraries. One-two thousands of words were taken from each language for these tables, the quantity of common words in language pairs has been calculated upon them and 7 language-models have been created later. How it shows as the result of the researches, all the researched languages form a family tree with some levels of sinchronical branching. At least 6 Nostratic languages developed from the previos common language on the lowest level (old Indo-european, Altaic, Uralic, Semitic-Chamitic, Kartvelic and Dravidic). The place for their formation has been founded in Fore Asia (6 areas near the lakes Van, Sevan and Urmija as well near the mountains Ararat, Aragac, the rivers Kura, Araks, Choroh, Great Zab, Little Zab etc). The borders between the areas are mountchains. This natural borders separate six states now - Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Irak and Iran. Some other facts from researches of diverse scientifists to support of this chois have been added in the work. Three groups of the old Nostratic tribes migrated to East Europe later (7 thou. years ago). Their late languages as a part of the three previos great language families have been researched on the level two. The grafical models of them help us to find the areas of the settlement of the Indoeuropean, Finnic-Ugric und Turkish peoples in the East Europe between Volga-, Dniepr- and Visla-river. The modern Indoeuropean; Finnic-Ugric und Turkish begann to form here in areas between numerous tributaries of great river Volga, Don, Dnieper, Vistula in III-rd mill. B. C. The old Indoeuropean languages had been formed from the common language in the Dniepr-basin - Greec, Italic, Armenian, Celtic, Thrakish, Frigish, Illirian, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Tocharian, Indian, Iranian, Chettish. The old Finnic-Ugric languages begann to form in areas between Volga and Don. The old Turkish languages begann to form in areas between Dnieper and Don. The separate Iranian, Germanic, Slavic languages were researched on the level three. The areas of their formation were founded in Dnieper- and Don-basin too. The Indoeuropean peoples of these languages lived here after the other Indoeuropean peaples migrated to West and South Europe and to Asia back. Much other linguistic and archeological facts can confirm this arrangement as the result of the researches and are added in the work. The first book end on the chronological level I-st mill. B. C. The later development of the ethnogenetic processes will been iven in the second book. The work is written in Ukranian, has 100 pages (7,6 print sheets), 6 maps, 12 pictures, 11 tables, 12 pages of quoted publications. References 1. Stetsiuk V.M. Opredielenie mest poselenij drevnich slavian grafoanaliticheskim metodom. - Izvestia AN SSSR. Serija literatury i jazyka. 1987. Nr 1. Moscow. (In Russian). 2. Juravlev V. F. K probleme rasselenia drevnich slavian: o tak nazyvajemom ?grafoanaliticheskom metode". - Voprosy jazykoznanija. 1991. Nr2. Moscow. (In Russian). About the method The applied models of related languages are a modification of a special graf. The peculiarity of this graf is that all its knots without exeption are connected between themselves with ribs and these ribs have fixed, certain length. This graf can be applied at description of spatial associations of objects with common features which quantities between object pairs are depended from the distance between these object pairs. Specially it can be used in linguistic, archeology, biology etc, also where objects have enough common features. The tables-dictionaries being input into computer can help us to separate not etymologized words in diverse languages , to unit them in groups and to reconstruct ?dead languages" with the aid of these words. There are very many Indian languages in America. One can determine their relationship and locate their old native lands with using the grafic-analytical method. Also, one can reconstruct in this way the process of settling of America . Valentyn Stetsiuk Gr. Skovorody str. 9/7, Lviv, 290010, Ukraine tel., fax. 380-322-427414 tel. private 380-322-766258 e-mail: valentyn at icmp.lviv.ua [CILAkorot.ZIP] - 337K, download the zipped Internet version Word format, 70 pages. -- -- M. Hubey Email: hubeyh at Montclair.edu Backup:hubeyh at alpha.montclair.edu WWW Page: http://www.csam.montclair.edu/Faculty/Hubey.html <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Mon Mar 8 02:41:30 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 21:41:30 -0500 Subject: Counting, Probability Theory, and the Birthday Paradox, #1 Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> I have this feeling that we have to re-do something we started, partly for the benefit of the newcomers, and partly for the benefit of the old-timers (no insult intended). This re-enforcements is a necessary part of learning. Social scientists often get angry that not everything can be read like a novel. Probability theory is basically fine-tuned commonsense instead of raw commonsense. What I mean by that is that the basics of probability theory follow from common sense but the untrained mind extrapolates incorrectly. If this happened in logic it is called a 'paradox'. Such names do not exist in probability theory, (from now on PT or something like it.) PT is normally taught starting with set theory not the way it was developed. It is usually due to the fact that most students taking such courses are mathematicians and they find it easier (after years of training) to just get the axioms and then build up from there. We started here using intuition. The part of PT that many other people (especially social scientists) are familiar with and also use, is called statistics. Well, a "statistic" is really a number derivable from a population of things. For example, the mean of the population is a "statistic". The sample mean (the mean of a random sample taken from a population) is also a statistic. Statistics is obviously based on PT, because that is the underlying basis of it. But it is often better to start off with some examples. The basics are this: 1. probability it defined in at least two ways. 1.a) frequency definition 1.b) hokus-pokus definition 1.c) mathematical definition 2. then we use these probabilities by combining them in various ways. There are really only two ways 2.a) addition or OR 2.b) multiplication or AND 1.a) this is a limiting definition of sorts. For example, we imagine an experiment in which a "fair" coin is N times. Then, the probability of heads, written as P(H) is the fraction of the total that the coin comes up heads as this number N approaches infinity. First, nobody can throw a coin an infinite number of times. So we have to only imagine it. Secondly, as we toss the coin many times and keep a running ratio of H/N (where H=number of heads, N=total throws) we will see that as N increases this ratio gets closer and closer to 0.5 as we expect. 1.b) That is where the hokus-pokus definition comes in. In such problems we simply are either "given" P(H) or we make a determination outside of probability theory based on symmetry arguments etc. 2.c) the mathematical definition formalizes this concept. We say that there is a thing called a sample space. That is the space of all possibilities. Obviously this is a set. And every element of the set has some number associated with it, say wi (that's w subscript i) such that when you add up all the wi, you get 1. This is a normalization condition. That is because we consider probability to be a fraction. If P(E)=0 then this event is the "impossible event". If P(E)=1 then this event is the "sure" or "certain" event. Therefore, if we divide up the space of possibilities of an experiment into N sets and then add them all up, we must get 1. That is because we are saying that one of those things must happen, certainly. In the case of Heads and Tails, (disregarding the possibility of the coin standing on its side) there are two choices, H or T. Therefore we must have 1) P(H) + P(T)=1 One of them must happen; that is certain. The readers must have noticed that I sneaked in something here into eq.(1). That something is that I did not say what '+' is. IT is in section 2, and the '+' corresponds to what is meant by "logical OR'. So eq (1) means that the coin will come up heads OR tails. What is clear and certain here is that we have to have some way of knowing that P(H)*P(T) is not 1/4 but zero. A coin cannot come up showing both tails and heads, but applying the multiplication rule above blindly would/could lead us to believe that. Some of what we do has to come from "commonsense". However we can fix this like this. Often unsolvable (or seemingly unsolvable) problems become easier to solve and to understand if we generalize them. Suppose we generalize this coin to an unfair coin. Then the probability of heads could be some number x, between 0 and 1 i.e. 0< =x <=1. Then the probability that it is not heads is 1-x. Therefore probability of both heads and tails could be (note "could") x*(1-x). This is still wrong, but it gave us fuzzy logic. In some cases, things are not so clear cut and we want results like above. In our case, we have to think of the sample space as being divided into two mutually exclusive sets so that they both can't happen. So here are two problems intimately related to many things being discussed right now in historical linguistics. These problems can't be solved so simply, but what is need to solve them is not beyond high school math. We did this before, and we can muddle through it again. It's better the second time around, they say :-) Here they are: they are related to each other. 1. A marksman takes shots at a target so far away that we are not sure that he will hit a bullseye. Suppose his probability of hitting the bullseye is p. (Now, p is just a number here, a number greater than or equal to 0 and less than or equal to 1. We normally would write this as 0 <= p <= 1. In books the < sign and the = sign are put on top of each other so that it doesn't look like we have a representation of an arrow in <=) a) What is the number of shots that he will [probably have to] take before he hits the target (bullyseye)? b) What is the probability that out of 10 shots he will hit 6? 2. The probabilities of birth of a male (boy) or a female (girl) are approximately equal. Let's say that they are and that the probability of the birth of a boy and the birth of a girl are both 1/2 each. A couple have 5 children. a) What is the probability 2 boys and 3 girls? b) What is the probability of at least one boy? c) What is the probability of getting 3 girls and then a boy? (Problem 2.a does not ask for the probability of 2 boys being born first, and then 3 girls or vice versa. The order does not matter. Any combination of 2 boys and 3 girls will do.) For those who are bored or tired, this is pretty much near what you need to be able to do what is necessary to do some of the simple calculations you see in articles like Cowan, Bender, or Rosenfelder's article. A little bit more will allow you to read Ringe's book. If you want to read Embleton's book, you have to switch to statistics (which we can touch upon). -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 01:38:48 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 20:38:48 -0500 Subject: Mitochondria Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Mitochondrial evidence has been considered to be the definite answer to many problems of the biological and social sciences for a while. There was some disturbing news in Science News years ago that mtDNA could be passed from the father but it was buried away. Meanwhile the news that was created by mtDNA (e.g. African Eve), and its relative African Adam (obtained from the Y-chromosome) are still around. This issue (5 March 1999) of Science (journal of the AAAS) has a special on Mitochondria. The article on p. 1435 has some really disturbing news for the believers. First, the mtDNA clock is off. Mutations occur at different rates and the numbers don't tally with other evidence. Second, there is the possibility of recombination with the father's contribution, so there is a distinct possibility that there was no such woman as the African Eve (literally speaking) and that today's distribution of the mtDNA could have occurred via a recombination with the male contribution. Third, some type of substitutions in the DNA are more likely to occur, so that the concept of uniform and constant mutation is out the window. With all of these caveats many "presently" believed-in theories are also sunk. Examples are given in the article (which I debunked on lists on USENET) such as the famous experiment from a year ago in which it was "proven" that the Neandertals separated from modern humans 600,000 years, and these are now "theories" that have gone out the window. The other example is the "African Eve" who lived about 200,000 years ago which I criticized on sci.lang within weeks after it was printed. Times are getting more exciting. I think social scientists and biologists are about to discover "diffusion" equations, Ito stochastic differential equation, and Fokker-Planck methods. I worked on these during my PhD and never thought I'd see them again. Recently I saw whole books on finance (derivatives) which are full of Ito calculus and Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov methods and Brownian motion. These are really a part of stochastic processes and we got tantalizingly close to this topic the last time around. Summer is almost here (well, at least spring is here) and if we start again, we might get to this topic by summer. It looks like historical linguistics is now ready for the diffusion equation, as is biochemistry and some social sciences. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 22:21:54 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:21:54 -0500 Subject: mama and papa and reruns Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> One of the problems with the comparative method, which I listed on one of my previous posts is the fact that a particular set of words which satisfy phonetic resemblance to a set of the type {ana, ama, anna, amma, atta, ....} is not used in the comparisons. The reason for this is that these words are said to be 'infant talk', or 'baby talk'. This point of view is further justified by a kind of a back-compatibility argument of finding such words in many languages. Of course, the fact that words satisfying such phonetic resemblance criteria occur in so many languages is the strongest evidence yet for various "lumper" theories. I should mention that similar "lumper" vs "splitter" arguments also rage in paleontology, especially the paleontology of hominids. I want to present very strong evidence that this argument (that infant talk creates phonetic resemblances accross language families and that these words should not be used in comparisons) has no merit other than to work against lumper programs and to make the splitter's work look much better than it really is. I will only post snippets from this article: "Baby Talk", USN & WR, 15 June, 1998. I know that USN&WR is a newsweekly and not a scientific journal. That makes the anti-lumper baby-talk arguments even more' useless; after all, if this knowledge has now spread to the masses, what purpose does it serve to continue in linguistics? ======================snippets================================= p.50 Within a few months of birth, children have already begun memorizing words without knowing their meaning. The question that has absorbed-- and sometimes divided--linguists is whether children need a special language faculty to do this or instead can infer the abstract rules of grammar from the sentences they hear, using the same mental skills that allow them to recognize faces or master arithmetic. ... An infant's brain, it turns out, is capable of taking in enormous amounts of information and finding the regular patterns contained within it. ... Infants can perceive the entire range of phonemes, according to Janet Werker and Richard Tees, psychologists... ... Yet children begin to note word boundaries by the time they are 8 months old, even they though they have no concept of what most words mean. p. 52 [Saffran and Aslin] reported that babies can remember words by listening for patterns of syllables that occur together with statistical regularity. ... In the past, psychologists never imagined that young infants had the mental capacity to make these sorts of inferences. p.53 Findings like Newport's are suggesting to some researchers that perhaps children can use statistical regularities to extract not only individual words from what they hear but also the rules for cobbling words together into sentences. =======================end snippets=============================== What this means is that infants learn the so-called "baby-talk" words which are not allowed in comparisons of languages long before they begin to talk. This means that the baby-talk arguments have it backwards. Infants learn to babble what they hear from parents. So if infants are babbling "dadda", "dad", "daddi", "mommi", etc they are not making them up but most likely have already heard them often and are trying to imitate their parents. There are mailing lists in which people are still repeating the same old falsehoods. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 22:26:12 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:26:12 -0500 Subject: Crowley: Book Review Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> This is not a book review. This is just a bunch of snippets from Crowley's book. I will reply to this to add my comments, and that will be the book review. In this post, if you see anything in square brackets [...] it is probably my addition. -------------------------Crowley-------------------------------- Crowley, T. (1992) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, Oxford University Press, NY. p.37 The concept of lenition is not very well defined, and linguists who use the term often seem to rely more on intuition or guesswork than on a detailed understanding of what lenition means. p. 48 ..I will define the concept of phonetic similarity. Two sounds can be described as being phonetically more similar to each other after a sound change has taken place if those two sounds have more phonetic features in common than they did before the change took place. If a sound change results in an increase in the number of shared features, then we can say that assimilation has taken place. p. 73 A phonetic description of a language simply describes the physical facts of the sounds of the language. A phonemic description, however, describes not the physical facts, but the way these sounds are related to each other for speakers of that language. It is possible for two languages to have the same physical sounds, yet to have very different phonemic systems. The phonemic description therefore tells us what are the basic sound units for a particular language that enables its speakers to differentiate meanings. p.88 ...you have to look for forms in the various related languages which appear to be derived from a common original form. Two such forms are cognate with each other, and both are reflexes of the same form in the protolanguage [PL]. p.89 In deciding whether two forms are cognate or not, you need to consider how similar they are both in form and meaning. If they are similar enough that it could be assumed that they are derived from a single original form with a single original meaning, then we say that they are cognate. p.93 Having set out all of the sound correspondences [SC or RegSC] that you can find in the data, you can now move on to the third step, which is to work out what original sound in the protolanguage might have produced that particular range of sounds in the various daughter languages. Your basic assumption should be that each separate set of sound correspondences goes back to a distinct original phoneme. In reconstructing the shapes of these original phonemes, you should always be guided by a number of general principles: (i) Any reconstruction should involve sound changes that are plausible. (You should be guided by the kinds of things that you learned in Chapter 2 in this respect.) (ii) Any reconstruction should involve as few changes as possible between the protolanguage and the daughter languages. It is perhaps easiest to reconstruct back from those sound correspondences in which the reflexes of the original phoneme (or protophoneme) are identical in all daughter languages. By principle (ii) you should normally assume that such correspondences go back to the same protophoneme as you find in the daughter languages, and that there have been no sound changes of any kind. p.95 (iii) Reconstructions should fill gaps in phonological systems rather than create unbalanced systems. Although there will be exceptions among the world's languages, there is a strong tendency for languages to have 'balanced' phonological systems. By this I mean that there is a set of sounds distinguished by a particular feature, this feature is also likely to be used to distinguish a different series of sounds in the language. For example, if a language has two back rounded vowels (i.e. /u/ and /o/), we would expect it also to have two front unrounded vowels (i.e. /i/ and /e/). p. 98 (iv) A phoneme should not be reconstructed in a protolanguage unless it is shown to be absolutely necessary from the evidence of the daugher languages. p.109 ..But what do our reconstructions actually represent? Do they represent a real language as it was actually spoken at some earlier time, or do our reconstructions only give an approximation of some earlier language? ....according to this point of view, a 'protolanguage' as it is reconstructed is not a 'language' in the same sense as any of its descendant languages, or as the 'real' protolanguage' itself. It is merely an abstract statement of correspondences. ...Other linguists, while not going as far as this, have stated that, while languages that are related through common descent are derived from a single ancestor language, we should not necessarily assume that this language really existed as such. The assumption of the comparative method is that we should arrive at an entirely uniform protolanguage and this is likely to give us a distorted or false view of the protolanguage. In some cases, the comparative method may even allow us to reconstruct a protolanguage that never existed historically. p.110 ..One frequently employed device in these sorts of situations is to distinguish the protophoneme by which two phonetically similar correspondence sets are derived by using the lower and upper case forms of the same symbol....Another option in these kinds of situations is to use subscript or superscript numerals e.g. /*l1/ and /*l2). p. 119 [Internal Reconstruction chap. 6] There is a second method of reconstruction that is known as internal reconstruction which allows you to make guesses about the history of a language as well. p.123 ...you would normally consider using internal method only in the following circumstances: (a) Sometimes, the language you are investigating might be a linguistic isolate i.e. it may not be related to any other language (and is therefore in a family of its own). In such a case, there is no possibility of applying the comparative method as there is nothing to compare this language with. Internal reconstruction is therefore the only possibility that is available. (b) A very similar situation to this would be the one in which the language you are studying is so distantly related to its sister languages that the comparative method is unable to reveal very much its history. This would be because there are so few cognate words between the language you are working on and its sister languages that it would be difficult to set out the systematic sound correspondences. (c) You may want to to know something about changes that have taken place between a reconstructed protolanguage [RPL] and its descendant languages. (d) Finally, you may want to try to reconstruct further back still from a protolanguage that you have arrived at by means of the comparative method. The earliest language from which a number of languages is derived is, of course, itself a linguistic isolate in the sense that we are unable to show that any other languages are descended from it. There is no reason why you cannot apply the internal method of reconstruction to a protolanguage, just as you could with any linguistic isolate, if you wanted to go back still further back in time. ...this method can only be sued when a a sound change ahs resulted in some kind of morphological alternation in a language. Morphological alternations [MA] that arise as a result of sound changes always involve conditioned sound changes [CSC]. If an unconditioned sound change [USCh] has taken place in a language, there will be no synchronic residue of the original situation in the form of morpological alternations, so the internal method will be completely unable to produce any results in these kinds of situations. [more on intermediate changes leading to false reconstructions..] p. 129 [Grammatical, Semantic, and Lexical Change, chap. 7] The number of individual phonemes of a language ranges from around a dozen or so in some languages, to 140 or so at the very most in other languages. p.132 There is a tendency for languages to change typologically according to a kind of cycle. Isolating languages tend to move towards agglutinating structures. Agglutinating languages tend to move towards the inflectional type, and finally, inflecting languages tend to become less inflectional over time and more isolating. ..[diagram].. Isolating languages become agglutinating in structure by a process of phonological reduction. By this I mean that free form grammatical markers may become phonologically reduced to unstressed bound form markers (i.e. suffixes or prefixes). p.134 ...languages which are agglutinating type tend to change towards inflectional type. By the process of morphological fusion, two originally clearly divisible morphemes in a word may change in such a way that the boundary is no longer clearly recognizable. [defn of portmanteu morphemes]. p.135 Finally, languages of the inflectional type tend to the isolating type; this process is called morphological reduction. It is very common for inflectional morphemes to become more and more reduced, until sometimes they disappear altogether. The forms that are left, after the complete disappearance of inflectional morphemes, consist of single phonemes. p.136 There is, in fact, a fourth type of language: those having polysynthetic morphology. Such languages represent extreme forms of agglutinating languages in which single word correspond to what in other kinds of languages are expressed as whole clauses. Thus a single word may include nominal subjects and objects, and possibly also adverbial information, and even non-core nominal arguments in the clause such as direct objects and spatial noun phrases. p. 137 Polysynthetic languages can develop out of more analytic (i.e. nonpolysynthetic) languages by a process of argument incorporation. p. 144 Words in languages can be grouped into two basic categories: lexical words, and grammatical words. Lexical words are those which have definable meanings of their own when they appear independently of any linguistic context: elephant, trumpet, large. Grammatical words, on the other hand, only have meanings when they occur in the company of other words, and they relate those other words together to form a grammatical sentence. Such words in English include the, these, on, my. Grammatical words constitute the mortar in a wall, while lexical words are more like bricks. p.145 The change from lexical word to grammatical word is only the first step in the process of grammaticalization, with the next step being morphologisation i.e. the development of a bound form out of what was originally a free form. In fact, morphologisation can involve degrees of bonding between bound forms and other forms as it is possible to distinguish between clitics and affixes. A clitic is a bound form which is analysed as being attached to a whole phrase than to just a single word. An affix, however, is attached as either a prefix or a suffix directly to a word. p.168 [Subgrouping chapter 8] Similarities between languages can be explained as being due either shared retention from a protolanguage, or shared innovations since the time of the protolanguage. If two languages are similar they share some feature that has been retained from a protolanguage, you cannot use this similarity as evidence that they have gone through a period of common descent. The retention of a particular feature in this way is not significant, because you should expect a large number of features to be retained this way. However, if two languages are similar because they have both undergone the same innovation or change, then you can say that this is evidence that they have had a period of common descent and that they therefore do belong to the same subgroup. You can say that a shared innovation in two languages is evidence that those two languages belong in the same subgroup, because exactly the same change is unlikely to take place independently in two separate languages. By suggesting that the languages have undergone a period of common descent, you are saying that the particular change took place only once between the higher level protolanguage and the intermediate protolanguage which is between this and the various modern languages that belong in the subgroup. [problem of multiple scales!] p.168 While it is shared innovations that we use as evidence for establishing subgroups, certain kinds of innovations are likely to be stronger evidence for subgrouping than other kinds. ...subgrouping rests on the assumption that shared similarities are unlikely to be due to chance. However some kinds of similarities between languages are in fact due to chance, i.e. the same changes do sometimes take place quite independently in different languages. This kind of situation is often referred to as parallel development or drift. ... In classifying languages into subgroups, you therefore need to avoid the possibility that innovations in two languages might be due to drift or parallel development. YOu an do this by looking for the following in linguistic changes: (i) Changes that are particularly unusual. (ii) Sets of several phonological changes, especially unusual changes which would not ordinarily be expected to have taken place together. (iii) Phonological changes which correspond to unconnected grammatical or semantic changes. ... If two languages share common sporadic or irregular phonological change, this provides even better evidence for subgrouping those two languages together as the same irregular change is unlikely to take place twice independently. p. 171 [Lexicostatistics and Glottochronology] Lexicostatistics is a technique that allows us to determine the degree of relationship between two languages, simply by comparing the vocabularies of the languages and determining the degree of similarity between them. This method operates under two basic assumptions. The first of these is that there are some parts of the vocabulary of language that are much less subject lexical change than other parts, i.e. there are certain parts of the lexicon in which words are less likely to be completely replaced by non-cognate forms. The area of the lexicon that is assumed to be more resistant to lexical change is referred to as core vocabulary (or a basic vocabulary). There is a second aspect to this first general assumption underlying the lexicostatistical method, and that is the fact that this core of relatively change-resistant vocabulary is the same for all languages. The universal core vocabulary includes items such as pronouns, numerals, body parts, geographical features, basic actions, and basic states. Items like these are unlikely to be replaced by words copied from other langauges, because all people, whatever their cultural differences, have eyes, mouths, and legs, and know about the sky and clouds, the sun, and the moon, stones, and trees and so on. Other concepts however may be culture-specific. ... The second assumption that underlies the lexicostatistical method is that the actual rate of lexical replacement in the core vocabulary is more or less stable, and is therefore aboutg the same for all languages over time. In peripheral vocabulary of course, the rate of lexical replacement is not stable at all, and may be relatively fast or slow depending on the nature of cultural contact between speakers of different languages. This second assumption has been tested in 13 languages for which there are written records going back over long periods of time. It has been found that there has been an average vocabulary retention of 80.5 percent every 1,000 years. p.173 [basic or core vocabulary] The most popular list of this length is known as the Swadesh list, which is named after the linguist Morris Swadesh who drew it up in the early 1960s. p.181 Once the percentage of cognate forms has been worked out, we can use the following mathematical formula to work out the time depth, or the period of separation of two languages; t = log C/(2*logR) In the formula above, t stands for the number of thousands of years that two languages have been separated, C stands for the percentage of cognates as worked out by comparing basic vocabularies, and R stands for the constant change factor mentioned earlier (the value in this formula is set at 0.85). p.183 Firstly, there is the problem of deciding which words should be regarded as core vocabulary and which should not. Obviously, it may be possible for different sets of vocabulary to produce differing results. Another difficulty involves the actual counting of forms that are cognate against those that are not cognate in basic vocabulary lists from two different languages. ... Lexicostatisticians in fact rely heavily on what is often euphemistically called the inspection method of determining whether two forms are cognate or not in a pair of languages. What this amounts to is that you are more or less free to apply intelligent guesswork as to whether you think two forms are cognate or not. ... Of course, two different linguists can take the same lists from two different languages , and since there is no objective way of determining what should be ticked 'yes' and what should be ticked 'no', it is possible that both will come up with significantly different cognate figures at the end of the exercise. [p. 186 example of languages of Milne Bay area of Papua New Guinea] [minimal spanning tree can be drawn from these figures] p. 201 [causes of language change ] One famous linguist Otto Jesperson made a great deal of the importance of simplity as a factor in bringing about sound change: I am not afraid of hearing the objection that I ascribe too great a power to human laxness, indolence, inertia, shirking, easy-goingness, sluggishness, or whatever other beautiful synonyms have been invented for 'economy of effort' or 'following the line of least resistance'. The fact remains that there is such a tendency in all human beings, and by taking it into account in explaining changes of sound, we are doing nothing else than applying here the same principle. Despite the obvious appeal of this argument as a major factor in explaining language change, there are also several problems associated with it. The first is that it is extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible, to define explicitly what we mean by 'simplicity' in language. Simplicity is clearly a relative term. p. 212 [observing language change, chapter 10] The concept of linguistic indeterminacy also relates to the idea of the linguistic system as used by Saussure. He argued that in describing a language (i.e. phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, clauses, and so on) and describing the ways in which these units interrelate (i.e. the grammatical rules for putting them together for making up larger units). In talking about describing the system of a particular language, Saussure is implying that for every language, there is one -- and only one -- linguistic system. p. 215 One of the most influential linguists of the past few decades, Noam Chomsky, expresses this view when he said that a grammar should describe an 'ideal speaker-hearer relationship', and it should ignore factors from outside the language itself (such as formality of a social situation). But language is not an ideal system at all. p. 227 [problems with traditional assumptions, chap. 11] Jones emphasized that it was similarities in the structure of the Indo-European languages, rather than it was similarities between words, that were important in determining language relationships. This observation led to a new intellectual climate in the study of language relationships, as scholars started looking instead for grammatical similarities between languages to determine whether or not they should be considered to be related. Lexical similarities, it was argued, were poor evidence of genetic relationship, as similarities between practically any word in any two languages can be established with enough effort. p. 232 In reconstructing the history of languages, you therefore need to make the important distinction between a systematic (or a regular) correspondence and an isolated (or sporadic) correspondence. This is a distinction that I did not make in Chapter 5 when I was talking about the comparative method, but it is very important. p. 256 [Language Contact, chapter 12] The influence of one of the linguistic systems of an individual on the other linguistic system of that individual is referred to in general as interference. Interference can occur in the phonological system of a language, in its semantics, or in its grammar. Phonological interference simply means the carrying over of the phonological features of one language into the other as an accent of some kind. ... p. 257 Semantic interference can also be referred to as semantic copying, as loan translation, or as calquing. A calque (or a semantic copy or a loan translation) is when we do not copy a lexical item as such from one language into another, but when just the meanings are transferred from one language to the other, while at teh same time we use the corresponding forms of the original language. p. 260 There is a significant body of literature on the subject of linguistic diffusion and convergence, which is based on the assumption that languages can and do influence one another. The term diffusion is used to refer to the spread of a particular linguistic feature from one language to another (or, indeed to several other languages). p.262 The diffusion of grammatical features in this way has caused some linguists to question further the validity and basic assumptions of the whole comparative method. Some languages appear to have undergone so much diffusion in the lexicon and the grammar that it can be difficult to decide which protolanguage they are derived from. According to the comparative method as I have described it in this volume, it is possible for a language to be derived from only a single protolanguage, yet some linguists have found it necessary to speak of mixed languages, which seem to derive from two different protolanguages at once. p.270 Many linguists have been struck by the fact that pidgin and creole languages often show strong parallels in their structure with their substrate languages than their superstrate languages. p.312 [cultural reconstruction, chapter 13] While many attempts at paleolinguistic comparisons fall far short of scientific respectability, the writings of Johanna Nichols since the mid-1980s have attracted considerable interest among some linguists, as well as archaeologists and others interested in establishing relationships at much greater-time depths than is possible using the comparative method. Nichols' approach is more akin to population science in that she does not aim to study the evolution of individual languages, or even closely related groups of languages. Rather she aims to study the history of 'populations' of languages. By this, she means that she considers large groupings of languages together, dealing not with particular features of individual languages, but broader general features of language groupings. Thus, she considers for example, the languages of Australia or Africa as a whole. She pays attention not to whether structural features are present or absent, but to what are the statistical frequencies and distributions of features are within these larger populations of languages. Such linguistic markers are considered to be akin to biological markers in that they can be used to identify affinities between populations at considerable time-depths. She argues that if, in the languages of a continent (or some other large geographical area) a feature shows up with a high frequency, this distribution is not something that is due to recent diffusion. When several markers of this type are shared, this is taken as being indicative of historical affinity. Of course, such features must be known to be typologically unrelated. ... The actual application and interpretation of Nichols' method is complex and it is unlikely to become the standard model by which individual historical linguists will attempt to study linguistic relationships. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 22:30:28 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:30:28 -0500 Subject: Guidelines Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Guidelines For Posting To : ------------------------------------------------ The study of language covers a broad range of questions, and is likewise relevant to many fields of study. The neuroscientist who explores the biological basis of language, the psychologist seeking a more comprehensive view of the nature and dynamics of language, and the historical linguist who dreams ultimate goal of classification of and agreement on all the languages of the world, something akin to the Human Genome Project, all work with closely related and overlapping subjects, and all stand to benefit from and contribute to a common pool of knowledge. The rapid growth of information technology has made possible rapid exchange of information regarding languages. Whereas only a short time ago only the field linguist could have hoped to get information on some languages, native speakers, and linguists specializing in various languages can now be virtually brought together with ease. Parallelling this development in information technology has been the interest in making historical or comparative linguistics more rigorous and dependent upon and based on mathematics similar to the study of syntax and grammar of language. However, this forum can often lead to heated dialog on the nature of the language. In the interest of fostering constructive dialog on a very complex subject, the following guidelines should be observed when posting: 1. The basic aim of the lists is to encourage discussion and exchange information on research on quantitative aspects of language and other relevant disciplines in the sciences and humanities; with the aim of understanding the use, misuse and abuse of quantitative methods in linguistics and identification of such bogus quantitative results that exist in the literature. 2. As the overall goal of this discussion is communication toward the advancement of knowledge, it is expected that the disagreements do not lead to useless flaming, and heckling. 3. Please keep in mind that the study of language crosses many disciplinary boundaries. Anything related to language may be discussed on this list however the preferences are for quantitative methods and models since there are many other lists available for discussion of other aspects of linguistics. Formal Language Theory is understood in this context to be a part of quantitative methods since it is a branch of mathematics and computer science as well as linguistics. Feel free to draw from research including posts on other lists or websites, however focus on what it means for quantitative linguistics, and theory, not the specific details of the language or specific words, lexemes, morphemes. 4. The list is not moderated. So far it has worked rather well, proving that social science mailing lists need not be moderated. In a strange way, this list also shows the solution of the problem of policing lists in linguistics. By making it quantitative, the useless riff-raff can be easily self-filtered. Noise-makers and hecklers do not want to be on quantitative lists. That is why they don't exist in physics, computer science, engineering, chemistry, or math lists. 5. Please don't exceed about 60 characters per line. Use spaces for paragraphs liberally, it makes it easier to read on the monitor. However, please do not put a long signature list. It is understood to be sign of immaturity on the Internet. Only put your name, email address, and a website that may be necessary. Avoid quoting previous messages any more than absolutely necessary --we've already read them once. Please do not use AOL type quoting. Use the quoting that uses angular brackets >, as everyone else. Leave only enough on the post to show what the other(s) may have said. 6. The mailing-list server is majordomo. To subscribe or unsubsribe send email to the address majordomo at csam.montclair.edu and in the body of the mesage put whichever is appropriate: subscribe language unsubscribe language If you have problems feel free to contact the list-owner; huibeyh at montclair.edu -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 10 22:36:26 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:36:26 -0500 Subject: Binomial Distribution and Ringe Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> H. Mark Hubey wrote: > > > Here they are: they are related to each other. > > 1. A marksman takes shots at a target so far away that we are > not sure that he will hit a bullseye. Suppose his probability of > hitting the bullseye is p. (Now, p is just a number here, a number > greater than or equal to 0 and less than or equal to 1. We normally > would write this as 0 <= p <= 1. In books the < sign and the = > sign are put on top of each other so that it doesn't look like > we have a representation of an arrow in <=) > > a) What is the number of shots that he will [probably have to] take > before he hits the target (bullyseye)? Here is the solution to this part. It gives us a new probability density called the geometric density. The continuous version of it is the exponential density. We are thinking of a series of experiments of the type; S FS FFS ... FFFFFFFS Note that there is only one S (i.e. success) and all the other tosses before it are F (failure). So this is the "time to success" density (or distribution). Any of these can happen if the marksman takes shots. The question is which is more likely to happen? To compute that we have to average all these possibilities. But before we do that we should write the probability density in the form that one usually sees it; P(S)=((1-p)^x) * (p) That is x failures (of probability 1-p each) followed by a single success of probability p. > b) What is the probability that out of 10 shots he will hit 6? This is related to the above. Superficially it seems like we want to change the above formula to something like P(S)= ((1-p)^4) * (p)^6 so that we have 4 failures and 6 successes out of 10. But this is only one possibility of obtaining 6 successes and 4 failures. IOW, this is something like FFFFSSSSSS. But we have to consider other possibilities such as SSSSSSFFFF. To do this we have to find all possible ways of obtaining 6 successes and 4 failures. This brings up the problem of permutations and combinations. To do that let's start with ways of arranging N objects along a line. For example if we want to find arrangements of {a,b,c} by trial and error we can see that the possibilities are abc,acb,bac,bca,cab,cba which totals to 6. In general we can total the number of permutations by noting that for the 1st position we have N possibilities. After having made that choice we have N-1 possibilities left, and so on. So for N objects the number can be computed via N*(N-1)*(N-2)....3*2*1 This is read as N-factorial and written as N!. For N=3, we obtain 3*2*1 which is 6. The more difficult aspect of this is to compute the number of possibilities if we arrange N objects R at a time. To do that we proceed similarly. For the 1st place we have N choices, for the 2nd place we have N-1 choices, etc. However, we have to stop this before when we get to the Rth place, so the formula becomes N*(N-1)*(N-2)*...*(N-R+1) There is an easier way to write this, in terms of factorials. N! P(N,R)=---------- (N-R)! Now a combination C(N,R) can be obtained from P(N,R) by dividing by R! because in the definition of combination the order is not significant. And finally we get to the famous Binomial Distribution which is f(S)= C(N,S)*(p^S)(1-p)^(N-S) p^S is the probability of S successes. (1-p)^(N-S) is the probability of (N-S) failures out of N tries (i.e. S successes and N-S failures) and the C(N,S) is the combination that distributes the S successes out of N tries into the various possibilities. This is the formula used by Ringe in his work. This is the formula that is used by Rosenfelder on his website. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Fri Mar 12 03:57:07 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 22:57:07 -0500 Subject: Crowley: Book Review Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Here is the review: > -------------------------Crowley-------------------------------- > > Crowley, T. (1992) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, Oxford > University Press, NY. > > p.37 > The concept of lenition is not very well defined, and linguists who use > the term often seem to rely more on intuition or guesswork than on a > detailed understanding of what lenition means. It is very well defined now. For those who cannot obtain my book, they should note that they will be able to read it in the pages of the Journal of the International Quantitative Linguistics Association with a name like "Vector Speech Spaces via Dimensional Analysis" or something resembling it. Crowley has a disarming candor in this book which no doubt derives from his knowledge of the field and his love of it. There is no "black magic" in this book. He either explains it clearly or explains that nobody really knows, or that people guess, etc (except in cases where he errs !). :-) > p. 48 > ..I will define the concept of phonetic similarity. Two sounds can be > described as being phonetically more similar to each other after a sound > change has taken place if those two sounds have more phonetic features > in common than they did before the change took place. If a sound change > results in an increase in the number of shared features, then we can say > that assimilation has taken place. Now here is a perfect example of candor, intelligence, creativity all rolled into one. First, he has apparently discovered the concept of similarity all on his own. He cannot exactly put his finger on it but it is clear that he is talking about distance. And this distance is indeed the simplest such distance metric, the one based on distinctive features. If all the distinctive features are binary, then this distance is simply the number of bits that differ between two phonemes. This distance metric is used in computer science for distances between bitstrings and is called the Hamming metric after the first person to have used it. For more on this you can look at my book [Hubey,1994] and you will also find other (more accurate and more precise) distance metrics. The final result of all these spaces (metric spaces) is the vector spaces via dimensional analysis that is mentioned above. I think it is my greatest contribution in the whole book. Unfortunately a few linguists whom I asked thought that this particular chapter was snake oil. That's how things go in life! > p. 73 > A phonetic description of a language simply describes the physical facts > of the sounds of the language. A phonemic description, however, > describes not the physical facts, but the way these sounds are related > to each other for speakers of that language. It is possible for two > languages to have the same physical sounds, yet to have very different > phonemic systems. The phonemic description therefore tells us what are > the basic sound units for a particular language that enables its > speakers to differentiate meanings. This is reasonably typical and yet also something that hides a great truth; there is great confusion in the literature on what these things mean. I propose that words acoustic, perceptual and articulatory be used instead of phonetic. It would go a long way toward clearing up the confusion in the field. Then we could rename phonetic and phonemic as "absolute" and "relative" as well as "low-precision/accuracy" vs "high-precision/accuracy" descriptions. This accords reasonably well with the facts in linguistics. > > p.88 > ...you have to look for forms in the various related languages which > appear to be derived from a common original form. Two such forms are > cognate with each other, and both are reflexes of the same form in the > protolanguage [PL]. Here is truth and candor; "appear to be derived". > p.89 > In deciding whether two forms are cognate or not, you need to consider > how similar they are both in form and meaning. If they are similar > enough that it could be assumed that they are derived from a single > original form with a single original meaning, then we say that they are > cognate. More truth and candor: "similar in both form and meaning". This again is nothing but "distance" staring us in the face again, and again, and... > p.93 > Having set out all of the sound correspondences [SC or RegSC] that you > can find in the data, you can now move on to the third step, which is to > work out what original sound in the protolanguage might have produced > that particular range of sounds in the various > daughter languages. Your basic assumption should be that each separate > set of sound correspondences goes back to a distinct original phoneme. > In reconstructing the shapes of these original phonemes, you should > always be guided by a number of general principles: > This is the only place where I have actually seen principles actually listed in mostly clear terminology. > (i) Any reconstruction should involve sound changes that are plausible. > (You should be guided by the kinds of things that you learned in Chapter > 2 in this respect.) This again must be "empirical". What else can "plausible" mean? It means mostly that if it has been deemed plausible already (because someone has found it to exist, or has convinced others that it existed) then you can use it the same way. Of course, there are other ways. > > (ii) Any reconstruction should involve as few changes as possible > between the protolanguage and the daughter languages. General principle called Ockham's Razor (sometimes Occam's Razor) and often called the "Parsimony Principle". It's a general principle that people use for no other reason than the fact that it exists. > It is perhaps easiest to reconstruct back from those sound > correspondences in which the reflexes of the original phoneme (or > protophoneme) are identical in all daughter languages. By principle (ii) > you should normally assume that such correspondences go back to the same > protophoneme as you find in the daughter languages, and that there have > been no sound changes of any kind. If the sound changes resemble the [in]famous random walk (Brownian motion) then if we divide up the changes into intervals, the greatest amount will be "no-change" because the random walk has zero mean and that is where it gets its maximum. > p.95 > (iii) Reconstructions should fill gaps in phonological systems rather > than create unbalanced systems. > > Although there will be exceptions among the world's languages, there is > a strong tendency for languages to have 'balanced' phonological systems. > By this I mean that there is a set of sounds distinguished by a > particular feature, this feature is also likely to be used to > distinguish a different series of sounds in the language. For example, > if a language has two back rounded vowels (i.e. /u/ and /o/), we would > expect it also to have two front unrounded vowels (i.e. /i/ and /e/). This is another general principle that is in use. It is called "symmetry". There is a whole book written on it [Van Fraasen] , and things like this have already been used already in physics. Maxwell's Equations (of electromagnetics) came out of symmetry considerations during the last century and he predicted in 1860s what was confirmed experimentally in the 1890s. For whatever reason, nature seems to like symmetry. But it is not exactly clear what he means by "balance". It seems (from my reading of books on linguistics) that there is a kind of a mental chemical elements table-like thing and it is this table that linguists somehow mentally try to fill in. But there are many ways in which symmetry arguments pop up and many of these can be seen in, you guessed it, my book [Hubey,1994]. (It was rejected by some anonymous reviewer for a publishing company and I am really upset at what he wrote. Too bad I can't find out who he is and then check what mathematical work he has actually accomplished in linguistics and see if it amounts to anything worth writing about. My guess is that he does not comprehend or that he wants to publish some of these ideas himself while keeping mine unknown. Nobody will be ever able to figure out who did what until decades later and by that time his name will be attached to my work. It does sound like I am paranoid :-) but I don't believe that anyone can be that incompetent and still pretend to be doing mathematical work in linguistics. I can teach this to college students.] > p. 98 > > (iv) A phoneme should not be reconstructed in a protolanguage unless it > is shown to be absolutely necessary from the evidence of the daugher > languages. > > p.109 > > ..But what do our reconstructions actually represent? Do they represent > a real language as it was actually spoken at some earlier time, or do > our reconstructions only give an approximation of some earlier language? > ....according to this point of view, a 'protolanguage' as it is > reconstructed is not a 'language' in the same sense as any of its > descendant languages, or as the 'real' protolanguage' itself. It is > merely an abstract statement of correspondences. > ...Other linguists, while not going as far as this, have stated that, > while languages that are related through common descent are derived from > a single ancestor language, we should not necessarily assume that this > language really existed as such. The assumption of the comparative > method is that we should arrive at an entirely uniform protolanguage and > this is likely to give us a distorted or false view of the > protolanguage. In some cases, the comparative method may even allow us > to reconstruct a protolanguage that never existed historically. This is yet another one of those great truthful discussions and even better one that touches upon some of the deeper issues of what diachronic linguistics is about. > p.110 > ..One frequently employed device in these sorts of situations is to > distinguish the protophoneme by which two phonetically similar > correspondence sets are derived by using the lower and upper case forms > of the same symbol....Another option in these kinds of situations is to > use subscript or superscript numerals e.g. /*l1/ and /*l2). Great usage. These devices, like using Greek letters, script letters, German frakturs, bold, italics, letters with bars, arrows, underwiggles, subscripts, superscripts, etc have all been employed in mathematics and physics for similar reasons. IT would probably be best to use script upper case letters actually (something like Dingbat script). > p. 119 [Internal Reconstruction chap. 6] > > There is a second method of reconstruction that is known as internal > reconstruction which allows you to make guesses about the history of a > language as well. It seems like this is comparative construction applied to the same language by looking for clusters of words derived from the same root. > > p.123 > ...you would normally consider using internal method only in the > following circumstances: > > (a) Sometimes, the language you are investigating might be a linguistic > isolate i.e. it may not be related to any other language (and is > therefore in a family of its own). In such a case, there is no > possibility of applying the comparative method as there is nothing to > compare this language with. Internal reconstruction is therefore the > only possibility that is available. > > (b) A very similar situation to this would be the one in which the > language you are studying is so distantly related to its sister > languages that the comparative method is unable to reveal very much its > history. This would be because there are so few cognate words between > the language you are working on and its sister languages that it would > be difficult to set out the systematic sound correspondences. > > (c) You may want to to know something about changes that have taken > place between a reconstructed protolanguage [RPL] and its descendant > languages. > > (d) Finally, you may want to try to reconstruct further back still from > a protolanguage that you have arrived at by means of the comparative > method. The earliest language from which a number of languages is > derived is, of course, itself a linguistic isolate in the sense that we > are unable to show that any other languages are descended from it. There > is no reason why you cannot apply the internal method of reconstruction > to a protolanguage, just as you could with any linguistic isolate, if > you wanted to go back still further back in time. > > ...this method can only be used when a a sound change ahs resulted in > some kind of morphological alternation in a language. Morphological > alternations [MA] that arise as a result of sound changes always involve > conditioned sound changes [CSC]. If an unconditioned sound change [USCh] > has taken place in a language, there will be no synchronic residue of > the original situation in the form of morpological alternations, so the > internal method will be completely unable to produce any results in > these kinds of situations. All excellent explanations. Truthful. To the point. No black magic here. IT would have been so much better if he could have introduced some ideas on how to evaluate this data objectively and rigorously. > [more on intermediate changes leading to false reconstructions..] > > p. 129 [Grammatical, Semantic, and Lexical Change, chap. 7] > > The number of individual phonemes of a language ranges from around a > dozen or so in some languages, to 140 or so at the very most in other > languages. > > p.132 > There is a tendency for languages to change typologically according to a > kind of cycle. Isolating languages tend to move towards agglutinating > structures. Agglutinating languages tend to move towards the > inflectional type, and finally, inflecting languages tend to become less > inflectional over time and more isolating. ..[diagram].. > Isolating languages become agglutinating in structure by a process of > phonological reduction. By this I mean that free form grammatical > markers may become phonologically reduced to unstressed bound form > markers (i.e. suffixes or prefixes). > p.134 > ...languages which are agglutinating type tend to change towards > inflectional type. By the process of morphological fusion, two > originally clearly divisible morphemes in a word may change in such a > way that the boundary is no longer clearly recognizable. > [defn of portmanteu morphemes]. > p.135 > Finally, languages of the inflectional type tend to the isolating type; > this process is called morphological reduction. It is very common for > inflectional morphemes to become more and more reduced, until sometimes > they disappear altogether. The forms that are left, after the complete > disappearance of inflectional morphemes, consist of single phonemes. This is worth discussing in detail probably in some other list because it is a very interesting and complex problem. But the fact that he writes about it and also gives such clear scenarios for belief in the possibility of such occurrences speaks loudly for his understanding of the issues of diachronics. > p.136 > There is, in fact, a fourth type of language: those having polysynthetic > morphology. Such languages represent extreme forms of agglutinating > languages in which single word correspond to what in other kinds of > languages are expressed as whole clauses. Thus a single word may include > nominal subjects and objects, and possibly also adverbial information, > and even non-core nominal arguments in the clause such as direct objects > and spatial noun phrases. > > p. 137 > Polysynthetic languages can develop out of more analytic (i.e. > nonpolysynthetic) languages by a process of argument incorporation. Excellent again. By doing this he has pointed to a way of creating some kind of a scale between say, zero and one, which we write as [0,1] meaning an interval between 0 and 1. This means that we can now treat typology as a variable that takes values in [0,1]. Since both probability theory and fuzzy logic take values in [0,1] we now have the means to create mathematical models and test them. > p. 144 > Words in languages can be grouped into two basic categories: lexical > words, and grammatical words. Lexical words are those which have > definable meanings of their own when they appear independently of any > linguistic context: elephant, trumpet, large. Grammatical words, on the > other hand, only have meanings when they occur in the company of other > words, and they relate those other words together to form a grammatical > sentence. Such words in English include the, these, on, my. Grammatical > words constitute the mortar in a wall, while lexical words are more like > bricks. Great analogy. > p.145 > The change from lexical word to grammatical word is only the first step > in the process of grammaticalization, with the next step being > morphologisation i.e. the development of a bound form out of what was > originally a free form. > > In fact, morphologisation can involve degrees of bonding between bound > forms and other forms as it is possible to distinguish between clitics > and affixes. A clitic is a bound form which is analysed as being > attached to a whole phrase than to just a single word. An affix, > however, is attached as either a prefix or a suffix directly to a word. I prefer words like postfix, prefix, infix. > p.168 [Subgrouping chapter 8] > > Similarities between languages can be explained as being due either > shared retention from a protolanguage, or shared innovations since the > time of the protolanguage. If two languages are similar they share some > feature that has been retained from a protolanguage, you cannot use this > similarity as evidence that they have gone through a period of common > descent. The retention of a particular feature in this way is not > significant, because you should expect a large number of features to be > retained this way. > > However, if two languages are similar because they have both undergone > the same innovation or change, then you can say that this is evidence > that they have had a period of common descent and that they therefore do > belong to the same subgroup. You can say that a shared innovation in two > languages is evidence that those two languages belong in the same > subgroup, because exactly the same change is unlikely to take place > independently in two separate languages. By suggesting that the > languages have undergone a period of common descent, you are saying that > the particular change took place only once between the higher level > protolanguage and the intermediate protolanguage which is between this > and the various modern languages that belong in the subgroup. [problem > of multiple scales!] > > p.168 > While it is shared innovations that we use as evidence for establishing > subgroups, certain kinds of innovations are likely to be stronger > evidence for subgrouping than other kinds. ...subgrouping rests on the > assumption that shared similarities are unlikely to be due to chance. > However some kinds of similarities between languages are in fact due to > chance, i.e. the same changes do sometimes take place quite > independently in different languages. This kind of situation is often > referred to as parallel development or drift. The concept of distance automatically takes care of this problem. For example suppose we are looking at a protolangauge (PL) that has five features. Let us represent this as [1,1,1,1,1]. Now suppose three of the languages derived from this PL have A=[0,0,1,1,1], B=[0,1,1,1,0] and C=[1,1,1,0,0]. Now the distances between these are: d(A,B)= 3, d(A,C)=4, and d(B,C)=3. The maximum distance possible is 5, so we can obtain the similarities; s(A,B)=2, s(A,C)=1, s(B,C)=2 As can be seen from their features, B and C have jointly innovated the last feature, whereas A and B have jointly innovated the first feature. Now A and C have not jointly innovated anything and their similarity is 1 whereas the others are higher. To make it clearer we can simply compute their distances from the PL d(A,PL)=2, d(B,PL)=2, and d(C,PL)=2 and therefore on the similarity scale we have s(A,PL)=s(B,PL)=s(C,PL)=3 So they are all equally removed from PL whereas their relationships to each other is seen in the s(..) measures. > ... > In classifying languages into subgroups, you therefore need to avoid the > possibility that innovations in two languages might be due to drift or > parallel development. YOu an do this by looking for the following in > linguistic changes: > > (i) Changes that are particularly unusual. > (ii) Sets of several phonological changes, especially unusual changes > which would not ordinarily be expected to have taken place together. > (iii) Phonological changes which correspond to unconnected grammatical > or semantic changes. > ... > If two languages share common sporadic or irregular phonological change, > this provides even better evidence for subgrouping those two languages > together as the same irregular change is unlikely to take place twice > independently. Unfortunately, "unusual" here is not defined clearly. Does it mean "not occurring empirically" amongst the world's languages? > > p. 171 [Lexicostatistics and Glottochronology] > > Lexicostatistics is a technique that allows us to determine the degree > of relationship between two languages, simply by comparing the > vocabularies of the languages and determining the degree of similarity > between them. This method operates under two basic assumptions. The > first of these is that there are some parts of the vocabulary of > language that are much less subject lexical change than other parts, > i.e. there are certain parts of the lexicon in which words are less > likely to be completely replaced by non-cognate forms. The area of the > lexicon that is assumed to be more resistant to lexical change is > referred to as core vocabulary (or a basic vocabulary). It seems here that these assumptions belong only to those who practice lexicostatistics. Is that really true or is it only they who clearly state their assumptions while some of the others might be just muddling along? Or is it that now there are a plethora of beliefs and assumptions? > There is a second aspect to this first general assumption underlying the > lexicostatistical method, and that is the fact that this core of > relatively change-resistant vocabulary is the same for all languages. > The universal core vocabulary includes items such as pronouns, numerals, > body parts, geographical features, basic actions, and basic states. > Items like these are unlikely to be replaced by words copied from other > langauges, because all people, whatever their cultural differences, have > eyes, mouths, and legs, and know about the sky and clouds, the sun, and > the moon, stones, and trees and so on. Other concepts however may be > culture-specific. This can easily be fixed up. Just create another parameter snd use this parameter to change the first parameter. > ... > The second assumption that underlies the lexicostatistical method is > that the actual rate of lexical replacement in the core vocabulary is > more or less stable, and is therefore aboutg the same for all languages > over time. In peripheral vocabulary of course, the rate of lexical > replacement is not stable at all, and may be relatively fast or slow > depending on the nature of cultural contact between speakers of > different languages. This second assumption has been tested in 13 > languages for which there are written records going back over long > periods of time. It has been found that there has been an average > vocabulary retention of 80.5 percent every 1,000 years. This number can easily be changed for other languages based on more intelligent guesswork and model building. Indeed it should be done. > > p.173 [basic or core vocabulary] > The most popular list of this length is known as the Swadesh list, which > is named after the linguist Morris Swadesh who drew it up in the early > 1960s. > > p.181 > Once the percentage of cognate forms has been worked out, we can use the > following mathematical formula to work out the time depth, or the period > of separation of two languages; > > t = log C/(2*logR) > > In the formula above, t stands for the number of thousands of years that > two languages have been separated, C stands for the percentage of > cognates as worked out by comparing basic vocabularies, and R stands for > the constant change factor mentioned earlier (the value in this formula > is set at 0.85). Too bad he does not show where it comes from. > > p.183 > Firstly, there is the problem of deciding which words should be regarded > as core vocabulary and which should not. Obviously, it may be possible > for different sets of vocabulary to produce differing results. > > Another difficulty involves the actual counting of forms that are > cognate against those that are not cognate in basic vocabulary lists > from two different languages. > ... > Lexicostatisticians in fact rely heavily on what is often > euphemistically called the inspection method of determining whether two > forms are cognate or not in a pair of languages. What this amounts to is > that you are more or less free to apply intelligent guesswork as to > whether you think two forms are cognate or not. More candor. Yes, guesswork. OR should we call it a belief. Or should we call it an axiom or postulate. Why not? > ... > Of course, two different linguists can take the same lists from two > different languages > , and since there is no objective way of determining what should be > ticked 'yes' and what should be ticked 'no', it is possible that both > will come up with significantly different cognate figures at the end of > the exercise. > [p. 186 example of languages of Milne Bay area of Papua New Guinea] [minimal spanning tree can be drawn from these figures] Yes, I sketched on into my copy of the book. We can easily get a tree from this data. I can sketch it out if anyone is interested. It could be a good MS thesis. > p. 201 [causes of language change ] > > One famous linguist Otto Jesperson made a great deal of the importance >..... > Despite the obvious appeal of this argument as a major factor in > explaining language change, there are also several problems associated > with it. The first is that it is extremely difficult, perhaps even > impossible, to define explicitly what we mean by 'simplicity' in > language. Simplicity is clearly a relative term. Yes, and complexity is also difficult to define, but there is a whole field and science of complexity now, and simplicity can be defined from complexity. In fact, a measure of complexity appropriate for linguistics is desperately needed for many reasons. > p. 212 [observing language change, chapter 10] > > The concept of linguistic indeterminacy also relates to the idea of the > linguistic system as used by Saussure. He argued that in describing a > language (i.e. phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, clauses, and so on) > and describing the ways in which these units interrelate (i.e. the > grammatical rules for putting them together for making up larger units). > In talking about describing the system of a particular language, > Saussure is implying that for every language, there is one -- and only > one -- linguistic system. This is also another excellent idea. Unfortunately, many linguists seem to only repeat the words and not do anything about this. In fact, there is a way to do this, and some of it will be in my next paper. I already wrote about this on many lists, but unless someone did something about this and published it somewhere I did not see, there is nothing being done about it. This idea takes its clearest form in thermodynamics where we have intensive and extensive parameters. I wrote about this in my newest book for social scientists and especially linguists. I will be looking for a publisher soon. I hope I dont' get the same kind of review. I will have to have the IEEE or some other nonlinguistic entity publish it if this continues. Maybe I will have to do it myself. AT least it will be there for others to read 100 years from now. > p. 215 > One of the most influential linguists of the past few decades, Noam > Chomsky, expresses this view when he said that a grammar should describe > an 'ideal speaker-hearer relationship', and it should ignore factors > from outside the language itself (such as formality of a social > situation). But language is not an ideal system at all. Yes, more "idealization" like ideal gases, frictionless pulleys, massless springs etc of physics. A necessary evil. > > p. 227 [problems with traditional assumptions, chap. 11] > > Jones emphasized that it was similarities in the structure of the > Indo-European languages, rather than it was similarities between words, > that were important in determining language relationships. This > observation led to a new intellectual climate in the study of language > relationships, as scholars started looking instead for grammatical > similarities between languages to determine whether or not they should > be considered to be related. Lexical similarities, it was argued, were > poor evidence of genetic relationship, as similarities between > practically any word in any two languages can be established with enough > effort. Here again we run into the same problem. What is a structure? Is there no mathematical model of these "structures"? Yes there are. PLenty of them, about 400 pages worth. [Hubey,1994]. > > p. 232 > In reconstructing the history of languages, you therefore need to make > the important distinction between a systematic (or a regular) > correspondence and an isolated (or sporadic) correspondence. This is a > distinction that I did not make in Chapter 5 when I was talking about > the comparative method, but it is very important. Good heuristic way to do probability theory. > > p. 256 [Language Contact, chapter 12] > > The influence of one of the linguistic systems of an individual on the > other linguistic system of that individual is referred to in general as > interference. > > Interference can occur in the phonological system of a language, in its > semantics, or in its grammar. Phonological interference simply means the > carrying over of the phonological features of one language into the > other as an accent of some kind. > ... > p. 257 > Semantic interference can also be referred to as semantic copying, as > loan translation, or as calquing. A calque (or a semantic copy or a loan > translation) is when we do not copy a lexical item as such from one > language into another, but when just the meanings are transferred from > one language to the other, while at teh same time we use the > corresponding forms of the original language. How about if people spent 300 years speaking two languages until the two languages "fused". Is that possible? I know people (ignorant ones) who speak 2-3 languages and they speak them all the same way. I can imagine how a whole village of these 1,000 years ago could have created a new language from 2-3 other languages without trying. > p. 260 > There is a significant body of literature on the subject of linguistic > diffusion and convergence, which is based on the assumption that > languages can and do influence one another. The term diffusion is used > to refer to the spread of a particular linguistic feature from one > language to another (or, indeed to several other languages). > > p.262 > The diffusion of grammatical features in this way has caused some > linguists to question further the validity and basic assumptions of the > whole comparative method. Some languages appear to have undergone so > much diffusion in the lexicon and the grammar that it can be difficult > to decide which protolanguage they are derived from. According to the > comparative method as I have described it in this volume, it is possible > for a language to be derived from only a single protolanguage, yet some > linguists have found it necessary to speak of mixed languages, which > seem to derive from two different protolanguages at once. This is probably another important development and it is good that Crowley writes about this. At least now the poor student does not go away with the feeling that all is carved on stones. > p.270 > Many linguists have been struck by the fact that pidgin and creole > languages often show strong parallels in their structure with their > substrate languages than their superstrate languages. Extremely important for language mixing. Similar to the way in which we can create degrees of typology we can also think of language contact in degrees. From one extreme in which only the superstrate wins to the other extreme in which the substrate wins out we have a whole continuum of types/degrees of changes. So all languages can then be considered to be "mixed language" but to different degrees. This problem is even better than the present problem. > p.312 [cultural reconstruction, chapter 13] > > While many attempts at paleolinguistic comparisons fall far short of > scientific respectability, the writings of Johanna Nichols since the > mid-1980s have attracted considerable interest among some linguists, as > well as archaeologists and others interested in establishing > relationships at much greater-time depths than is possible using the > comparative method. > > Nichols' approach is more akin to population science in that she does > not aim to study the evolution of individual languages, or even closely > related groups of languages. Rather she aims to study the history of > 'populations' of languages. By this, she means that she considers large > groupings of languages together, dealing not with particular features > of individual languages, but broader general features of language > groupings. Thus, she considers for example, the languages of Australia > or Africa as a whole. She pays attention not to whether structural > features are present or absent, but to what are the statistical > frequencies and distributions of features are within these larger > populations of languages. > > Such linguistic markers are considered to be akin to biological markers > in that they can be used to identify affinities between populations at > considerable time-depths. She argues that if, in the languages of a > continent (or some other large geographical area) a feature shows up > with a high frequency, this distribution is not something that is due to > recent diffusion. When several markers of this type are shared, this is > taken as being indicative of historical affinity. Of course, such > features must be known to be typologically unrelated. > ... > The actual application and interpretation of Nichols' method is complex > and it is unlikely to become the standard model by which individual > historical linguists will attempt to study linguistic relationships. Nichols is doing with mathematics what other linguists do with words. Here Crowley fails to understand what Nichols is doing but only to a degree. He does, however, have at least a good understanding of the importance of what she is doing, which is much more than what many other linguists are apparently capable of. Here endeth the review! -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 17 03:20:56 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:20:56 -0500 Subject: test Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> test -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 17 03:30:54 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:30:54 -0500 Subject: Linguistics and Circularity Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> IT has been two years, he still hasn't understood what circular reasoning means. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "H. Mark Hubey" Subject: Re: linguistic features and Circularity Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 18:50:21 -0500 Larry Trask wrote: > > --------------------Original message------------------ > > On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > > > 5. Over the long-period, beyond what standard linguistics > > methodology allegedly cannot have anything to say, we have to use > > other methods to arrive at unconventional (but logical and rational) > > conclusions. Why is it that only some features of languages are used > > for geneticity when languages have so many other characteristics? > > Because only certain features are valuable in recovering ancestry. This happens to belong to the generalities concerning methods of HL. We have a case like this: A: I am Napoleon and this is general Marat who can verify it. B: I am General Marat as Napoleon said, and I verify that he is Napoleon. This is the circularity which for some reason does not seem to get through although I have been explaining for years now since the days on the language evolution list. It is related to a form of argument which a linguist pulled when he wrote to me: "This method says that languages A and B are related but we know it is not so." This method of course, was, the use of unobjectionably objective mathematics. OF course, it is backwards, aside from being circular. IT goes like this: 1. We have some heuristic rules which we use. 2. According to these heuristic rules, IE languages are all genetically related. 3. Then using this idea backwards: since the IE languages are proven to be genetically related, we now know using this knowledge that the heuristics rules are the one and only one way of "recovering ancestry". Mr. Trask, I am not going to make the other mistakes I made on other lists and let this get out of hand. NO evasion, no bluffing, no argument by repetetion, no argument from ignorance. Only the blunt truth. Which part of this is not clear? Perhaps we can now discuss these heuristic rules. And please no arguments of the type "it is obvious". Let us at least do a little background reading like epistemology, philosophy of science, or even a little logic even if not probability theory. PS. I deleted the rest of the red herrings. I will reply to them separately and under a separate thread so we don't continue to get mixed up in endless labrynths and confusion. Please answer the post directly. Which part don't you understand? -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 17 03:41:20 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:41:20 -0500 Subject: Linguistics and Logic Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> More fun reading. Since the linguistics community itself does not clean up its own house, it looks like it has to be cleaned by outside forces. Rocket scientists (which is a euphemism for physicists and electrical engineers) completely changed Wall Street, but they won't do the same for linguistics because there is no money in it. A stray pseudo-rocket scientist (yours truly) has decided that he will overcome forces of darkness in linguistics single-handedly :-) This is just the beginning. Enjoy. BTW, just in case it is not yet clear, this and the previous post were rejected by the moderator. People still wonder how Nazis or Communists grab power and hold it. It's easy, as can be seen. You need some well-meaning and ignorant collaborators who adore you. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "H. Mark Hubey" Subject: Re: linguistic features and Logic Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 19:19:40 -0500 Larry Trask wrote: > > There are countless inflectional systems available for use in >languages, > and countless possible phonological forms for expressing any given > meaning. Consequently, data in these areas are typically useful in > recovering ancestry. As I promised, here is a separate thread. Your argument is of the type: there are countless white people, so whiteness cannot be used as a marker of geneticity. But of course,it can be. I am white and my whiteness is from my parents and is genetic. Even if 80% of the world's humans are white, whiteness is still genetic. And there are not "countless inflectional systems". There are more people than inflectional systems, and they are finite. I don't know about you but I am doing science, not metaphorics or English literature and certainly one cannot create science via hyperbole. It is quite useful of course for political demogoguery and poetry. Additionally, the word "inflectional" as usually used by people like you also applies to agglutinational. Because of that Comrie suggests that the word "fusional" should be used. I like to use "infixing" and reserve postfixing for agglutination where only postfixes/suffixes are used. And finally, the "inflectional" systems might have arisen only once and mostly IE or AA. One can see in von Soden, who thinks precisely the opposite of your claim, i.e. that something as rare and strange as inflection probably was invented only once and spread and that this makes AA and IE relatives in the long past. Obviously most of this is detail that should be discussed after the basics are agreed upon. I wrote this only because there is a tendency in discussions in linguistics to constantly go off on a tangent and get buried in useless detail, for example the "lack of initial r in Akkadian and Hittite". I read this in a book on Hittite from OI or Puhvel (I don't recall which) and which I posted recently to sci.lang. Besides all this, what we call Sumerian or Akkadian comes from accross and over centuries so that the languages would have changed. Of course, if the fact that they were changing was due to the substratum then all of that has to be taken into account. The lack of initial liquids or their overall weak representation in the ME before IE and AA has too much evidence to be shoved aside by evasion. We will get to this again, I am sure, after the general ideas get through. > > (See Crowley,1992 and especially Nichols' works on this.) > > But Nichols's work is not really intended to set up language >families: her purposes are otherwise. I'm afraid I don't know > what "Crowley (1992)" might be, but, if it's the earlier > edition >of Terry Crowley's HL > textbook, I don't understand why it's being cited. A thief was hawking a stolen carpet. He yelled out "who will give me a hundred dinars for this?" in the bazaar. Someone approached him and bought the carpet. A compatriot approached him later and asked "Why did you sell that for a hundred dinars?" "Uhhh," said the thief "Is there a number bigger than 100?" Idries Shah, in one of his books on Sufis. What you see in Nichols' work is not what I see. This phenomenon is related to a logical fallacy called "argument from ignorance" and should be called "argument from lack of imagination". People think they understand something if they have seen it many many times or someone can create an analogy to something they have seen many many times. That means if we have a "model" of some kind we feel good about it. People don't really have any idea how trees work, but they are not amazed because there are so many of them and they have seen them so often. But if they see a computer doing graphics or talking they are amazed. I have seen many airplanes fly but they amaze me all the time despite the fact that I have a PhD in engineering. Bertrand Russell was heckled after a speech by someone who said something like "we all know that nothing can stay up in the air. Do you expect us to believe that the earth stays up in the sky without support? Everybody knows that it is supported by a giant turtle." Russell thought finally he had an answer "well then, tell me, what makes the turtle stay up in the sky?" "Ehh," said the womAn, "you can't fool me like that. Everyone knows, that it is turtles all the way down." During the last century when the first train was making its way thru Germany the train had stopped in some village. The curious villages gathered around looking at the locomotive. One of them approached the engineer and said "We've been thinking. We think there is a horse inside that locomotive." The engineer went thru the explanation of expansion of steam, Carnot cycles, etc. The villagers walked away and talked amongst themselves and then came back and one of them said "We don't believe that stuff about energy, pressure, entropy and all that. We still think that there is a horse inside the locomotive." Exasparated the engineer asked "Tell me then, what makes the horse go?". The peasants talked to each other for a while and came back "There are four little horses inside the hooves." This is the problem of "exorcising the ghost from the machine". Arguments of the type you have been trying for the last N years do not impress me at all. They still don't. AFter we first understand why the heuristic method works (if it does) and where are its faults, and where are its weaknesses and how it can be improved and how we can use propositional logic and probabilistic logic correctly to infer things we can discuss these. I think for the time being, all they do is distract. I skipped the rest. They can be dealt with later. I first offered data assuming that you could put the pieces where they belong. Since it doesn't work, we have to first discuss other things until we reach the point where the importance of the data and where it belongs and how it affects conclusions can be better appreciated. Please do not write things to digress. Let's stick to the main problem at hand. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 17 03:44:26 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:44:26 -0500 Subject: Prize Offering Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> > Subject: $100 PRize Offer > Message-ID: > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > content-length: 1220 > > I hereby offer $100 to anyone who can convince Larry Trask to > join the mailing list and see how far bluffing can > take him on this list without a moderator to play bodyguard > for him. > > This is a bona fide offer, and I will gladly pay. > > You are hereby given permission to circulate this email as > far and as wide as you might want to. > > The truth of the matter is that R.L. Trask actually insults > the linguistics community when he gets away with what he does. > He does so because he knows very well that his audience is > ignorant and he can pull wool over their eyes. This will become > obvious eventually to everyone except fellow dinosaurs. > > He did this once on Histling with the Birthday PRoblem and > once with Marilyn and the Goat. My response got deleted because > it was perfectly well-suited to the con-man bluff on his part. > > Enjoy the show. The fun is just beginning. Last time I took > time off from my work, I started an electronic newsletter and > almost completely wrecked a mailing list which was run by > buffoons. I have finished my 5-yr book. It can be found on the > Barnes & Noble website for sale (The Diagonal Infinity, World > Scientific). Now I will have a little bit more time to devote to > linguistics. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Sat Mar 20 04:45:24 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 23:45:24 -0500 Subject: Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis (dates) Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > > >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > > >Linear Ware Culture raced ahead of agriculture. > > -- nyet. LBK spread rapidly, and so did agriculture -- all the way from > Hungary to northern France in a few centuries. That left a lot of > uncultivated ground in between, and of course hunting continued right down to > historic times as a supplement, gradually decreasing in importance. > > Bottom line: they were farmers. It took less than 500 years for farmers to > colonize the entire loess soil belt. This shouldn't be surprising. A human > population faced with an open land frontier doubles every 25 years or so. > > 1,000 > 2,000 > 4,000 > 8,000 > 16,000 > 32,000 2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 25*64=1,600 years. Starting with Adam and Eve, and doubling every 25, after 64 doublings is 1,600 years and the population is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 because that is what 2^64 is computed to be. > -- and that's in only 150 years and starting from a very low base. Can't get much lower than Adam and Eve. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Thu Mar 25 02:50:10 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 21:50:10 -0500 Subject: [Fwd: [Fwd: MONTY HALL GAME ODDS....]] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Just in case, someone brings up this Monty Hall problem again, here is the solution. We might even discuss Bayes Theorem (formula). Some philosophers are Bayesians and reason using probability theory instead of logic. So the usage of this formula is very important. Disclaimer: I hope the solution is correct :-) > From: Ben Bullock > Organization: http://www.hayamasa.demon.co.uk/ > Newsgroups: sci.stat.math > I've corrected this solution to the Monty Hall problem. > > I do believe that this solution is correct. > > This solution is partly based, by the way, on one found in a book > called `Understanding Statistics' by Upton and Cook, which is a book > for teaching A-level statistics published by Oxford University Press. > > The `Monty Hall' problem > ======================== > > In a certain game show, behind one of three doors 1, 2 and 3 is a > valuable prize. A contestant must pick one door to open. Only if he > picks the right door will he win the prize. The contestant picks one > door. The host then opens one of the two doors which the contestant > didn't pick, and shows the contestant that there is no prize behind > it. He then asks the contestant if he would like to switch to the > remaining, unopened, door, instead of the one he first picked. What > should the contestant do? > > The paradox > =========== > > Argument 1 (`no point switching') runs as follows: > > ``If the prize was equally likely to be behind any of the doors, then > opening one of the wrong doors only shows the contestant that the > prize is not behind that door. Therefore it is equally likely to be > behind either of the other doors.'' > > Argument 2 (`always switch') runs as follows: > > ``Two out of three times the contestant picks the wrong door. In > those cases, the host will show him the other wrong door. If the > contestant always switches to the other unopened door, he will be > switching away from an empty door to the prize door 2 out of 3 times. > If he doesn't switch, he will loose 2 out of 3 times. So he will have > better odds of winning if he always switches''. > > Which of these arguments is right? > > The solution > ============ > > Neither of the above two arguments is exactly wrong or exactly right. > Both of them contain a hidden assumption about what the host will do. > (This is a good counterexample which shows the danger of `hand waving' > arguments such as the above two). To correctly understand this > problem it is necessary to use Bayes' theorem. > > Suppose that the contestant chooses door 3 initially, and that the > host opens door 2 (in any other case the result is the same, just by > relabelling doors). The chance of the prize being behind door 3, > given that the host opened door 2, is, by Bayes theorem, > > P(O2|P3) P(P3) > P(P3|O2) = -------------- > P(O2) > > P(O2|P3) P(P3) > = ------------------------------------------------ (1) > P(O2|P1) P(P1) + P(O2|P2) P(P2) + P(O2|P3) P(P3) > > where the events are > > O2: host opens door two, > P1: prize is behind door 1, > P2: prize is behind door 2, > P3: prize is behind door 3. > > If the prize is behind door 2 the host won't open door 2 of course: > > P(O2|P2) = 0 > > If the prize is behind door 1 the host must open door 2: > > P(O2|P1) = 1 > > The probabilities of the prize being behind the different doors are > > P(P1) = P(P2) = P(P3) = 1/3. > > If we abbreviate P(O2|P3), the chance of the host opening door 2 when > the prize is behind door 3, as > > P(O2|P3) = p, > > then > > 1/3 p > P(P3|O2) = ----------- > 1/3 p + 1/3 > > p > = ----- > 1 + p > > from equation (1) above. If the host opened door 2, the prize must be > behind either door 1 or door 3, so > > P(P1|O2) + P(P3|O2) = 1 > > and > > P(P1|O2) = 1 - P(P3|O2) > > p > = 1 - ----- > 1 + p > > 1 > = -----. > 1 + p > > Now, the contestant doesn't know what p is: it can be anything between > 0 and 1. Consider the possibilities: > > If p = 0, > --------- > > in other words, if the host never opens door 2 when the > prize is behind door 3, then the probability that the prize is behind > door 1, given that the host opened door 2, > > 1 > P(P1|O2) = ----- > 1 + 0 > > = 1, > > so the prize *must* be behind door 1. > > If 0 < p < 1, > ------------- > > then > > 1/(1+0) > P(P1|O2) > 1/(1+1), > > or > > 1 > P(P1|O2) > 1/2, > > in other words, the prize is more likely to be behind door 1 than door > 3, and so although we are not sure where the prize is, there is a > benefit to changing doors. > > If p = 1/2, > ----------- > > in other words, if the host is equally likely to pick either door 1 or > door 2 to open when the prize is behind door 3, then > > 1 > P(P1|O2) = ------- > 1 + 1/2 > > = 2/3. > > This is the hidden assumption in argument 2 above. > > If p = 1, > --------- > > in other words, if the host will certainly open door 2, not door 1, > when the prize is behind door 3, then P(P1|O2) = 1/2, and there is no > benefit in switching. This is the hidden assumption in argument 1 > above. > > The contestant's `best guess' > ============================= > > The `best guess', given that the contestant does not know the value of > p, is to switch, since even in the case p = 1 this does not decrease > his chance of winning, and in the case p < 1 it increases it. > > -- > Ben Bullock (home page http://www.hayamasa.demon.co.uk/) <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Mon Mar 29 00:00:17 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 19:00:17 -0500 Subject: McCray Review & Discussion Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> This is not a review. Comments may be posted. When comments get posted, then it can be considered to be a review. ------------------------cut here --------------------------------- McCray, Stanley, (1988) Advanced Principles of Historical Linguistics, American University Studies, Linguistics, Vol. 6, Peter Lang Publishing, New York p.1 Linguistics, like any other science, has been riddled through with various dogmatic practices and methodological subdivisions. Although it may be claimed that the formulation of theories ultimately contributes to new insights about language, it seems nevertheless that the proliferation of models which are sometimes repetetive, sometimes contradictory, sometimes meaningless, has done little to alleviate the linguist's frustration over the lack of a cogent way of looking at languages which is at least as impressive in its treatment of the data as it is in its metatheoretical elegance. p. 3 First, if any universal principles about language are to be unearthed, how wide a body of evidence should be used? Obviously, no one person is competent to deal with all the world's languages. Yet even within a particular group of languages, the question is how much to include in an analysis comes up again and again. Second, how far can linguistics progress beyond explaining ungrammatical utterances or reconstructing isolated pieces of language? Third, what is the source of the methodological limitations in constructing linguistic theories? Finally, how well does linguistic science fit into the overall structure of scientific and philosophical discourse? ... The goal of this work is to suggest at least a "methodological mindset" which may ultimately provide some answers. p.6 It is a well-known fact that, even though the word "system" dominates many discussions of present day linguistics, the concept is one that is not always easy to make precise....Therefore if the motto of modern synchronic linguistics must be `language is both a system', the motto of of diachronic linguistics must be `language is both a system and not a system'. The desire to reject the notion of system in language is documented in more recent proclamations. Note, for example, Lass 1980: "In fact, even though `system' is used very loosely in describing various aspects of language, it seems doubtful that the term in the mathematical sense, is appropriate; its use in linguistics can never be anything more than a false -- if sometimes useful -- metaphorical extension. I do not think that languages are systems in the technical (systems-theoretical) sense, or that they can be profitably viewed diachronically if they were." Based on these two citations, it seems that the only difference in these views separated by twenty years (in which both general and linguistic science have seen many advances) is that whereas Steblin-Kamenskij views the notion of system as a "vague" concept (a strange statement from an obviously well-educated man who must have been aware of the history of science), Lass, on the other hand, feels that it is not the concept itself that is vague, but rather the way linguistics uses it that leaves something to be desired. Both scholars, however, appear to agree that it is impossible to talk about system in historical linguistics. Obviously, both men offer their statements in reaction to the time-honored principle of the systematicity of language which was emphasized for the first time (at least by Western scholars) by de Saussure in his outline of a series of constructs for synchronic linguistics. Given though the enormous amount of research about language structure, and in view of well-attested rule-governed linguistic phenomena, it seems rather odd that in our age two such scholars should reach the rather depressing conclusion that language, in certain significant manifestations, may not represent a system at all. Such a conclusion, if valid, causes out the common assertion that linguistics is indeed a science. I find particularly interesting the comments of Lass, whose thesis against the systematicity of language is made, at least in part, with reference to some of the ideas expressed in an important work by Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1967). Writing on the development of what he calls the general systems theory, he outlines a series of axioms he views applicable not only to the physical sciences, but to the social sciences as well. .. [von Bertalanffy's ideas] First and foremost is the notion of system in general and the structure of language in particular. A system may be defined as a set of elements tied together by empirically verifiable interrelations. This is, obviously, a loose and general definition. Von Bertalanffy defines it thus: "A system can be defined as a set of elements standing in interrelation. Interrelation means that elements p stand in relation R, so that the behavior of an element p in R is different from its behavior in another relation R'. If the behaviors in R and R' are not different, there is no interaction, and the elements behave independently with respect to the relations R and R'". It is evident that human languages are systems in this regard. For example, while any two languages may share certain features (such as front rounded vowels, genitive case, perfective aspect, etc.), the precise relation of these features to other elements will differ in the two languages. Such a notion of interrelation lies at the heart of linguistic science because it defines the structural integrity around which a language is constructed. Moreover, it is the concept of systemic integrity which is, as we shall see in the course of this book, one of the most important ideas for linguistics, comparative or otherwise. ... p.10 For example, Hamp (19740 observed: "Most instances of really interesting linguistic change involve multiple changes of various sorts: phonological, syntactic, semantic" (141). In a later (1981) piece, he observed that reconstruction must take into consideration all levels of grammar: "At present, we know relatively little about the relation between changes in different areas of linguistic structure", (1984:301). p. 11 Linguists are quite fond of citing Kuhn in the hope of giving scientific legitimacy to their theorizing; rejection of the alternative possibilities offered by the general systems approach runs counter to Kuhn and scientific thinking in general. It has happened too often, in both synchronic and diachronic studies, that, once certain methodological lines have been drawn, communication between various factions becomes at best polemic, if it continues at all. p.12 it is important, given this, to review some basic facts about language: 1. Language represents a rule-governed system. The subsystemic components may be described under phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and the lexicon. 2. Although the notion of interrelation amongst elements has not been overtly stated, it is nevertheless within common parlance to discuss such notions as morphophonemics, morphosyntax, phonotactics, etc 3. Many of the relationships (and let it be known here that I use the term "relationship" as a generic term denoting both relations and functions, which must be distinguished) described under 2 may be accounted for by means of laws and rules. Some of these latter, however are problematic. 4. In addition to the pure linguistic subsystems and their interactions, tehre exist several other important systemic components which are at least as complex in their own right. These are the psycho-biological and the socio-linguistic. 5. The nature of interaction between elements described under (1) and (4) may be accounted for in formal terms. p.14 The reader will note, I hope, that I shun a distinction between "description" and "explanation" in this work - I believe that a more general "accounting for" is more useful. I do this because most of the discussion regarding the difference between description and explanation in linguistics is quite trivial when compared to the task at hand. Extended debate over whether we should be trying to describe or explain something leads merely to another proliferation of essentially useless metatheory of the type: "How does one go about talking about something?" Such ruminations, when carried to the ridiculous extremes documented in present-day linguistics and semiotics, only give rise to pseudo-intellectual, quasi-scientific circumnavigation of the core of data that should constitute the focus of the discussion. p. 62 Now, the use of typology is a difficult thing. For one, what constitutes plausible typology? Again, there is the danger of relying too heavily upon those with which one is most familiar... Note, for instance, the use of typology as seen in Schmalstieg(1980). One of the most intriguing aspects of this study is his use of examples from outside of Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Georgian, etc - in judging the validity of his statements regarding PIE structures. Yet, in defending his view that PIE developed, rather than lost inflection, he makes this rather curious statement: "On the grounds of language typology, it will probably be objected that languages we know tend to lose inflectional endings rather than to gain them. As I have pointed out.....language typology and universals are very weak arguments" (23). Thus, here he has suddenly grown suspicious of the very type of argumentation he had employed quite effectively (and which he goes on to employ) throughout his work..... But, I believe that his hesitation in categorically accepting typological arguments results from two facts. The first is that typological evaluations should be carried out from inside out, i.e. we should compare the reconstruction first to the typology of the particular language family under legitimate investigation, thence to a macro-group closer in structure, and finally to a more remote one, and so forth. Thus typologies radiate out, from the most known linguistic structures to the least. This procedure is especially valuable in reconstructing remote periods of a language, since random sampling of world langauges may cause on to reconstruct something that has little relevance to the original structure of the macro-dialectal group in question. Second, the use of typologies in itself is not sufficient as an evaluative principle, since it seems that several methods should be used in any sytematic evaluation for the purposes of cross-checking. The implementation of typological evidence can be unreliable because too wide a body of comparative evidence may at once confirm and refute various arguments, as we have already seen. And, even if we believe that there exists an overwhelmingly convincing typological trend, who can say whether or not that trend was always in force in an earlier stage of the language. p. 67 Generally, traditional views of PIE phonology have posited larger phonemic inventories than more recent formulations. The role of secondary combinatory phenomena is greatly reduced in these methodologies. This orientation is represented in the work of ..... Szmerenyi(1970). p.68 The laryngeal theory has come to have as many refutors as it has followers. Schmalstieg (1980) offers an alternative to both traditionalist and laryngealist views. This theory depends heavily on the sequencing of layers of pre-PIE and various slices of PIE before dialectical differentiation. p.71 Finally, the typological argument bears against the theory, at least in the opinion of Szmerenyi(1967) who notes that laryngeal theory assumes an original vowel system consisting of one vowel. Although it has been argued that certain Caucasian languages have such vocalic systems, he argues that the exact patterning is not the same in the two language families; in fact, he observes that most Caucasian languages possess more than one vowel. ..... Thus, Hittite material notwithstanding, few sure confirmation of the laryngeal theory exist. Nevertheless, the partial confirmation provided by Hittite does, in some cases, provide, attractive possibilities for the positing of the existence of certain pre-historic consonants. p.81 As we have seen above, certain researchers do not believe in an original separation between noun and verb, and from this point of view the following conclusions have been drawn: 1) PIE was an agglutinative language 2) PIE was a reduced-type ergative language 3) PIE was a topic prominent language. I think that (1) is fairly reasonable to assume if one believes in an early monothematic structure. The basic assumption behind (2) and (3) is that traditional distinction between subject and object is not relevant. p. 82 >From the standpoints of typology and diachronic recapitulation, these non-traditional notions may be justified especially as regards (1) since many IE languages show evidence of agglutination of particles - indeed, I feel that this interplay with particles is quite important for IE syntactic and semantic proto-structure .. Anderson, J.M. and C. Jones (1974) Historical Linguistics I. Amsterdam: North Holland. Hamp, Eric (1974) The major focus in reconstruction and change. In Anderson and Jones, 1974b, 58-67. Lass, Roger (1980) On explaining linguistic change. Cambridge: University Press. Schmalstieg,Wm. (1980) Indo-European linguistics: a new synthesis. University Park: Penn State Press. Steblin-Kaminskij, M.I. (1982) Myth: the Icelandic Sagas and Eddas. Ann Arbor:Karoma. Szmerenyi, O. (1967) The `new' look of Indo-European, Phonetica, 17. 65-69. Von Bertalanffy, Ludwig (1967) General systems theory. New York:Braziller. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Mon Mar 29 01:03:43 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 20:03:43 -0500 Subject: Lass, part 1 of 3: Electronic Virtual Review Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> This was meant originally to be a review of the book for the Linguist, but when I finished typing in the parts I wanted to make comments on, it was already 80 KB. It was too long and nothing that long could be published in the Linguist. I probably will be tied up with other things this summer and beyond, so I decided instead to 'release' this to . I would like to make comments on these later, but everybody else is welcome to do so. The material in braces {..} is probably all mine and was meant to leave markers for myself. ----------------------Part 1 of 3 ------------------------ Lass, Historical Linguistics, 1998. p. 25 The cornerstone of historical rationality is this simple proposition: there are no miracles. This reflects the epistemological stance generally called uniformitarianism: the principles governing the world (=the domain of enquiry) were the same in the past as they are now. General Uniformity Principle Nothing that is now impossible in principle was ever the case in the past...The principle can (with some risk and a lot of tact) be taken further. Not only did nothing impossible ever happen, but in general the most likely things have always been the most likely to happen. There is a second or derivative Uniformity Principle, which is statistical or probabilistic: Principle of Uniform Probabilities The general distribution of likelihood in a given domain was always the same in the past as it is now. Again, this must not be taken simplistically. The likelihood of a resident of New York being a Yiddish-speaker in 1800 was not the same as it is now, that of a Londoner having a telephone was zero in 1856, but is quite high now, and so on. p.28 General Uniformity Principle No linguistic state of affairs (structure, inventory, process, etc) can have been the case only in the past. Uniform Probabilities Principle The (global, cross-linguistic) likelihood of any linguistic state of affairs (structure, inventory, process, etc) has always been roughly the same as it is now. ... Now one possible objection to this kind of uniformity argument (cf. Matthews 1981, Lass 1986a:233ff) must be taken account of. It goes like this: how good really is `the best of our knowledge'? Surely nobody has examined all the languages spoken in the world at present (not to mention all past ones, including those that vanished without a trace, and all future ones). {This is where the model is really needed. The probabilities and etc come from the model. i.e. low number of phonemes in the past, etc, consonant-clusters in Europe etc} Therefore the argument is not based on knowledge at all, but on ignorance; it's only failure to recognize the obvious (even necessary) limitations of our knowledge of the `total set of human languages' that allows this smugness. The counterargument is essentially philosophical. All human knowledge is flawed, provisional and corrigible, which is what makes scholarship of any kind worth doing. p. 104 {Relatedness, ancestry and comparison} p. 105 Any one could be true for a given case: there are coincidences, like Modern Greek mati and Malay mata `eye'...or Rumanian and Lau (Austronesian) dori `to desire'. p.106 Chance (a last, not first resort if we're looking for an interesting architecture) is virtually ruled out by multiple sets with strong internal resemblance, but none to other such sets....We are left with common ancestry. As a first approximation, a family is a set of languages with enough marked and pervasive similarities for us to want to consider them to be `genetically related'. That is, a language family is a lineage, which means there was a common parent. Oversimply, they were once the same language. The idea of linguistic `descent', i.e. monogenesis and subsequent differentiation is an ancient one; the locus classicus in the Judeo-Christian tradition is the Babel story. p.108 The notion of some kind of relationship between languages other than monogenesis, specifically the possibility of multiple (unrelated) lineages seems to have taken root after the introduction into the west of Hebrew grammatical studies in the sixteenth century (Percival 1987).... We ought to note also that the idea of relatedness [of Conrad Gesner] was based on essentially (as with Jones) on phenotypic resemblances, even cultural ones. One of the triumphs of later comparative method was the transcendence of a superficial (phenotypic) notion of `similarity', and the development of a quite different methodology, based to be sure on `shared properties', but not on obvious similarities. It was this (largely but not exclusively: there are clear adumbrations in Sajnovics for instance) nineteenth-century innovation that made truly genetic approach to language filiation possible. p. 109 ...while metaphors of `parenthood', lineal relationship, etc are useful and indeed necessary in historical linguistic discourse, the unmarked form of linguistic parentage is parthenogenetic. We assign languages to a family first because they (intuitively) have so many have consistent similarities that we reject chance or borrowing as the causes; but we also recognize that the family members are still sufficiently distinct to be named as individuals. Different sets establish different language families. Historically, similarities of the requisite type suggest common ancestry; differences within similarity-sets suggest, in Darwin's famous phrase, `descent with modification'. p.110 Evolving systems (probably in any empirical domain) are characterized by what is known in mathematical theory of (nonlinear) dynamical systems (popularly `chaos theory') as `sensitive dependence on initial conditions'. The smallest differences in initial conditions may, in the later development of any pair of sublineages starting from (essentially) the same point have enormous consequences. In biotic and cultural systems, this connects with a property called path-dependency: `isolated populations... must tend to diverge even when they start from the same initial condition and evolve in similar environments' (Boyd & Richerson 1992:186). The key here is `similar': given any initial isolation whatever, and sufficiently complex and hence contingentlcy-laden landscape over which the original split populations develop, no two evolutionary trajectories (as wholes) will ever be identical. Since the very fact of initial `isolation' (whatever causes it) means that the initial conditions will always be slightly diffferent, linguistic evolution will by definition be subject to massive contingency, which guarantees its genuine historicity. {He's adding this bit about isolation etc. the connection to nonlinear DEs is neither immediate nor obvious. He does not explain how these systems can be represented as trajectories} {we can consider members of a language family simply as sample functions of a stochastic process in N dimensions! Why do we have to give each sample function a name ?} Historicity then implies some kind of `irreversibility'. {No, it does not. He makes this up. Explain the Einstein Brownian motion problem and Fokker-Planck, Kolmogorov, and entropy.} On the macro-scale this is indeed the case for linguistic evolution: there are frequent `repetetions' of sorts but (except at a certain micro-scale..) they are never total..... {Are there only two scales? what are they based on?} Historically evolved entities at a certain scale (see below) are contingently individual, hence not repeatable; the topography of the epigenetic landscapes over which they emerge and d___lop is too complex and locally differentiated to allow exact repetition. The arrow of evolutionary time (biological, linguistic, cultural) is not of course thermodynamic (entropy-increasing); but it is qualitative. {Hard to understand what he means!} And historicity itself acts as its own guarantee of both continuity and ever-increasing differentiation, because any given state is the product of all prior one.... Irreversibility and increasing differentiation (in short historical `uniqueness') then may be functions of the complexity of initial conditions or system structure or both. This criterion seems to fail at one linguistic micro-level: in phonological change. Here the vocabulary of elements is (comparatively) small, and what look like exact repetitions are indeed not uncommon. We often seem to get evolutionary reversals or retrograde changes, where some phonological category X goes to Y (and to Z...) and then X or Y is generated again. p.113 In biosystematics of the type called cladistic (<><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Mon Mar 29 01:06:05 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 20:06:05 -0500 Subject: Lass: Part 2 of 3; Electronic Review Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Lass, Historical Linguistics, 1998. -------------Part 2 of 3 -------------------------------------- p. 215 The Nature of Reconstruction This chapter deals in more detail with phonological reconstruction, and includes some consideration of the rather different kinds of problems that may arise outside of phonology. p.217 [an example} So given correspondences of the type {p,f,0} we ought to make two reconstructive assumptions (regardless of the attestation in our corpus} 1. A correspondance {C,0} where C is some non-glottal voiceless consonant implies a pathway C > h > 0. 2. Therefore the zero-dialects went through an /h/ stage. ...A theoretical imperative generates occult complexity, which surfaces as history.,,,In this case I invoe a fairly conventional lenition hierarchy (Lass & Anderson 1975;ch.5) which can be illustrated with the velars: ... These are the guiding assumptions 1. Ceteris paribus, movement down the hierarchy is more likely than up. 2. The lower a segment is on the hierarchy, the more likely a further descent (`inherent weakness', or zero as attractor) 3. Generally, changes tend to proceed one step at a time (assuming the `steps' represent from one `universal category space' to another. Historical evidence for these particular constraints is close to overwhelming (Lass 1978:ch.6) but the type-residues left by historical change in particular instances may look quite different. This is one of the crucial historical/synchronic dividing lines: change can leave or distorted or misleading traces in the data which require principled sorting. What warrants this procedure ('principle overrides data') is that at least in particular cases, and in enough of them, it has considerable empirical backing. Again and again, so often that we're inclined to think of it as the norm, if we look hard enough we find material that justifies the hidden sequences in particular cases. And the more such successes we have, the more confident we can feel about invoking the techniques in cases with less information. Fortunately, the micro-dialectology and micro-history of many languages will provide the information we need; though when a family is represented by a small number of distantly connected and highly differentiated languages the relative roles of principle and data are skewed in the direction of the former. p.221 Quanta and phonetic gradualism: a few suggestions I have been making a pitch for the venerable principle of gradualism (nature non facit saltum). In biology it is associated with Darwin, and is enshrined in the general preference in modern evolutionary theory for `micro-mutation' as opposed to `saltation' as the source of major apomorphies, even radical taxonomic distinguishers (Gould 1983,Ayala 1983) It would be nice to have a hard theory of the size of the units or `quanta' of phonological change...What is a permissible step in change depends on some antecedent theory of primitives. If the smallest theoretically significant phonological primitive is the (binary) distinctive feature (Jacobsonian, or Chomsky/Hallean, or whatever), then obviously no changes can be any smaller than the size of such a feature. p. 228 Projection again: conventions and justification 1. process naturalness 2. system naturalness 3. simplicity 4. phonetic legality 5. family consistency 6. oddity condition 7. portmaneau reconstruction p.237 Many Uralic languages show a phenomenon called `consonant gradation', in which particular consonants in certain syllable-configurations have different `grades'.... p.238 But there are two apparent violations of the `one-step' principle of descent down the hierarchy: /p/ > /v/ involves two stages, and /k/ > 0 traverses the entire hierarchy in one step. There is an apparent difference between what must have been the historical situation, and its synchronic residue... p.270 Phonetic realism: the art of coarse transcription {example given of pig...} Coarsely, this means that if we met a Proto-Indo-European speaker we'd expect that his word for `pig' would begin with some kind of voiceless labial stop. A symbol like [p] in this case is a claim that a decent phonetician would want to use IPA [p] in notating at least a good part of the initial stretch of this utterance (and hence for the type of which the utterance would furnish a token); and that there would be no real temptation to use symbols like [t,k] on one dimension or [b,beta,w] on another. p.272 Mary Haas (1969:31) observes that `any language is an actual or potential protolanguage'. This of course is trivially true: if a language survives across even one generation it is the protolanguage for the undoubtedly somewhat changed language of the next. p. 277 Chap 6 Time and Change p.278 What people think of as `changes' can be grouped under five major topoi, each of which might have a classical or antique, or at least literary slogan; 1. Change as loss 2. Change as (neutral) change of state of flux 3. change as creatio ex nihilo; `In the beginning God created the Heaven and earth.' 4. Change as degeneration: `Change and decay in all around I see.' 5. Change as progress:`Till we have built Jerusalem/In England's green and pleasant land.' Types 4 and 5 may just be ideologically colored versions of 1-3. In the first, changes the serious ontological matter: one individual or type or natural kind becomes another, there is a transsubstantiation or trans-individuation.... In the second type, there is no state change, but merely `substitution' of another (normally pre-existent or potentially pre-existent) state. This one is adumbrated in Sweet (1900:ch3), magisterially laid out in Hoenigswald(196) and carried to its apogee in Katicic (1970). Sweet distinguishes what he calls `organic' change (phonetic change due to mishearing, mis interpretation ,assimilation, gradual phonetic drift, etc.) from external change e.g. analogy, and the like. Katicic (1970:ch 3) on the other hand pushes the substitution idea to its ultimate conclusion; even internal phonetic change is a 'change in relations between languages and communities rather than a change in the languages themselves'. Since all language varieties belong to an atemporal (apparently quasi-platonic) universal variety set, all change can be construed as substitution; all conceivable outcomes exist in posse. A history doesn't show change at all, but rather a succession of different languages, which can be seen as`one language with some internal variety'. Unlike Sweet (or Hoenigswald), and like Saussure but more so, Katicic manages to get rid of time and history completely; history (in the week sense in which there could be said to be any at all) is just permutation of what is essentially there already and always has been. Problems of filiation and the like are resolvable to operations on the universal variety set that lead to `restricted diversity'. p.281 Historians, like all other linguists, are practitioners of the `Galilean style' (Botha 1982); they work with categories of high abstraction and idealization. But it's not always clear (maybe not even to all historians themselves) just how far the abstractions go; sometimes we can learn interesting things by looking behind the idealizations, and finding out what we lose by getting what we gain from them. p.290 Linguistic Time (Arrows and cycles) The modern physical sciences now recognize both types of: reversible or classical (Newtonian) time, and non-reversible or thermodynamic time. Reversible time in physics is not normally construed as cyclic; though specific reversibilities can lead to equilibrium, which may be. p.291 Whereas under a thermodynamic regime (say you the current order of the universe on the heat death interpretation), entropy increases in a close system and leads to a static equilibrium, maximal disorder, etc. This has been a basic philosophical problem in physics since the 19th-century, when classical dynamics, in which time is reversible, came into an apparent conflict with the irreversibility associated with the second law of thermo dynamics, and the idea of entropy. ... the idea that there is an immutable substrate or background to all or temporal experience is compelling, since it imposes the special kind of order on the universe; one could see the same kind of motivation in Katicic's position as in Parmenides's or Newton's or Einstein's; if timing change on illusions, the universe has a `ground' that blacks in the presence of general line transformation. Such visions animate not only larger scale philosophical or Cosmo logical schemata, but may manifest more locally, in linguists attitudes toward their own subject matter, particularly as it unfolds in time. The issue of the direction and linguistic evolution has been of interest since antiquity; as early as Plato's Cratylus the idea was broached that if the first Namer named things by nature and not by convention, the form/meaning fit has become (unidirectionally) less transparent. p.292 During the 19th and 20th centuries, three more or less articulated views of the shape of linguistic history have emerged, each for its radical proponents the result of some kind of directional law. These overall metaphysical characterizations seem to be of two general kinds: 1. Uniform directionality.. There are three main types: (a) positive (Progressivism): languages evolve a particular optimizing direction, becoming more efficient or simple or sophisticated or whatever. ... (b) negative (decay): languages move from a perfect type towards some less perfect one: e.g. Bopp (1833) from analytic into a synthetic, for Jesperson the opposite. (c) non-evaluative: there simply are directions, either in actual glottogenesis (from a primitive state) or in the evolution of languages, but those do not necessarily have anything to do with quality (perhaps Humboldt 1882). 2. Cyclicity. Languages moves through life-cycles like organisms (cf Davies 1987); they may have periods of youth, maturity, and senescence (as in 1b), but recycle over and over, e.g. each great type comes around again after language has passed through the others in some particular series: e.g. isolating> agglutinative > inflecting/fusional, etc (von der Gabelentz 1981), at a local rather than a global level Meillet 1912.) Few scholars now would believe that any of these principal legislates for language change overall: there are no global directionalities fixed by natural law. Individual histories (or parts of them) can be any one of the above. Though, especially in the work growing out of the tradition of grammaticalization studies started by Meillet (1912) and revived recently by Elizabeth Traugott, Bernd Heine and others (Traugott & Heine 1991), Hopper & Traugott 1993), certain directions are increasingly being singled out as major or overwhelming. p.293 The history of any dynamic system can be mapped as a trajectory in a multidimensional space (phase space) where each point in the space represents a possible system state. By a dynamic system, I mean any evolving ensemble where variation of parameter setting produces a change of state. Under this (relatively standard) mathematical definition, not only a mechanical or thermodynamic systems (e.g. a swinging pendulum, convection in a needed fluid) dynamical, but so are evolving populations, whether systems and even valued sets generated by completely abstract equations, where changing the numerical values satisfying some control parameter produces an evolution. Such evolution was maybe partly linear, or at least show continuous change, but may then settle into other configurations.... Dynamical systems in general can be characterized as tending to move towards regions in phase space called attractors: an attracted as a region 'such that any point which starts nearby gets closer and closer to it' (Stewart, 110). In simple and rather loose terms, and attractor is region into which a system tends to set up, and in which it remains unless it is dislodged in some special way. The most common or typical attractors are single point attractors or sinks, and limit cycles. The precise mathematical definitions is not at issue here, since this is a heuristic rather than mathematical discussion; what counts is the image of an evolving system as a kind of flow in some n-dimensional space, and the existence of regions in that space towards which the flow tends to converge. P. 294 Such imagery and terminology are very general, and apply to innumerable evolving systems, both purely abstract and physical. This kind of language was originally developed for talking about quantifiable mathematical systems, but that are (at least so far) non-quantifiable systems that exhibit this same type of behavior, or at least have properties similar enough so that we can informally but appropriately borrow the terminology. The point of such borrowing is that terminology's neutral with respect to content though the system; to put another way, a general dynamical description is a syntax without semantics. Such a neutral expository language allows us to talk about the shapes of historical developments without an ontological commitment, and may lead us see things that we would not otherwise, or at least see things differently. The larger -- scale philosophical implications of this point will be taken up in 7.6; for now I am interested mainly in the utility of the notion of trajectories and related concepts for talking about histories as trajectories in time. Their function for moment is defining types of temporal configurations that seem to repeat, and serving as a source of generalized images for visualizing them as trajectories. Sinks and limit cycles are what might be called typical or ordinary attractors. But there is another type, appearing in system after system, which is rather different properties. Such a strange attractive user region in phase -- space (typically found when a system is far from equilibrium) in which the behavior on the system becomes increasingly unpredictable and chaotic, and parameter values less and less orderly, and less and less likely to repeat. But within such attractors are often occur what are called windows of order in which orderly phenomenon are apparently self generated out of the chaos... That is (deterministicaly) chaotic systems can generate their own order. It is becoming increasingly clear, both in chaos theory and the developments now often grouped under complexity theory (Lewin 1993) that the edge of chaos regimes in all sorts of natural (and artificial) systems in which self regulation and order are generated out of apparent disorder (this is sometimes referred to as autopoiesis). The evidence for this kind of temporal trajectory isn't relevant for the historical linguists, because RMON other things he suggests that there simply are rather general system types that behave in certain ways, regardless of what the systems are composed of, or who happens to be using them. P. 295 Many evolutionary pathways in language change seem to lead to sinks... a good example is the set of phenomenon now usually grouped under the general heading of grammaticalization. For instance (cf. Givon 1971, Comrie 1980, Campbell 1990c) it seems that case markers typically (even according to Givon and some others exclusively) evolve out of grammaticalized free nouns, along the pathway, Noun > Postposition > Clitic > Case-marker. The step along this pathway seems irreversible or nearly so; once a now has become a pulse position it can't become one out again, a case market cannot detach itself than become a postposition. {examples from Kannada, Estonian, Hungarian} {note Sumerian noun-adjective could have given rise to agglutination} P. 296 Developments so this kind can be construed as paths along a chreod leading to a point attractor.. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Mon Mar 29 01:10:33 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 20:10:33 -0500 Subject: Lass: Part 3 of 3: Electronic Review Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Lass, Historical Linguistics, 1998 The comments inside braces {...} are probably all mine and were meant for memory jogging and markers. -------------------Part 3 of 3 --------------------------- P. 298 (cycles) Long-term cycles of change are familiar from the histories of many (I would suspect most) languages. In these cases particular items or categorical structures appear, disappear (through loss or transformation) then we appear, and such alterations can go on for indefinite periods (this is beautifully laid out in von der Gabelentz 1891). These cycles are interesting because there's clearly no particular necessity that either the states represented should appear at all. If for instance a line which develops a particular contrast, then loses it, then develops of again, it is obvious that neither the state with it nore the one without it is preferable, since the languages seem to get along perfectly well in both. {phonological change i.e. Brownian motion--> Gaussian, Einstein--> most don't change..} P. 299 Cycles of course may pose was severe problems for reconstruction since one has to know where in the cycle what is to know what direction was moving in. what they are also interesting in themselves: why should such (quasi)-periodic attractors exist at all? 1 possible answer is that so many linguists info, are in essence simply the manifestations of one of a pair of binary choices, so that in effect if a change is to occur at all in a particular domain, it will virtually always have to involve exiting one state and entering the only other one there is. Many linguistic states therefore can only be construed as points on the limit cycle, and the cyclicity will always be capable of emerging to the historians field of view. It least in principle; whether in fact depends on the period of the attractor. Some may have such long periods at one cannot tell them from point attractors, or even stable conditions that existed forever: a language state may be so long-lasting that it looks like stasis, and may or may not be. It seems that we have no way of telling. There are however certain good candidates for limit cycles, as there are for point attractors. The significant point is that identifying regimes which are likely to the cyclical demystifies cyclicity: there is no need for anything occcult or mysterious, given a system which is unstable to begin with. {examples of cycling of vowels, short long etc.} P. 300 One particularly interesting kind attractor, somewhere between a cycle in point, his or have called the center of gravity phenomenon. A center of gravity is a kind of limit cycle of relatively long period, in which the system, however much may wander about in the interim, continually returns to particular values for some parameter, or favors recurrence of particular output types or processes. { more examples} P. 301 That is, language is often display, either for the whole of their histories or for specific periods, apparent preferences for certain kinds of change, or certain developmental patterns... in a variety, in which groups of changes appear to move in a certain direction, or towards a goal, has been familiar and problematical at least since the 1920s, under the rubric of drift, laterly also conspiracy (Sapir, etc). This is the kind of change that can be construed as autocatalysis. In a drift sequence of classical kind, what appears to happen from a macro perspective is that (some subsystem of) a language tends to move in a particular direction, so that the end point of an evolutionary sequence is a fairly major state change (e.g. a language starts out phonemic and ends up without it, starts out OV and ends up VO). To this has been interpreted (mistakenly) as a kind of orthoGenesis or directed evolution (notoriously by Lass, which I regret...) {examples given} P. 302 Any possible language state (at micro or macro levels of resolution) can become any other;.... Much changes ran them or semi random tinkering, or play with options available in the category space (6.4). Both thereof within histories possible some directions on larger scales, which appear on the finer scale as individual grammaticalizations (e.g. noun >clitic>...) or on a larger scale as conspiracy or drift. >From most important point that ought to emerge from this discussion is that the landscape or dynamical system image makes any form of teleology superfluous.!!!!! It is the combination of initial conditions and the interaction with abstract control parameter is that determines the shape all systems wondering us through its phase space. This has been very well put by Cohen & Stewart (1994:31). A dynamic does not necessarily imply a purpose. Darwinian evolution as a dynamic, but organisms do not seek to evolve. The existence of attractors does not implied that dynamical systems are goal seekers: on the contrary, they are goal-finders, which only recognize what the goal is when they have found it. P. 303 Language histories (especially those primarily embodied in written corpora, which are the easiest to look at) often appeared to show long period of stasis, followed by bursts of innovatory activity... both the stasis and a burst of activity may be real... A history off a language-states is of course only as far as our sampling intervals: the bigger they are, the > degree of manifest change; and or conversely, the more likely the apparence of stasis. P. 304 what we have been such cases is pseudo-stasis due to post settlement homogenization. On the other hand, there is genuine stasis, even in non-literary languages, anyone may be called variational stasis. P. 305 Otto Jesperson once remarked (1992:418) that "transformation is something we can understand, while a creation out of nothing can never comprehend up by the human understanding"... In principle, there was seem to two basic types of possible innovation: transformation of inherited material, and innovation from zero or invention or relative vs. radical or absolute innovation.... You've seen that languages (ceteris paribus, as always) innovate preferential he by utilizing (including transforming) existing material; as a second recourse they borrow; as a third they just might (in certain domains anyhow) invent in. there seems to be a preference hierarchy (which also serve as a guy to likelihood in reconstruction, as directional pathways do): phonological change > morphosyntactic change by analogy or reanalysis > morphosyntactic borrowing > absolute invention. Relative or transformative innovation is generally amenable to reconstruction (if not always of the strict kind). Absolute innovation involves even more than the emergence: it involves the forging ex vacuo of new material. Thus it should in principle be possible to find cases, even in the histories of well-known languages, where there is no ancestors but zero. The argument for this type of innovation is not empirical, but transcendental: but it is one worth following a, as it has not, as far as I know, been pushed to its limits. It's why should innovation from zero the possible, or why should we even think of it? There is a historical argument, which, interestingly, is the same whether one believes in monogenesis (like the flakier adherents of Protoworld) or polygenesis (perhaps the safer option) for human language. Is clear that all the characters of proto-world or where you care to call it, or on a poly genetic view, the characters all the original proto languages for each (established) family, must at some point represents absolute innovation. That is, while languages as (say) the type of software or capacity may be mono genetic, individual languages and therefore families are the results of polygenesis, the software operating on and/or creating material to fulfill the capacity. It doesn't matter in this sends whether it happened once or any indefinite number of times. This is probably, and typically speaking, the non-issue, since the time-depths involved are so vast that we have no technologies for exploring them. There is no way to find out when the noun phrase was invented.... English is separated from its putative ultimate parent Proto-Indo-European by any reasonable estimates some 8000 years; yet there is not one piece of inflexion or generational material that English has now or ever had that cannot be traced back to the parent language. p. 314--biology, rna, imperfect copying etc P. 316 Exaptation... This "missing term in the science of form" as they called it (Gould and Vrba) denotes the co-optation doing evolution of structures originally developed for other purposes. Classical examples are the co-op station of feathers.... Exaptation, that is, is opportunistic: it is a kind of conceptual renovation, as it were, of material that is already there, but either serving some other purpose, or serving no purpose that all. Thus perfectly good structures can be exapted, as can junk of various kinds. I am convinced (see further 7.6-7) that there is such a thing as a theory of historically evolve systems, and other virtually any subsystem to meet certain criteria is going show, that look like junk deposition. In other words, human cultural evolution, (or of the evolution of human cultural artifacts, which is almost virtually not the same thing), like the evolution of biological systems, is based at least partly on bricolage, cobbling, jerry-building, what everyone to call it; pieces also systems are always falling off and if not lost out of recycled, often in amazingly or general and clever ways... P. 317 if a piece of juncture arise, for any reason, there are three things one can do with it: pleaded as it is; get rid of it; or recycle it been used for something else. Languages like organisms display all three strategies. P. 319 It is important to distinguish exaptation from analogical and similar processes, or abduction. P. 325 people have tried to explain why it linguistic change should occur ever since they first became aware of it. There are two major some issues: (a) why should any change that all occur? and (b) why should some particular observed (type of) change have occurred? Question at present has no agreed on technical answer ... P. 326 the usual focus in the literature has however been not on wide change cars off unexplained particular changes or change types under larger rubrics with some supposed theoretical warrant. There seem to the two polar positions on explicability. ... Explanation is a complex motion, with many possible construals... Taking into account in the source of objects that had been called explanations in various sciences and pseudo-or quasi sciences there seem to the three basic or canonical conceptual types: 1. Causal explanations. 2. Functional explanations. 3. Genetic or historical explanations. ... we might add a fourth category, which could perhaps be seen as subcase of two; rational explanations. This category, under one guise or another, could be considered the type for hermeneutic explications of various kinds: any attempt at the explanation or exegesis extrapolating from, `the common experience of being human' could eventually fall under this heading, since what underwrites them all abduction based on something like empathy or understanding, which in the end amount to a kind of a anamnesis. P. 329 if a strong D-N type seems to the usual of the language change; histories of contingent domain, there are no laws of the requisite power, if there any kind that all. Probabilistic explanations can be applied in case of tendencies or likelihoods but they are peculiarly unsatisfactory, in that they typically reduce at best to tautologies: whatever is more likely to happen is more likely to happen, and our surprise at the occurrence is to that extent diminished.... If languages as historical objects are indeed systems with sensitive dependence on initial conditions than micro-level prediction is impossible, since the initial conditions are in principle either unknowable or unspecified with the requisite degree of precision; though after the fact explications of a quite delicate kind may be feasible.... We are then left with a seventh week explanations of different times, involving such notions as function, reason, etc..... A further variant is the invisible hand explanation in which people do rational things but in the course of doing them achieve some unintended goal.. The discussion above may seem rather limiting; probably reason is that I'm trying (as I did somewhat all successfully in Lass 1980) through distinguish between explanation is a technical term in academic discourse, and some of its looser everyday uses.... p.311 Some writers, while still making a distinction between weak and strong explanations, attempt to group all exegetical activities under the same heading...(see Heine)..; he is willing to use the term explanation whenever any of the following goals have been achieved: 1. Description of a phenomenon is an example of a more general phenomenon. 2. Seeing facts in a wide context or in the larger pattern. 3. Imparting organized knowledge, i.e. knowledge of relation between various facts.. {see Futuyma 1995.. discussions of testability of evolutionary hypothesis} p. 332 it's now indicate that a half since I launched a full frontal attack and what seemed to be the false tensions of most times explaining linguistic change (Lass 1980). That both in retrospect was a bigger could, course depositors assault on all forms of explanation other than those fitting D-N or covering law model... P. 333 in fact the explanatory commencement of restored or sciences (if one can called them that) is a special and rather different sort from that in the natural sciences. As du Preez says of psychoanalysis, taking is a paradigm case to the hermeneutic discipline: the explanation of any actual event is a long narrative about circumstances... it does not fit into the hypethetico-deductive format. The interface, it is like history, which also has generalizations, is explanatory, and attempts to discover the origins of events in circumstances, but cannot be predictive. On the other hand (and this is relevant to the discussion that follows), in psychoanalysis narratives may be falsifiable (in some details) as theories in the natural sciences. But because of the complexity of the narrative... because although many options on tone and incident one can rarely falsify a narrative as a whole. The notion of what might constitute a falsification is crucial, as we will see below. P. 334 To use Peirce's famous beanbag example, deduction induction and abduction all involve the Triad of rule, case, and result, but inference moves in different directions.... Abduction on the other hand involves inferring the case from rule and result: Rule: all beans from this bag to our white. Result: these beans are white. Case: these beans are from this bag. P. 335 there is a fundamental problem here: other peoples all abductions (unlike their correct deductions) may fail to convince, since the nature of the particular abduction depends a contingent attributes of the abducer.... Abduction, says Sebeok (1983: 9) enables us to formulate a general prediction, but with no warranty of a successful outcome; key like Pierce does not seem to mind this, but there are strong objections, from a number of points of view. P. 336 (hermeneutic explanation) I reject completely the view (especially in the historical context) that Pateman outlines under the heading of the hermeneutic challenge (1987: tenf) the concept of dependent existence of cultural objects implies that the proper scientific attitude towards them is the hermeneutic one in which we attempt to understand their meaning, and that explanation of them and all the relations of human agents to them will be given in the vocabulary on beliefs, reasons, motives, and purposes rather than in the make a mechanistic vocabulary of causes and laws. At least I decree that clauses and the laws may be inappropriate, but the others are even more so, at least in any reality other than pragmatics. Abandoning predictive or deductive explanation apparently leads us only with untrustworthy post hoc strategies of explications. This would not in itself necessarily be a bad thing, if it were not for one troublesome fact: because of the quirkiness of abduction(among other things), the convincing force of any hermeneutic explanation depends on a number of disparate and contingent variables; and not all of them seem to be satisfactorily handled in any given instance, and may not in the genre itself. These include (a) the ingenuity of explainer; (B) the interpretation's coherence with the rest of the explainee's putative knowledgeable of the domain; and (c) most importantly to explainee's willingness to accept the interpretation (which may as we will see involve a good deal more than the satisfaction of simple logical criteria, including aspect and temperament of practice). There is something you didn't simply dialogic about such explications, which is not the case in the positivist mode; there if you accept the rules of the game in the first place you have no problem with particular instances. Hermeneutic interpretations then are epistemically very different from other types, and in that one has a choice not to accept, since neither logical deduction nor any other kind of valid inference is primarily at issue. All such explanations by permissive, not binding on the explainee. (A good deductive explanation, even if it's boring, does have the one excellent property that no sane explainee can reject it.) P. 338 genetic linguistics, according to Anttila (1989: 23.2) deals of history and human action; therefore paramedics is the only viable metatheory, since the subject matter is maximally open systems in which mechanistic prediction is impossible. So in history... piecing together a possible past is guessing through indexes, where the laws involved somehow relate to the common experience of being human, and results are traces of human action. Elsewhere Anttila says that reconstruction... means piecing together a possible chain of events, a state affairs, i.e. inferring the case. The inference involved is abduction (and induction...) not deduction, and the frame this classical hermeneutic anamnesis (reenactment through interpretation and understanding) not natural science. P. 339 I find impossible to make out what some of the terms that Anttila or pateman use could possibly mean in the context of historical linguistics. How can one understand or get an intention behind or discover the meaning or shift from .... P. 340 The point of hermeneutics appears to be the discovery and formulation of meaning. ... see Sir Medawar's elegant hatchet-job on psychoanalytic theories. P. 342 a classic and persistent example is the claim that optimal sound -- meaning correspondence is biunique, formulated by Anttila as the slogan `one meaning one form'. The reasoning for ironing out of alternations.. is that `the mind shuns purposeless variety'...(MSPV principle) P. 345 (new stuff... principle of isomorphism... regularization.... strict one-to one symbolization is possible only in closed systems such as formal (mathematical) languages...) P. 346 change in principle, given the data we have, be random rather than motivated, and the results would probably look pretty much the same.... Crucially, the notion of preference here is pseudo-statistical, no more than universalization of an intuition.... Virtually all collections of data often sort that I go of our tendentious, gathers to make specific points and appearing only in the context of sketches of short store of periods, or sense of examples designed to illustrate the operation of MSPV.... Crucially, the notion of preference here is pseudo-statistical, no more than the universalization of intuition. P. 352 in a recent attempt to argue for the speaker-centred and non-structuralist account of language change, in which Speaker interaction is the primary locus and determinant, James Milroy (1992) argues against the system based views of language. He suggests that if languages are machines, ... then variation and change ougth to be dysfunctional, and thus not only inexplicable but counterpredicted. ((Suggested notion of system is excessively restrictive)).. P. 353 {systems} relate complex biological systems, for instance, clearly are not, but they do not lose any of their systematicity in this way. It is only in what might be called a folder adaptation as model of the organism... it is not generally clear, as Gould has been arguing in detail for over a decade that animals for instance, while certainly functional systems, are often quite sloppy ones. Parts are Jerry-built and cobbled together out of other parts,.... {function and dysfunction} for any complex system regular feature doesn't have to be either functional or dysfunctional;... It may affect the precisely the non-functionality of such characters that is the primary enabler of change (Lass 1990a).. {Redundancy and noise..} It is in this light that we probably want to interpret linguistics variability. Languages are imperfectly in replicating systems and therefore throw up variants during replication; the fact of variation itself is neutral. If a variant were to be genuinely dysfunctional in some serious and compromising sense, the chances are that its survival would be prejudiced. So it's perfectly possible that both variation and change itself (as a result) are neutral: even selection does not necessarily have to select event which is better adapted. In any case, that are even in biology modes off apparent selection that are not in the Darwinian sense genuinely selective or adaptive (Kimura 1983). All of these possibilities, given the much better understood the nature of variation and change in organisms, need to be considered before any claim for function can be made for variation or change. A final point on systems. Milroy's dichotomy between a system and a means of communication is incoherent. Once we allow for non- physical systems, any means of communication that is to work as such most in fact be a system; not only a system, but one that its share (within certain bounds) by all users. P. 355 In Lass(1980) idle to the general argument against functional explanation, which was later attacked by ML Samuels, and others (SAmuels 1987).. This argument largely concerned so-called homophonic clash and the danger of merger neither of which I am willing to accept as rational motivations for change, on precisely the same grounds with that I rejected MSPV.. Let's consider a classical and family of functional explanation, linguistics change (with apparently a more solid basis than MSPV, but still essentially hermeneutic, in that it attempts to provide a reason why some things should happen). ... According to the neogrammarian principle...(useful and largely correct) position as a basis, cases that appear to violate the condition are interesting, and require explanation. P. 361 in summary, a conceptual basis for functional explanation is underwritten by five in plausible assumptions: 1. That exist functional and dysfunctional language states in the normal of things, i.e. all language states are not equifunctional 2. Speeches can have intuition is about the efficiency or a phonology, etc. all their language for its communicational tasks (unless one is true this can't be) 3. Speakers can make comparisons between the present (structural) state of language and some as yet unrealized one, and opt for one or the other. 4. Following from 3,speakers can have any global structural intuition about their language. 5. Speeches can change of the alignment on the basis called any toned information in 1-4: hence change can be a motivated behavior. These assumptions all involve the category mistake endemic in both the generativist child -- as -- little -- linguist and hermeneutic rational-agent models: confusing ordinary speakers for whom languages by and large in non-focal historical given those special speakers for whom making language focal is a professional concern. P. 363 Curiously, then, individual list theory used actually neutralize the individual proper, since they must make all individuals in affect interchangeable. What ultimately happens is this: the larger picture of historical change is interpreted as if it all occurred in an individual speaker... this individual picture is than projected onto a collective language history, which becomes sum of a set of individual acts so alike that anyone can stand for the type. (heat bath and thermodynamics) P. 365 As Bickerton (19791:461) has pointed out, typical patterns we observe see impossible ' unless something, somewhere is counting environments and keeping a running score of percentages'. And individual list interpretation of demand that each speaker not only keep track of his own scores, but proposal other members all the group, so that if one speaker goes off of the rails, he can adjust his own school or to maintain the average. And sense he does this also with interlocutors from outside the community, if you must be able to keep his scores right even when there is no feedback from other community members. Bickerton doesn't think we can attribute this kind of sophisticated running competition to individual, nor do I. But as he says" something" must be adjusting individual behaviors to conform with certain norms. I am not at all short what this might be (or if there's anything better at all other than some mathematical property of such systems of competing variants of themselves); but it clearly is not a generalized individual's behavior can be hermeneutically understood or re-enacted. It is difficult to see how this kind of things can be accommodated except in a view of language has been at least partly transcendental or meta-personal, on system with which speakers interact, but which used in some sense outside them, and extra mental reality. (field theory). But one conclusion seems to emerge fairly strongly from the preceding arguments, which reflects badly on the hermeneutic challenge. Rather than introducing a truly human element into the explanation of linguistics change, hermeneutic explications is able to function only as a totalitarian uniformizing imposition, since it is based on the problematic assumption that one man's mind can stand for the minds of all others. It brings us back two days before Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog introduced the notion of orderly heterogeneity. P. 366 Agents: structure, pragmatics and invisible hands p.367 that he is, there are too quite distinct time dimensions needed to talk about language.... Change occurs over geological time, beyond the capacity of human staff, since no active density consequences on his actions.... This is the geological time dimension, where speeches are not conscience all that rolled improper dating variation, and indeed can't be: the analysis on thrift, says Sapir (161) is certain 'to be unconscious, or rather unknown to the normal speaker'. P. 370 A modest ontological proposal I conclude that hermeneutic or functionalist explanatory strategies are not very satisfactory. And this is sold because of a fundamental mistake about the nature of what is to be explained. This mistake is considering language change to the something that speeches to rather than something that happens above languages. P. 373 compare this spread all language change to level respiratory virus in an epidemic. We want to the disease spread throw population typically in the same kind of exponential curve that characterizes lexical diffusion. {prob dens again}. P. 374 more generally: there are many phenomenon and the world that are properties of particular kinds of systems, rather than the entities that happen to make up the systems. Exponential growth curves this triable by a certain kind of logistic equation are typical among extraordinary number of natural and cultural phenomenon although most diverse kinds, in such diverse fields as population genetics, the study of predator-prey relationships and epidemiology, and may well be simply a universal property of the growth off variant populations on the certain classes of conditions rather than all the particular objects including those classes. (Fibonacci, Pi, Planck's constant) etc).. The pervasiveness of abstract system types in different domains makes it dangerous to argue with the kind of specificity Milroy does that a particular sort of propagation must necessarily take its origin from the local nature of the population through which it moves, rather than from the nature of a process type, which may be a piece of world structure as its were, rather than an attribute of a particular kind of lower-order object in the world. {nonsensical or ignorant}. p.375 {about replication and genetics} So in a quasi-species sequence spaces each individual genotype its computable as being a certain distance (in terms of differing nucleotide sequences) from each other one, and the spread of genotypes into a sequence space has the form, as Eigen puts it, of a cloud. {prob density again). What happens if we construe all language as this kind of object, which exists needed in any individual Morton collective to, but rather as an area in an abstract, vastly complex, multidimensional phase space.... For one thing, we can start to talk about variation and change the same way we do for other populations: all language is a population called variants moving through time, and subject of selection... p.378 any imperfectly replicating (i.e. evolving) system throws up a (random or near random) scatter of variants or imperfect copies overtime.... {examples, drift, conspiracy?...vector, attractor....) p.382 speciation and the growth of new populations typically involved what population geneticists call bottlenecks; when any subset of a polymorphous or variable population splits off form the ancestral stock, it will carry with it only that subset of variant characters that it possesses.... So there is a major sense in which the development of a new language represents, paradoxically, a decrease in variation. .... If the description given above is valid, then in fact, monogenesis (at any level from the origin of language to that of a particular low-level dialect cluster) virtually entails contingent properties of the population being transmitted in bulk and amplified via bottlenecks. Such properties often have long viability periods. For example the first personal marker /-m-/ has its survived in Indo-European for it least some 8-10,000 years. P. 384 I am rather asking here under what guise it might be most profitable to look at human languages as a system in time, and what kinds of consiliences fallout from a particular view. P. 385 Milroy and others have argued eloquently (and in part successfully) for embedding the historical study of language in a social matrix: Andersen,Anttila, Pateman, Keller and Ikonen have argued (to my mind less successfully) for incorporating accounts of human meaning, interpretation, action etc. P. 388 nothing in linguistics anyhow really seems to be that original; the line I've been pursuing his bowl in principle is not in detail... (Davies) in this view, language change was seen, like geological change, to be the result of powerful non-human forces, in which human goals and actions and no part: the speaker no more controlled the vast movements of linguistics change than the farmers interventions control the formation of geological strata. Output was not of course structuralist but historical, though its focus was on large scale autonomous systems; but the tension between autonomous or naturalized and speaker-centred or psychologistic (or actional) orientations is old and recurrent. And the end both outputs are probably complementary; given enough history, the paucity of major choices makes all innovations reactionary. Looking back on this chapter, and parts of the rest of the book, it seems that a great deal of the discussion and not been so much about the ostensible subject matter as about epistemological style. In particular, the polemic in this chapter has been about incommensurable difference in approach to the subject (and some peripheral connections) that seems in his own way as important as any substantive matter is actually dealt with. {dichotomy--physics etc} I suppose what I find most objectionable about Anttila, Shapiro and others of the romantic persuasion is that they lack sobriety; and they are enthusiasts.... The fundamental error although it hermeneutic approach is that it attempts to get inside something that because of its demands historical extension may not have an inside at all.... It abrogates the scientists primary responsibility: to free investigation and knowledge from human emotional attitudes, to step back to the position of a spectator who is not part of the world on the study. References: Anttila, Raimo, (1972) and introduction to restore and comparative linguistics, Macmillan Company,New York Baldi, P. (ed) 1990 Linguistic change and reconstruction methodology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bomhard, A. 1990 A survey of the comparative phonology of the so-called `Nostratic' languages, in Baldi 1990:331-58 Boyd & Richerson, (1992) How microevolutionary processes give rise to history in Nitecki & Nitecki 1992:179-210. Cohen & Stewart (1994) The Collapse of chaos: discovering simplicity in a complex world, London: Penguin. Kimura, M. (1983) The neutral theory of molecular evolution, Cambridge University Press. Lass, R. (1980) On explaining language change, Cambridge University Press. Medawar, P. (1984) Pluto's Republic, Oxford University Press Milroy, J. (1992) Linguistic variation and change, Oxford:Blackwell. Nichols, J. (1992) Language Diversity in Space and Time, University of Chicago Press. Samuels (1987) -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above." From HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu Wed Mar 31 13:50:49 1999 From: HubeyH at mail.montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 08:50:49 -0500 Subject: Proving Negatives Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> I see this phrase often. I don't understand what it means. I have this feeling that it has to do with a point of view in Philosophy of Science. PoF has gone thru many stages. The first, and earliest stage is attributed usually to Bacon and may be termed Baconian. It is the usual high school rant about, hypothesis/theory, experiment, etc. The experiment was supposed to verify the theory. That does not work out according to laws of logic. So someone attempted to change "verification" to "confirmation". The experiment was supposed to "confirm" the theory. That does not work out either. That was done clearly by Hempel in the so-called RAven Paradox. It goes like this; the statement "Ravens are black" can be written as R => B (where => stands for "material implication" of logic). According to confirmationism, every time we see a raven that is black, this added further confirmation to the statement R => B. But the contrapositive of this statement ~B => ~R (where the tilde indicates negation) which is equivalent to the original statement says "If it is not black, it is not a raven". But then this says that everytime we see an object that is not black, such as a red corvette, or a yellow banana, we are also "confirming" the statement "ravens are black"! So "confirmationism" is as bad as "verificationism". The only thing left, as vigorously propounded by Popper is "falsificationism" which means essentially that a scientific statement can only be falsified. So the acid test for a statement being a scientific statement (not necessarily true) is that it be at least falsifiable in principle. So a statement like "elephants are pink" is a scientific statement in the sense that if we can find a non-pink elephant we can falsify the statement. Obviously, "elephants are not pink" is also falsifiable since to falsify it we need only to find a pink elephant. How does a "negative" not get proven? Maybe some people mean a statement like this; "the sun will always rise in the east". That can be falsified only if we can wait an eternity. But this is the problem of induction, which is what all the sciences (aside from math) have to face, and that includes physics and all the engineering that follows from it. So that problem is not about negatives but about induction. Induction itself causes no problems for math since it is a type of mathematical proof. Induction causes problems for sciences other than math. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights and "Fair Use": http://www.templetions.com/brad//copyright.html "This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above."