<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Hi Ian, hi all,<div><br></div><div>This has been discussed in the context of the Uniformitarian Assumption, which people have written about from all sorts of perspectives (with a very detailed disquisition on this in Brian Joseph and Richard Janda's introduction in their Handbook of Historical Linguistics). Fritz Newmeyer has also written about it, as have quite a few others.</div><div><br></div><div>As for studies that look at this from an empirical perspective, you might be interested in the following in the domain of phonology. All are easily found on the internet.</div><div><br></div><div><p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal"><font color="#000000" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Marsico, E. 1999. What can a database of protolanguages tell us about the last 10,000 years of soundchanges? In Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences , pages 353–356, San Francisco.</font></p></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Marsico, E., S. Flavier, A. Verkerk & S. Moran. 2018. BDPROTO: A Database of Phonological Inventories from Ancient and Reconstructed Languages.</span><br></div><div><p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Moran, S & A. Verkerk. 2018. </span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Differential rates of change in consonant and vowel systems. In Cuskley, C., Flaherty, M., Little, H., McCrohon, L., Ravignani, A. & Verhoef, T. (Eds.): The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference (EVOLANGXII). doi:10.12775/3991-1.077</span><br></p><p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:Helvetica"><font color="#000000"><span style="font-family:Raleway,Arial,sans-serif"><br></span></font></p><p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal"><font color="#000000" face="Raleway, Arial, sans-serif"><span style="caret-color: rgb(139, 142, 148);">Best,</span></font></p><p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal"><font color="#000000" face="Raleway, Arial, sans-serif"><span style="caret-color: rgb(139, 142, 148);">Eitan</span></font></p><p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal"><font color="#000000" face="Raleway, Arial, sans-serif"><span style="caret-color: rgb(139, 142, 148);"><br></span></font></p></div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 7:04 AM Joo Ian <<a href="mailto:ian.joo@outlook.com">ian.joo@outlook.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<p class="MsoNormal">Dear all,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We all know that languages spoken in a certain area (for example, Mainland Southeast Asia) tend to share areal features. But what about time? Do languages spoken at a certain time period, such as say, Bronze Age, share a certain feature
distinct from the features of languages spoken during, say, Iron Age?<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If so, then would a sample of languages spoken only at a certain time period (such as the 21<sup>st</sup> century) also be a temporally biased sample, similar to how a sample of languages spoken only in Europe would be an areally biased
sample?<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In order to create a trully non-biased sample of languages, is it also necessary to avoid temporal bias?<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I can think of several “temporal features”:<u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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<li class="m_3827566361209597153MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:0in">Vocabulary. Languages spoken before the 20<sup>th</sup> century would not have any words referring to “computer.” Bronze Age languages would have no words related to iron.<u></u><u></u></li><li class="m_3827566361209597153MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:0in">Metaphors. Some have argued that some metaphors, such as TIME IS MONEY, arose only via industrialization (although I
<a href="https://www.academia.edu/37137427/TIME_IS_MONEY_in_Classical_Chinese" target="_blank">have argued against this</a>, claiming that it has also existed in Classical Chinese)<u></u><u></u></li><li class="m_3827566361209597153MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:0in">Gender-bias. Most languages we speak today are biased towards male, for example the generic pronoun being the masculine singular pronoun. But in the 21<sup>st</sup> century, where
we strive for gender equality, we see that there are conscious changes being made to fix this gender-bias.<u></u><u></u></li></ol>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But in terms of syntax, morphology, phonology, etc. are there specific temporal features?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I would appreciate any insights on this issue.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">From Hong Kong,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Ian Joo</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://ianjoo.academia.edu" target="_blank">http://ianjoo.academia.edu</a></p>
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