<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">A further method is to sample densely in unrelated areas that include both hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, as colleagues and I did for our hunter-gatherer languages project. See, for example<div><br></div><div><a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0025195">https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0025195</a> [loan patterns: hunter-gatherers aren't that different]<br></div><div><a href="https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lity.2012.16.issue-1/lity-2012-0002/lity-2012-0002.xml">https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lity.2012.16.issue-1/lity-2012-0002/lity-2012-0002.xml</a> [numeral complexity: it's complicated]<br></div><div><a href="http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.2993/0278-0771-34.2.195">http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.2993/0278-0771-34.2.195</a> [ethnobiological nomenclature: hunter-gatherers are variable]<br></div><div><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215039014000022">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215039014000022</a> [Wanderwörter: it's complicated]<br></div><div><a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/113/48/13666.short">http://www.pnas.org/content/113/48/13666.short</a> [color in Pama-Nyungan, a large family of hunter-gatherers; color nomenclature is variable]<br></div><div><br></div><div>I also wrote a survey paper of the issues:</div><div><a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2010.00220.x">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2010.00220.x</a><br></div><div><br></div><div>Though I'm not sure we ever said this explicitly in this project, the overall impression I got from coding and analyzing all this data was that the sample of hunter-gatherers was more variable than intensive agriculturalists, but not necessarily more so than small-scale agriculturalists. Certainly none of the claims that hunter-gatherer languages share features as a group distinct from agriculturalists is impossible to maintain.</div><div><br></div><div>Claire</div><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><br></div><div>Claire Bowern<div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>Professor, Director of Graduate Studies</div><div>Chair: Yale Women Faculty Forum (<a href="http://wff.yale.edu/" target="_blank">wff.yale.edu</a>)</div><div>Department of Linguistics</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div>New Haven, CT 06511 </div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Tue, Oct 2, 2018 at 12:24 AM Eitan Grossman <<a href="mailto:eitan.grossman@mail.huji.ac.il">eitan.grossman@mail.huji.ac.il</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Hi all,<div><br></div><div>This conversation has taken all sorts of turns, so I'd like to go back to Ian's original question and point out again that there is an empirical way to look at this question, at least for some types of properties of language and to certain time depths.</div><div><br></div><div>If you construct a sample of proto-languages for which a property can be reconstructed with some degree of confidence (so maybe "no" for multiple-wh questions, but maybe "yes" for some aspects of phonology, morphology, and maybe more), you can compare distributions in this sample to distributions in present-day languages. This is what Marsico, Verkerk, Moran and others did for sound inventories in the papers I mentioned earlier. </div><div><br></div><div>Obviously, not all proto-languages are contemporaries, but there have been some suggestions about how to deal with this elsewhere, like Matthew Dryer's use of genera or Johanna Nichols' use of stocks.</div><div><br></div><div>One might also mention Bickel and Nichol's Family Bias Method, which wasn't articulated for this particular question, but does end up identifying diachronic trends in families, and as such, might be useful for seeing whether earlier distributions are different from present-day ones.</div><div><br></div><div>To my mind, this has a better chance of providing new results than trying to inferr earlier distributions from present-day ones, worthwhile and interesting as that is in its own right.</div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Eitan</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br clear="all"><div><div dir="ltr" class="m_4019861786589061164gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Eitan Grossman<div>Senior Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences<br></div><div>Hebrew University of Jerusalem</div><div>Tel: +972 2 588 3809</div><div>Fax: +972 2 588 1224</div><div><div><div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Tue, Oct 2, 2018 at 6:39 AM Randy J. LaPolla <<a href="mailto:randy.lapolla@gmail.com" target="_blank">randy.lapolla@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space">Hi All,<div>There are different ways to understand complexity: </div><div><br></div><div>Related to David’s discussion of multiple levels of jurisdictional hierarchy, Michael Halliday saw language as a resource for meaning creation, and talked about how the resources for meaning creation developed along with the increased complexity of societies, e.g. different registers and jargons for different domains. This view might give us different results from just looking at morphological complexity.</div><div><br></div><div>Related to Jeffrey’s insight, in complexity science, a more unconstrained system is more complex, so understanding a morphologically simple language like Chinese can be said to involve more complexity than understanding a language that constrains the interpretation to a greater extent, e.g. German. (I have an early 1995 paper that talks about relative complexity like this).</div><div><br></div><div>As Marianne implied, the discussion so far has assumed that communication involves the coding and decoding of symbols, but as she mentioned, and as Bollinger talked about as early as 1960, much of language is formulaic (he called it “idiomatic”), and so we are not generating or parsing sentences in every case, as had been assumed by Chomsky. </div><div><br></div><div>Also, we need to keep in mind that it isn’t a simple correlation between large society and simple grammar, as there are different variables involved, such as the types of social networks that are involved and the type of language acquisition that is involved, as the idea related to the latter is that the simplification results from second language learners acquiring a language that involves different habits from their own and so they simplify out those differences.</div><div><br></div><div>Randy<br><div>
<div style="text-align:start;text-indent:0px;word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><div style="text-align:start;text-indent:0px;word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><div style="text-align:start;text-indent:0px;word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><div style="text-align:start;text-indent:0px;word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><div style="text-align:start;text-indent:0px;word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><span class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:15px"><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:white">-----</span></span><div style="word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><span class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:separate;text-align:-webkit-auto;border-spacing:0px"><div style="word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><span class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:separate;text-align:-webkit-auto;border-spacing:0px"><span class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse:separate;text-align:-webkit-auto;border-spacing:0px"><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:normal;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:white"><b>Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA</b> （羅</span><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:white;font-size:13px"><font class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-style-span" face="Song">仁地</font></span><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34);background-color:white">）</span></div><div style="word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><span style="background-color:white"><font color="#222222" face="Arial, sans-serif" size="2">Professor of Linguistics, with a curtesy <span>appointment</span> in Chinese, School of Humanities </font></span></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:normal;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13.333333015441895px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Nanyang Technological University</span></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:normal;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><span class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:15px"><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34)"><span style="background-color:white">HSS-03-45, 14 Nanyang Drive </span></span></span><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:13.333333015441895px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);text-align:-webkit-auto">| </span><span class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:15px"><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34)"><span style="background-color:white">Singapore 637332</span></span></span></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:normal;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><span style="text-align:-webkit-auto;background-color:white;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><a href="http://randylapolla.net/" target="_blank">http://randylapolla.net/</a></span></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:normal;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><span class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:15px"><span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34)"><span style="background-color:white">Most recent book:</span></span></span></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);letter-spacing:normal;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;word-wrap:break-word;line-break:after-white-space"><span style="background-color:white"><font color="#222222" face="Arial, sans-serif" size="2"><a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Sino-Tibetan-Languages-2nd-Edition/LaPolla-Thurgood/p/book/9781138783324" target="_blank">https://www.routledge.com/The-Sino-Tibetan-Languages-2nd-Edition/LaPolla-Thurgood/p/book/9781138783324</a></font></span></div></span></span></div></span></div></div><br class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-interchange-newline"></div><br class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-interchange-newline"></div><br class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-interchange-newline"></div><br class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-interchange-newline"></div><br class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-interchange-newline"><br class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-interchange-newline">
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<div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On 2 Oct 2018, at 2:52 AM, Marianne Mithun <<a href="mailto:mithun@linguistics.ucsb.edu" target="_blank">mithun@linguistics.ucsb.edu</a>> wrote:</div><br class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650Apple-interchange-newline"><div><div dir="ltr">Of course it's not necessarily the case that morphologically complex words are usually parsed morpheme-by-morpheme online, especially with high frequency, frequency which might be enhanced in small societies.<div><br></div><div>Marianne</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 11:03 AM Heath Jeffrey <<a href="mailto:schweinehaxen@hotmail.com" target="_blank">schweinehaxen@hotmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">
<div style="font-family:Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt">
An object lesson about correlations between societal complexity and linguistic complexity is the trajectory of Trudgill's work. His original basic idea was that small, tightly-knit societies allow (and perhaps favor) complex phonemic inventories and opaque
morphology to develop. If you read "Sociolinguistic Typology" from cover to cover, you get the sense that halfway through writing it he realized that small, tightly-knit societies can also allow highly simple systems (like those David has brought to our attention).
So large-population national languages are stuck in a narrow range in the middle, while those of small tightly-knit ones can range widely in both directions. Not fully elucidated by Trudgill but implied by his results: the common denominator between very high
complexity and very low complexity is that both types of language put a high cognitive burden on the listener, who must either quickly parse words that contain many tiny morphemes in complex networks on the one hand, or must infer the speaker's meaning from
limited lexical input on the other hand. It's cognitive complexity in this shifty sense, not mechanically computed complexity (number of phonemes, morphemes-per-word counts, etc.), that we should be looking at. But this doesn't make research methodology any
easier. </div>
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<div id="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650m_7184812083100803328divRplyFwdMsg" dir="ltr"><font face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size:11pt"><b>From:</b> Lingtyp <<a href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>> on behalf of David Gil <<a href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank">gil@shh.mpg.de</a>><br>
<b>Sent:</b> Monday, October 1, 2018 12:18 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> Martin Kohlberger<br>
<b>Cc:</b> <a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>; <a href="mailto:josephdbrooks@ucsb.edu" target="_blank">josephdbrooks@ucsb.edu</a><br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [Lingtyp] Temporal features?</font>
<div> </div>
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<div class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650m_7184812083100803328BodyFragment"><font size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt">
<div class="m_4019861786589061164m_8158065247950382650m_7184812083100803328PlainText">Martin,<br>
<br>
On 01/10/2018 22:45, Martin Kohlberger wrote:<br>
> Dear David,<br>
><br>
> Following Joseph's comment, I really don't follow your point. How <br>
> does your "national language" value necessarily correlate with greater <br>
> socio-political complexity compared to a "local language only recently <br>
> part of larger polity"? Are you implying that communities which speak <br>
> a local language that is not part of a larger polity are necessarily <br>
> socio-politically less complex than communities which speak a national <br>
> language?<br>
More or less, yes, that's what I'm implying. Nation states have <br>
multiple levels of jurisdictional hieraerchy; they have newspapers, <br>
public transport, bureaucracies, football leagues, universities, you <br>
name it. Hunter-gatherer societies have essentially none of the above.<br>
<br>
(I'm not quite sure what the source of the misunderstanding is. If it <br>
has anything to do with apparent value judgements, I should emphasize <br>
that there is nothing inherently better or worse in being more complex, <br>
be it grammatically or socio-politically.)<br>
<br>
David<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
-- <br>
David Gil<br>
<br>
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution<br>
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History<br>
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany<br>
<br>
Email: <a href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank">gil@shh.mpg.de</a><br>
Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834<br>
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816<br>
<br>
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