No subject

Fri Mar 28 00:33:29 UTC 1997

Date:   Thu, 27 Mar 1997 13:26:23 -1000
From:   Alexander Vovin <vovin at hawaii.edu>
To:     Dorothy Disterheft <DISTERH at VM.SC.EDU>
Subject: Re: your posting to HISTLING
In-Reply-To: <97Mar27.013543hwt.370800(8)@relay2.Hawaii.Edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95q.970327125708.22020B-100000 at uhunix2>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
 
> I believe that that I again have make some corrections...
>
> On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Sarah G. Thomason wrote:
>
>
> S.T.:
>  > >    Alexander Vovin's confidence that some of the isolates
> listed > by Larry Trask have been de-isolated by general consensus among
> > specialists is probably too sanguine.  A recent review in LANGUAGE,
> > for instance, expressed doubts about the evidence for connecting
> > Japanese with anything else (I don't remember the details of the
> > reviewer's arguments; the review appeared three or four years ago;
> > it's possible that the reviewer's focus was on Japanese + Austronesian
> > rather than on Japanese + Korean).
 
> A,V.:
[NOTE: this passage has been modified from an original version by order of
our moderator. Since this is the only way to get my reply through, I had
to comply]
> Well, I believe that this is not the way how the refutation of a genetic
> claim has to be presented. Prof. Thomason cites some review in
"Language",
 which
in my opinion cannot be used as a "proof" that Japanese and Korean are not
related, especially in the light of the fact that there are many other
works on the subject with which Prof. Thomason does not seem to be
familiar
with. (I suspect that the review in question is that by B.Comrie of
Starostin 1991 -- published in Language 69.4 (1993) -- that as far as I
remember does not state that Japanese is an isolate, but dicusses the
claim that Japanese is Altaic).
 
 > S.T.:
> >
> >    And I have my own concerns about evidence linking Ainu with
> > anything else, to the extent that the evidence relies on the
> > reconstructions in Vovin's book on Ainu (which contains proposals
> > like Proto-Ainu *hd- for a large correspondence set in which most
> > dialects have w- and the others have segments which could easily be
> > reflexes of *w-; Vovin declines to reconstruct *w- here because
> > there are few words with this correspondence set, whereas both *h and
> > *d are reconstructible).
>
> A.V.:
> Sorry, but this is a gross misrepresentation of my work. First, PA *hd is
> not a proposal for a large correspondence set, and my TENTATIVE hypothesis
> that Ainu IS LIKELY to be genetically related to Austroasiatic is not
> build on this correspondence alone. It is true that reconstruction *hd
> might explain nicely such cases as Ainu wakka < *hdakka "water" and PAA
> *?dAk "id". It is also true that majority of Ainu dialects have either w-
> or G- or h- in this case. But it is not comparative evidence that warrants
> a reconstruction of some kind of cluster there. *hd was again a tentative
> solution, but if Prof. Thomason have a better explanation for the
> morphonological alternation between w- and s- (which I believe may reflect
> interdental voiced D (as in English "the", denoted in my book as /d/), I
> will gladly listen to the proposal. NOTE: since that time I have given up
> on reconstructing *hd in the word "water", now I believe that w- in this
> word is rather prothetic, as some of the earliest materials on Ainu have
> just AKKA or AK.
 
 
 
>
> A.V.:
> What's important in my humble opinion that HISTORICALLY these languages
> are not isolates. Today they became isolates: so how can it prove that we
> have more isolates than we tend to think?
>
> S.T.:
>   But what evidence
> > have we, for any language that we all agree is an isolate and that
> > has no attested former relatives, that it used to have some
> > relatives?  It's easy enough to imagine a situation in which no
> > split will occur, ever: just situate your hypothetical language in
> > a remote mountain valley (say), in a small area that only supports
> > a small cohesive population -- a single speech community in which
(roughly)
> > everyone talks to everyone else -- and leave everyone there
permanently.
> > No split.  A belief that there are no real-life cases of this general
> > sort (it doesn't have to be a mountain valley, etc.) is a  matter of
> > faith, not science.
>
> A.V.:
> None, of course. But note that we do not discuss such hypothetical cases
> as you propose. We do discuss real-life situations, where of course
> neither Ket nor Yukaghir are isolates from the historical perspective.
> I'll tell more: they are not isolates even from the synchronic
> perspective: 1) Ket is represented by two "dialects", Sym and Imbat, that
> are more like two separate languages, and they are not mutually
> intelligible; 2) Yukaghir's "dialects", Tundra Yukaghir and Kolyma
> Yukaghir are again independent languages, highly divergent, and not
> miutually intelligible. So off the list they go. Regarding your
> hypothetical language in a small valley, I would very much like to see an
> example (no splits, completely homegeneous, and no outside relations
> whatsoever -- so an example like Batsbi won't work). I am unaware of such
> cases -- and until I see one I won't be able to agree that belief in such
> cases is more scientific than the other way around.
 
S.T.:
> >    Vovin is right, of course, in saying that Japanese is not an
isolate
> > even if it has no demonstrable relatives, if it is really a small
> > family of very close-related languages.  But then Proto-Japanese
(still
> > on the hypothesis that it has no established relatives) would be/have
> > been an isolate, so it would still go into the total.
>
>
> A.V.:
> Unfortunately, this hypothesis is wrong. It has been demonstrated that
> Japanese is related to Korean beyond a reasonable doubt. There are many
> works on this subject by S.Martin, Murayama S., Lee Ki-moon, R.Miller,
> J. Whitman, L. Serafim, B.Mathias, and myself written in English and
> German, leaving aside a vast literature in more exotic Japanese, Korean,
> and Russian. Let us discuss the evidence presented in these works rather
> than to reach verdict on the basis of a single close-to-anonymous review
> in "Language".
>