Alexis on Wald on Linguistic classification

[Alexander Vovin]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Larry,
 
     Some thoughts below,
 
 
On Mon, 23 Feb 1998, Larry Trask wrote:
 
> Sasha Vovin writes:
> >
> > This is quite a revolutionary definition of relatedness. I used to
> > believe that relatedness is demonstrated by recurrent phonetic
> > correspondences established on the basis of basic vocabulary and/or
> > basic morphology, and I trust that all major families were done in
> > this way without any appeal to "chance", as the very existence of
> > this correspondences would rule out the "chance".
>
 
Larry Trask:
 
> Well, I too would certainly like to believe that all recognized
> language families have been arrived at in this way.  And some of them
> certainly have been: IE, Algonquian, Austronesian, to name a few.
>
> But others have not.  Two that spring to mind are Afro-Asiatic and
> Niger-Congo.  To the best of my information, recurrent correspondences
> in phonology and/or morphology have never been demonstrated for these
> families, and no significant reconstruction is available for Proto-AA
> or Proto-NC -- or, rather, none which has won any degree of general
> acceptance.
 
     I do not think it is necessary to present a comprehensive
reconstruction of a proto-language to prove that languages A,B,C,D... are
related. I do not know anything about Niger-Congo, and my knowledge of
Afro-Asiatic is almost non-existent. However, while you are certainly
right that there is no generally accepted AA reconstruction, there is a
certain set of recurrent correspondences that is pretty much agreed upon
(so I heard from Diakonov about ten years ago).
It is, I believe, possible to demonstrate the regular nature of
correspondences, and, therefore, to prove that given languages are
related, whithout having come up with an interpretation of these
correspondences, that would correspond to the reconstruction of a
proto-language. Afro-Asiatic is not alone in this position, the same
picture can be observed for Austroasiatic: the comprehensive
reconstruction of protoaustroasiatic does not simply exist, but I do not
know of a single person who doubts its existence exactly because the major
correspondences have been established.
 
 
  Indeed, Bob Dixon has recently been complaining that the
> evidence available to support the African families generally, and
> Niger-Congo in particular, simply does not resemble the state of
> affairs that Sasha describes.  Instead, it appears, the families are
> set up on the basis of a few recurring grammatical characteristics,
> characteristics which involve actual morphological material in the AA
> case but only typological features in the NC case.
 
    Well, if this is the case with Niger-Congo, then we can let rest it in
peace. No regular correspondences, no relationship. Back to my definition?
 
Sasha
 
=======================================
Alexander Vovin
Associate Professor of Japanese
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
382 Moore Hall
1890 East-West Road
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Honolulu, HI 96822
vovin at hawaii.edu
fax (808)956-9515 (o.)
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