the meaning of "genetic relationship"

[Isidore Dyen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Tue, 14 Jul 1998, bwald wrote:
 
> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> I wrote:
>
> >> Now we are getting to one of my favorite points, pointing out that
> >> preoccupation with genetic relationship to the exclusion of other factors
> >> in linguistic change carries with it the 19th century baggage of romantic
> >> nationalism ...
>
> Isidore Dyen responded:
>
> >The key word above is preoccupation, a loaded word. You continue to use
> >loaded words and they do interfere with the straightforward exchange of
> >views. There is no special privilege associated with genetic relationship
> >so that if you are not interested in it or do not believe it is worth
> >examining, forget it. Why go on about it? Genetic linguistics is a subject
> >on whose evaluation you disagree with. Just get on with your research.
> >That's what is important, we hope.
>
> Nothing more needs to be said about this, other than to say: it's good advice.
>
> I went on later:
>
> >> NB.  In my original quote above I give the perspective of an interest in
> >> the mechanics of linguistic change  -- an end in itself.  Dyen's response
> >> takes the perspective of an interest in linguistic change as a tool for
> >> uncovering past history, which I take to mean social history -- a means to
> >> an end.  My questions above accommodate to that end.
>
> ID respond:
>
> >It may help you to understand the importance of genetic linguistics, if
> >you start from the point that man is distinguished from other animals by
> >language. It seems to me to follow that as we trace the back the history
> >of the presently occurring languages we are dealing with the history of
> >the human being, though perhaps not completely, but an important
> >contribution to the total history.
>
> That's fine with me.  Nevertheless, I maintain that tracing back the
> history of presently occurring languages is a quite different task from
> understanding how human language originated.  So far the role of genetic
> linguistics toward the second issue is simply one of dismissing some of the
> more absurd theories of language origins.
 
It may help if you call them hypotheses concerning the origin of languages
rather than theories.
As I see it it is useful to distinguish theories from hypotheses. The
latter are explanations. There is little doubt that languages
originated and the question is how. The problem  has a simple structure if
it is set up properly. The first component is animal cries used as
signals. The second component is the fact that all natural languages
are characterized by a phonemic structure. What we need is a scenario (one
type of hypopthesis) that gets us from a cry-structure to a phonemic
structure. The scenario would be a lot simpler to construct if the most
minimal element was meaningful. Since all languqages use syntactic devices
to reduce the ambiguity of utterances, one can take it for granted that
syntactic devices developed for organizing different sequences
of different meaningful (call them) cries. Somehow phonemes were developed
out of the mishmash that was going on at that stage. Perhaps you would
like to take a hand in adding to this scenario, or to construct an absurd
hypothesis of your own.
 >