Doing historical linguistics

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
"H.M.Hubey" <hubeyh at montclair.edu> wrote:
 
>It should be obvious to everyone by now that Starostin is way ahead of
>the game than the 99% of the subscribers. It should be clear by now
>that if he has already built up a database of lexicons of various
>languages with their meanings, writeable in ASCII, Unicode etc, he has
>singlehandedly done what should have been done by the linguistics community.
 
I certainly agree that Starostin's databases are a great resource.
But that is not all.
 
>But that is not all.
>
>If there are people who are writing programs to paint (yes, produce
>art), and compose music, it takes no genius to see that even if Starostin
>only wrote (or got a student to write) a brute-force, dumb program on a
>commodity grade PC, he can uncover relationships that many humans cannot do,
>even if they collaborate.  The reason for this will take too long to explain.
 
Well, why don't you write (or get a student to write) a brute-force
program to explain it?
 
We *should* use information technology to assist research in
historical linguistics.  If only to nip in the bud attempts to relate
Bq. <agor> "dry" with something in Caucasian ("Warning 23: oldest
attested semantics: "barren, sterile"") or Bq. <emakume> with words
for "woman" sounding like /kwVn-/ ~ /kwVm-/ or Sum. <emesal> with
words for "woman" sounding like /em(e)/ ("Error 09: operation not
commutative").
 
Certainly there are people using programs to paint and make music.
But the value of the result depends entirely on the human input
parameters, and on human selection/rejection/editing of the output.
Even computer art is a craft.  It takes a specialist (or a gifted
person) to get interesting results.
 
A program (brute-force or otherwise) to assist in reconstruction of
proto-languages can be made, but surely to be useful it should
incorporate existing knowledge about linguistics in its programming
or configuration parameters (likely phonological developments and
semantic shifts) and it should be fed reliable and complete data,
including morphological information, otherwise it's GIGO.
 
It is an illusion to think that we can throw away two centuries of
comparative linguistic practice, and let "logic, probability theory
and fuzzy set theory" do all the work.  Mathematicians aren't going
to be replaced by theorem proving automata any time soon, and neither
are historical linguists scheduled to be replaced with
"proto-language construction programs".
 
 
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam