Doing historical linguistics

[H.M.Hubey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
 
> Well, why don't you write (or get a student to write) a brute-force
> program to explain it?
 
Students are not what they used to be :-)
 
> 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").
 
As they say "it all comes out in the wash". That is why averages are
used in statistics. The fact is that if there are lots of errors in
the present method, there's no way to find out, exactly as in the
case of using stats. For example, without Sumerian, no book like
Tuna's would have been possible. That means that many Turkic words
could have always been attributed to Tocharian, Iranian etc where now
one may be able to point to roots earlier than IE as in Hittie etc.
 
That means the comparative method also suffers from the same problems
as any stat method, but that cannot be discovered. It may be that
looking at thousands of languages employing brute-force methods might
create results which themselves could be useful for standard practice.
But at the same time clear models are needed. After all, what we want
in the final analysis is if there exists any pattern that is not likely
due to chance.
 
> 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.
 
There's no doubt that humans created computers and wrote the programs.
There's also no doubt that computers can now do things that great
mathematicians used to do. So there should also be no doubt that they
can do what linguists do.
 
 
> 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.
 
Existing knowledge, yes, existing dogma no. There needs to be clear
models not lumping things constantly ignoring possible errors. If
nothing else familiarity with some aspects of probability theory
will restrain linguists from making the kinds of blanket/certain
statements which no respectable scientist would ever make. In this
case I am referring particularly to kinds of statements which Larry
Trask often makes, probably thinking that he is discussing chemistry
probably via analogy.
 
> 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".
 
Mathematicians might be replaced by computers. About a year ago a
program which was more or less brute-force proved a theorem and when
people (mathematicians) examined the theorem, they thought it was rather
ingenious.
 
Let us not forget about Big Blue.
 
I will post the music article separately.
 
The reason all this happens is because people make intuition errors.
Intuition (creativity, etc) is not all what it is cracked up to be,
and it is mostly wrong to rely on it.
 
>
> =======================
> Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
> mcv at wxs.nl
> Amsterdam
 
--
Best Regards,
Mark
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