Cladistic language concepts

[Ghiselin, Michael]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
          Dear bwald
               (I'm sorry I don't know your name, only your address!)
               Before reading your message I sent a long one to Steven
          Schaufele about the relationship in question.  It may have
          helped.  And if linguists are interested in that sort of
          issue I am very pleased to be able to discuss such matters
          with them.
               You are quite right about the biologists' problem with
          "life" and the linguists' problem with "language."  These
          entities in the broadest sense originated once and only once
          in the history of the world.  All organisms and lineages
          thereof with which we are familiar have a common ancestor,
          and the capacity for language is the property of a single
          species.  Life in that sense and language in that sense are
          individuals.  A lot of their properties must be due to
          historical accident, or contingency.  If we were able to
          study similar entities that have evolved on different
          planets, we might be able to come up with a definition of
          some class of life-like entities.  Likewise with
          language-like entities that have no common ancestry.  In
          other words, defining life or language in that sense is
          hindered by our familiarity with a class that has but a
          single instance.
               It is not quite that bad, because when we study
          entities her on earth we find lots of species, and
          species-like things, which allow us to come up with a
          generalization that amounts to a definition of classes of
          such things.  So we can define the class of species, and the
          class of languages, even though Homo sapiens and French have
          no definitions strictly speaking.  And we can define a class
          that includes both the species and the language.  All
          species and all languages are lineages etc.
               I hope this metaphysics is not too tedious, but it
          shows I think the importance of studying such parallels in
          clarifying our thinking about such matters.
          Best,
          Mike Ghiselin