phonetic resemblances

[Sally Thomason]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------

   Larry Trask and Rich Alderson and a few others are doing a
great job of explaining why phonetic resemblances are not considered
by historical linguists to be either necessary or sufficient to
establish genetic relationships, but so far not much emphasis has
been placed on the skewing that can result from language contacts
of various kinds.  It's not just the problem of ordinary borrowing
-- which, in some contact situations, can penetrate into the
basic vocabulary: ca. 7% in a Swadesh list for English, for instance,
including words like "animal", which is as close to its French (or
Latin) source as in Hubey's ironic same-language examples.  In addition,
though, you get the very strong phonetic resemblances in mixed
languages, which for most historical linguists (I think) don't meet
the standard criteria for genetic relatedness.  It's only where
both lexicon and grammar show systematic correspondences throughout
that the languages under comparison fit the model of descent with
modification from a single parent language.

   Compare English with Tok Pisin, for instance, and you'll see
very strong phonetic resemblances throughout the vocabularies, but
you'll find extremely unlike grammatical structures.  Or compare
Michif with Cree and/or French, where almost all the verbs will
match Cree precisely and almost all the nouns will be identical to
French; or the Media Lengua, where the entire vocabulary is Spanish
but the grammar is Quechua; or Mednyj Aleut, in which most of the
vocabulary is Aleut but the entire finite verb morphology is Russian;
etc.  Only a systematic comparison of vocabulary *and grammar* will
reveal the mismatches in most of these cases -- Michif is the only
exception, and there even the most fervent believer in the
resemblance-is-all-you-need school will realize that to classify it
genetically you'd have to toss a coin to decide whether nouns or verbs
win.

   -- Sally Thomason
      sally at thomason.org


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