Q: Sarich and historical linguistics

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In a few weeks, I'm giving a talk on the perception of language
and linguistics among our academic colleagues in other disciplines,
such as psychology, anthropology, archaeology, primatology and
genetics.  Most of this talk will deal with non-historical
matters, but I want also to talk about the seemingly immense
influence of the long-rangers among our colleagues, who often
appear to believe that the long-rangers speak for historical
linguistics.  See, for example, the writings of the geneticist
Robert Sokal, of the palaeoanthropologist Richard Klein, and of
the primatologist Robin Dunbar.

But I've become particularly interested in the writings of the
eminent molecular anthropologist Vincent Sarich, one of the
founders of the out-of-Africa hypothesis of human origins.
Unlike most other non-linguists, Sarich has stepped into
historical linguistics in a big way -- and he doesn't like us
historical linguists very much.  In a 1994 article, he
warmly defends the long-rangers, and he hurls abuse at those
linguists who have criticized their work, accusing the critics
of being anti-scientific and of acting from the basest motives:

Vincent M. Sarich (1994), 'Occam's razor and historical linguistics',
in M. Y. Chen and O. J. L. Tzeng (eds), In Honor of William S.-Y.
Wang, Pyramid Press, pp. 409-430.

But I'm more interested right now in another of Sarich's articles,
published on the Web in 1994 and apparently not published elsewhere.
This article also carries a good deal of abuse directed at the critics
of Greenberg and Ruhlen:

        http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jel/sarich.html

Here is the passage I'm interested in:

"A similar scenario would also appear to apply in the linguistic
realm, but to see it we first need to challenge the extremely
conservative current consensus among most linguists that relationships
among languages that diverged more than perhaps 7,000-8,000 years ago
are, at present, unknowable.  A simple exercise suffices here to show
that this consensus is unreasonably pessimistic.  One simply sits down
with, for example, Buck's A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the
Principal Indo-European Languages, a basic word list, and some
independent knowledge of two or more languages representing distinct
Indo-European groups.  I used English and Croatian, representing,
respectively, its Germanic and Slavic branches.  If one then asks what
proportion of the words in modern Croatian appear, simply by inspection
(but allowing for some phonetic and semantic drift), to be cognate with
the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) form (or, where that is
unavailable, the English word), one gets a minimum figure of about 60%.
For example, snow, snjeg, *sneigwh; many, mnogo, *monogho; blood, krv,
*kru; tree/wood, drvo, *dru; earth, zemlja, *ghem.  Similar results were
obtained using native speakers of Spanish and Bengali, and for Armenian
and Albanian using Decsy's The Indo-European Protolanguage: a
Computational Reconstruction.  Thus 60% survival seems to be a
reasonably representative figure for the survival of PIE roots with
meanings in extant Indo-European languages.

"Now obviously some number of these matches will be coincidental (though
that number will likely be small, as illustrated by the fact that
Chinese, by the same test, will show less than 10% apparent 'cognacy'
with PIE, English, or Croatian -- I am indebted to Dr W S-Y Wang for
this comparison), but, by the same token, some will be missed when the
degree of phonetic or semantic change makes cognacy less than obvious.
For example -- foot, noga, *ped -- where one might miss the English
correspondence because of the phonetic changes, and would (and, perhaps,
should) certainly miss the Croatian unless one remembered that 'pod' in
Croatian means 'under', and that an association between 'under' and
'foot' is perfectly reasonable.  This would imply a cognacy loss of less
than 10% per millennium along a lineage, implying that even at a time
depth of 12,000-14,000 years; that is, twice the probable time which
separates modern Croatian from its Proto-Indo-European ancestor, one
might retain 30% or so phonetic/semantic cognacy.  Thus one could
recognize relationships among languages whose common ancestor lay that
far in the past provided that one looked at a sufficient number of them,
and avoided simple binary comparisons.  That is, if each of two
descendant languages retains 30% cognacy with the ancestral language,
they will, on average, share only 9% [(0.3)2] with one another -- and
this gets into the chance area of similarity.  On the other hand, if you
look at 10 such languages, three, on the average, will retain a
particular cognate -- greatly increasing your chances of recognizing
relationships among them, and of reconstructing the ancestral form.
This is the procedure and argument of Greenberg [(1987); see also
discussion in Ruhlen (1987)], and, whatever the questions that might be
raised about certain details, there can be no doubt the current general
consensus among most linguists that relationships among languages older
than about 7,000 years are, at present, unknowable, is unrealistically
and unreasonably pessimistic and conservative."  [END QUOTE]

Now, many of these general issues have been much discussed elsewhere,
and I have my own views, which I will reserve for the time being.
But I am interested in hearing comments from colleagues on any part of
this passage, though most particularly on the following points:

        *the use to which Sarich puts Buck's dictionary;

        *the claim that any given living IE language retains about 60%
        of the PIE lexicon in easily recognizable form;

        *the claim that genuine cognates among living IE languages are
        overwhelmingly obvious and trivial to identify by inspection alone;

        *the claim that this result automatically generalizes to other
        families, even to families which are as yet unrecognized.

Please reply directly to me, since I have no wish to flood this list
with discussions of long-ranger work.  I'll post a summary when I can.


Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)