Age of various language families

[Jan Terje Faarlund]

At 01:53 01.10.2002 +0200, Mikael Parkvall wrote:

>* Provided that we belive that languages do split, which time span is most
>likely to produce a split -- five minutes or two millennia?
>
>* And once a split has occurred, what is most likely, that one single
>isolate becomes extinct, or that all the dozens of daughters of a
>proliferous mother dies out?
>
>I am not laying claim on any Absolute Truth, but put together, I think the
>two rethorical questions above constitute -- an argument. And therefore,
>until somebody has come up with a better argument, it makes sense to me to
>assume that there is a correlation (albeit probably a weak one) between
>age and the number of surviving daughters.
>

Of course there is a statistical correlation between age and the number of
surviving daughters. Such a correlation would be interesting to linguists
only to the extent that there is also proportionate correlation, so that we
could predict  the number of daughter languages from the time depth - or
vice versa, with a reasonable degree of likelihood. My claim is that that
would be possible only of languages were independent of the material
condtions of their speakers. Since we cannot predict the frequency of
genocides, migrations, or meteors, we cannot predict the proportionate
correlaiton between splits and age. All we can say is what Mikael says
himself: "Two millennia is more likely to produce a split than five
minutes". I fail to see at what level that is an interesting observation.

Jan Terje


Professor Jan Terje Faarlund
Universitetet i Oslo
Institutt for nordistikk og litteraturvitskap
Postboks 1013 Blindern
N-0315 Oslo
Norway

Phone   +47 22 85 69 49 (office)
         +47 22 12 39 66 (home)
Fax     +47 22 85 71 00
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