Age of various language families

[Mikael Parkvall]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Jan Terje Faarlund wrote:

>Finally a sensible response to an absurd question. The idea that there
>should be a correlation between age and split in language families
>presupposes that languages float around by themselves as independent
>entities [...] Why do linguists always have to be reminded of somehting which
>all non-linguists know intuitively

Am I alone in finding "all non-linguists know this intuitively" less than 
satisfactory as a scholarly argument? Non-linguists "know" a lot of things 
about language that linguists have found to be false, just like 
non-astronomers once "knew" that the sun revolved around the earth.

Now, consider the following:

* 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.


/MP

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Mikael Parkvall
Institutionen för lingvistik
Stockholms Universitet
SE-10691 STOCKHOLM
(rum 276)
+46 (0)8 16 14 41, +46 (0)8 656 68 24 (hem)
Fax: +46 (0)8 15 53 89
parkvall at ling.su.se