Age of various language families

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
While agreeing with the wise points you are making, Tore, I still think
this whole discussion is severely flawed. It is presumed that languages
diverge and become more numerous over time. They do diverge, but I would
rather tend to believe that their number keeps relatively constant (but
perhaps not now, with mass communication and cultural imperialism). What
is being counted is protolanguages and their descendants - and, oh yes,
descendants outnumber their protos. But the protos had dialects that did
not have such a fate that we have occasion to call them the protos of
anything, since they are not directly continued in anything we know. Still
they must have been there and so should be included in the assessment of
the number of languages. If we simply blindly follow the lead we may end
in the silliest of absurdities: No one, marvelling at the great dialectal
variety of Frisian versus the near-absence of dialects of Greek, would
infer that the Frisian dialects split from each other before the time of
Linear B, although that is what the principle should make us conclude. I
am sure you would get cornered at more than one point and have to declare
some IE languages older than PIE. I may in fact apply to Indo-Iranian: It
is my rough impression that the number of Indic, Dardic and Iranian
languages is today greater than that of the Indo-European languages of the
other branches combined. That would mean that the protolanguage underlying
Indo-Iranian is older than the protolanguage underlying the rest; that of
the rest is PIE; so PII is older than PIE. That will be the point where I
stop bothering about the exercise.

Jens

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Tore Janson wrote:

> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Mikael Parkvall and Joanna Nichols both think that it would be interesting
> to get an idea about the average rate of language splits within a
> genetically defined family over a given time period. Several others have
> pointed to the formidable problems of method and definition involved. For my
> part, I also doubt that there is any way to find a reasonably reliable
> procedure to find such a rate, or that the value of this average rate would
> give us any meaningful information. In many ways the problem is similar to
> the notorious one of finding the (average) rate for language change. We all
> know what happened to the assumption by Swadesh that the rate is constant.
> But I want to draw attention to another aspect of the question.  Parkvall
> and Nichols look at the speech communities at a given time (now, in
> practice) and try to count how the languages relate to attested or assumed
> proto-languages. They then count the average number of languages coming from
> each proto-language. Since all existing languages are assumed (with good
> reason) to come from some proto-language, the average, with this method,
> cannot go below 1, as Nichols sees. Several of the objections raised have to
> do with the fact that languages that have disappeared completely, such as
> Etruscan, are not accounted for at all. And that has to be done, at least if
> one would like to get any kind of answer to Parkvall's question why there
> are not "gazillions" of languages by now.
> Therefore it would be better to count the number of languages at some time
> in history, and the average number of  "daughters" to these at a later time.
> In practice, we cannot do that, but suppose for a moment that we could, and
> we will see something interesting.
> Let us assume that at time A, there were three languages, called 1, 2, 3. At
> a later time B, there may be for example the three languages 1a, 1b, and 1c,
> meaning that language 1 has split into three, and 2 and 3 have disappeared.
> There may also be the three languages 1a, 2a, and 3a, meaning that each
> original language has exactly one daughter. If one counts from time B, as
> Parkvall and Nichols, the average number of daughters is 3 in the first
> case, and 1 in the second. But if one counts from time A, the average number
> of daughters is 1 in both cases.
> A moment of thought is enough to see that the later result will be true
> regardless of the number of splits, as long as the number of languages is
> the same at time A and time B. If there are 5000 languages at time A and at
> time B, the average language at time A will have exactly 1 daughter at time
> B. The splits that occur will be exactly balanced by the languages that
> disappear.
> On the other hand, if the number of languages rises from time A to time B,
> the average number of daughters will rise too. (All this is true under a
> large number of assumptions implicitly made by Parkvall and Nichols, among
> others that languages are well-defined entities, that there are language
> splits but not language amalgamations or languages without "mothers", and
> that each language is spoken by a well-defined speech community of its own.)
> If there are 200 languages at time A and 1000 languages at time B, the
> average number of daughters will be 5. That is, the average number of
> daughters is actually completely determined by the raise or fall in the
> number of languages.
> Now, a return to reality. The number of languages in the world at any given
> time is dependent on the total number of people on earth and the average
> number of people in each speech community with a language of its own. We
> know, or can guess, something about this. An account may be found in a
> recent book of mine: T. Janson (2002) Speak: A short history of languages.
> See also, for example, D. Nettle (1999) Linguistic Diversity.
> Very shortly, it is probable that for most of human history, up to around
> 10,000 years ago, the total population was very small, but speech
> communities were also very small (perhaps a couple of thousand persons), so
> that there may have been as many languages around as there are now for a
> very long time. In such a situation, there are no more splits than
> disappearances. In the last few thousand years, populations have raised
> dramatically, but the size of speech communities seems to have risen even
> faster. Thus, the total number of languages has probably gone down for quite
> some time, and is certainly going down right now. As for splits, the number
> has probably been high in some areas, and has been balanced by the fact that
> many languages have disappeared.
>  I think this example shows that it is important for historical linguists to
> remember that languages are actually spoken by people, and that linguistic
> changes do not happen within a theory or a model but have to do directly
> with what happens to the language users.
>
> Tore Janson
>