Age of various language families

[vovin at hawaii.edu]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I couldn't agree more with Jens Rasmussen, Scott DeLancey, and others
who voiced their opposition to the connection between the number of
primary branches in a family and its age. First of all, I am sorry to
say, I believe that Johanna Nichols calculations of a number of primary
branches in many cases are either fundamentally flawed, or are based on
some outdated material. Thus, e.g., Japanese (or rather Japonic as we
call it nowadays), certainly is not just one primary branch, but two,
with quite obvious split between Japanese proper and Ryukyuan. Having
just two primary branches, this family is *definitely* much older than
Slavic that has three. Austronesian does not have just 4 branches, as
JN asserts, there are 9 *primary* branches on Taiwan alone as cogently
demonstrated by Blust 1997, + the Malayo-Polynesian branch, altogether
totaling 10 primary branches.
Some more examples, that I believe, demonstrate quite well that a
correlation between the age of families and the number of their primary
branches is a fallacy:
1) both Turkic and Uralic have two primary branches, but it is quite
clear that the latter is much more older than the former;
2) modern Korean has three primary branches (Ceycwu, North Hamkyeng,
and the rest, including modern Seoul Korean), but the split between
these three *postdates* the texts written in Old Korean in 6-8th c.
C.E., probably going back to no earlier than 13th c. C.E.:
interestingly enough Korean shows more primary splits than neighbouring
Japanese, although it is apparently much more compact and younger
family;
3) I really loved example with Greek cited by other colleagues, but
here is one more with a language which has the written history of
approximately the same length as Greek, and which, as I believe, offers
no less important evidence against the above-mentioned "correlation":
Chinese. There are probably just two primary branches among modern
Chinese languages: Min and the rest (although potentially this is not
the only solution). The ultimate fun of it is, however, that no matter
how many splits we count among the modern Chinese languages, they are
all not older than the the 3rd c. C.E., that is almost 15 hundred years
after the first Chinese text was scratched on a turtle-shell and one
thousand years after we can read Chinese texts *phonetically* with a
good degree of accuracy.

Best wishes to all,

=========================
Alexander Vovin
Associate Professor
East Asian Languages & Literatures
University of Hawaii at Manoa
vovin at hawaii.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen <jer at cphling.dk>
Date: Thursday, October 3, 2002 1:17 pm
Subject: Re: Age of various language families

> ----------------------------Original message------------------------
> ----
> While agreeing with the wise points you are making, Tore, I still
> thinkthis whole discussion is severely flawed. It is presumed that
> languagesdiverge and become more numerous over time. They do
> diverge, but I would
> rather tend to believe that their number keeps relatively constant
> (butperhaps 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
> dialectalvariety 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
> declaresome 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
> underlyingIndo-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
> >
>