Age of various language families

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Mikael Parkvall wrote:

> As a result of reading some stuff by Bob "punctuated equilibrium" Dixon
> recently, I have been thinking about the relation between the age of a
> family and the number of languages it has split up into. Is there such a
> correlation in the first place, and if so, what does it look like?

Possibly an interesting question, but I see two very serious empirical
problems in trying to investigate it.  First, your sources will never
be truly comparable in terms of the criteria used to count languages.
For example, on your list you have Algonquian and Uralic each comprised
of 38 languages.  But counts like that are notoriously arbitrary--
Algonquianists, for example, count Fox and Kickapoo as two languages,
but the differences between them are of an order which in Europe, for
example, would probably only be considered as defining dialects of one
language.
     Second, and even more problematic (since it's not soluble even
in principle) is the fact that, for many families, it is very likely--
indeed, in many cases virtually certain--that the number of languages
used to be considerably greater.  Again, Fennic/Fenno-Ugric/Uralic serve
to illustrate:  there is (so I understand) onomastic and other evidence
that most of northern Russia was originally F-U or Uralic speaking.  The
obvious inference is that some indeterminate, and forever undeterminable,
number of F-U or Uralic languages disappeared in the face of Russian
expansion.  Thus the number of attested Fenno-Ugric languages cannot be
taken as giving any kind of reliable indication of the historical divergence
of the family.  The same thing is true in many parts of the world--in
North America, for instance, it is likely that the plagues which followed
early European contact effectively wiped out many tribes, or reduced
their populations so severely that the survivors joined another group.
Thus undoubtedly resulted in the extinction of some languages, but there
is no way of ever knowing, or even intelligently guessing, how many or
what their genetic affiliation might have been.

Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
1290 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1290, USA

delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html