The Neolithic Hypothesis

[Robert Whiting]

On Wed, 7 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>In a message dated 4/6/99 11:40:17 PM, you wrote:

><<I am rather disturbed by your persistent use of "predictably"
>in all of these statements.  If there is one thing that we know
>about language change, it is that it is not predictable. >>

>This is nothing but truisms.

You do know what a truism is don't you?  Since there are
indications that you are using a different Webster's than I am,
my Webster's says that a truism is "a self-evident, obvious
truth."

>And they are contradicted by the very fact that

And in the next breath you say that "self-evident, obvious
truths" can be contradicted.

>there is a Grimm's law and there is an Indo-European language
>group and there is a way the old sound laws can "predicatably"
>tell you if one word is cognate with another even if they are
>centuries apart.  That's what predictability means.  It means you
>can look at some word on a clay tablet and make a good guess at
>whether they are Greek or not.  Because it follows from prior
>experience. That's predictability.

No, that's history.  Grimm's Law and the Indo-European language
group are reconstructions based on present information.  They
are "predictions of the past," not predictions of the future.
Now these reconstructions do have predictive power (otherwise
they wouldn't be much use).  But this power is limited to being
able to determine how well a newly discovered language (such as
Mycenaean Greek or Hittite) fits into the reconstruction and can
be considered IE.  If it fits perfectly, then the forms of the
new language were "predicted"; if it doesn't fit, then the
reconstruction needs adjustment so the forms *can* be
"predicted."  So the new language is simply more evidence to be
fed into the reconstruction (the "prediction of the past").
But there is a big difference between predicting (reconstructing)
the past and predicting the future.  Now if Grimm's Law and
the reconstruction of PIE could tell me what English or French
or Russian was going to look like 500 years from now, *that*
would be predictability.

And what follows from prior experience is not predictability, it
is complacency.  Just because an event has had a certain outcome
in n repetitions does not mean that it will have the same outcome
on the n+1th repetition.  Statistical probability is what
predicts the outcome of an event, not prior experience.

>It really doesn't take a lot of hard thought to figure out that
>languages change.  It's not a breakthrough idea.

No, as you have pointed out, it is "a self-evident, obvious
truth."

>I remember reading about an early IEist first looking at Gothic
>and saying "I thought I was reading Sanskrit."  That is the
>point.  If he said, "boy, languages do change don't they?"  That
>would have been trite.  Or considerably worse.

Well, it's a good thing he wasn't reading Armenian or your entire
perception of historical linguistics might have been different.
But again, this is just a matter of predicting the past.  The
further back you go the more closely cognate language resemble
each other (another truism).  And you are missing the complement
of the statement which is "I didn't think I was reading German or
English."  In comparing two languages that are closer to the
original source, one is more likely to be struck by the
similarities.  But in comparing the same language at widely
separated periods (e.g., Anglo-Saxon and Modern English) one is
more likely to be struck by the differences.

>It's the continuity, not the change.  That's the science of it
>and from what I've seen in the work of some people in this field,
>the art of it.   Where's the pattern, not that there's no
>pattern.

It's not the continuity or the change.  It is the relationship
between continuity and change that defines language groups,
families, languages, and dialects.  And you are right that the
pattern is overwhelmingly important.  But the pattern consists of
both continuity and change.

>If my you find my speaking of predictability "rather" disturbing,
>I can only respond that I find you reminding me that languages
>change unpredictability - well, I'll believe you if you wake up
>speaking Bantu tomorrow.  Otherwise I'll find the whole idea
>ridiculous.

No doubt you will.  I thought, however, that we were talking about
changes *in* language, not changes *of* language.  But when I
wake up tomorrow I will say one English word, "gnu" and then you
can believe me.  But if you are suggesting that the population of
England woke up one morning and all said to themselves:  "Ah, the
Great Vowel Shift is scheduled to start today -- must remember to
lengthen my short vowels in open syllables and raise my long
vowels," that is not merely ridiculous, it is sublime.

><<I hope that you are not trying to say that one can predict the
>degree to which languages will diverge based on the geographical
>distance between them.>>

>Boy wouldn't that be silly.  Where would I get a wild idea like
>that?  Isn't French just as close to Chinese as it is to Spanish?
>Isn't Polish just as close to Mayan as it is to Russian?  How
>could you possibly think I would ever think that?  Never occurred
>to me.

And isn't the French of Quebec more distant from the French of
France than Basque or Breton are?  And isn't Australian English
more distant from British English than Welsh is?  On the whole,
I think it is better to speak in truisms than in non-sequiturs.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi