The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis]

[Glen Gordon]

RAY HENDON:
  [...] in this theoretical realm I see what I believe to be a propery
  analogous situation from medical research: their use of a
  mathematical probability modeling technique to predict the
  spread of infectious disease among a community.

I'm not sure if that is a proper analogy. Consider this. A virus is
fully definable, that is, by its genetic code. We can define and
distinguish different strains unambiguously this way. There might be a
cytosine instead of a guanine down the RNA sequence that shows a
discrete difference between two strains of virus.

In order to make this analogy between "spread of infectious disease"
and "spread of language" stick, wouldn't you need to be able to just
as accurately define and distinguish between different languages and
dialects? Afterall, language is the subject of your model and without
it properly being explained and understood, the results would be
meaningless.

However what defines a particular language as unambiguously unique
from another? How do we define "English"? There are many dialects of
English. Do we consider all the English dialects as part of a single
language or consider them seperate? How many dialects should there be
of English? At what point do the differences between one speech form
and another become insignificant or significant in these definitions?
Should Proto-Indo-European, Germanic or the descendant of English
500 years from now be considered "English"? What number of people need
to speak a particular speech form before it is considered a seperate
and statistically significant speech form. Is Eyak a real language?
What about artificial languages like Esparanto (some million or so
strong so I hear) or Klingon (you know how prevalent Trekkies are)?
Etc....

RAY HENDON:
  What I failed to emphasize in my earlier suggestion is each variable
  is itself a function, dependent upon many things.  But, all the
  miriad other things that influence what langage a given population
  is likely to speak are accounted for with the "exposure" and
  "susceptibility" variables.

Well, after "language" is defined, you need to contrive a way of
measuring "exposure" and "susceptibility". First off, what constitutes
"exposure"? The measurement of such a thing is further complicated by
recent technological advances in mass communications (TV, radio,
internet, etc) that redefine "exposure" as a potentially ubiquitous
thing that no longer has to arise from side-by-side contact of two
cultures. Measuring the exposure rate of a language cannot be
accurately done by simply counting how many people of one language
group physically co-exist with another group. Lurking social variables
(part of your "suspectibility" variable) always have something to do
with this equation but how does one discover them and again how does
one define these variables, especially when dealing with the remote
past?

One would think that by now, English strongly affects all languages
more or less equally and its "exposure" rate is thus the same but
Finnish is a type of language that resists foreign words by
creating it's own like <puhelin> for "telephone". Same for Mandarin
<tie-lu> "railroad", <dianshi> "television". Or as a friend of
mine enjoyed sharing, his example of the term "screaming broom" for
the modern word "vaccuum" in his language, Low German. Yet, Japanese
has been hard hit by English with items like <compyuutaa> "computer",
<makudonarudo> "McDonald's"  and during that highly publicized
vomiting incident by President Bush, my personal favourite <bushu o
suru> "to do a Bush".

And what happens when one language is considered "lower-class" than
another, like Yiddish or American Indian languages have been in this
century. How could we possibly predict that these kinds of social
circumstances would have occured or when and how they will occur in
the future?

RAY HENDON:
  Just as there are many reasons why some people are vulnerable to
  influenza, and there are many reasons why a person is exposed to the
  virus, in the end it doesn't matter.  They have either been exposed
  to it or not, and if there is no exposure there will be no
  influenza. If they are exposed, they are either susceptible to the
  infection or they are not susceptible to the infection. The why's
  and wherefore's are a different matter.

This is what makes the spread of infectious disease different from
language. The medical community is blessed with discrete variables to
measure. Linguists aren't so lucky. Language is a human and social
process - the why's and wherefore's _do_ matter very much.
Unfortunately, they can't be reasonably measured just as "love" and
"hate" can't be measured. These are human variables and we can be very
unpredictable little monkies.

Perhaps a psychological model, although I'm still skeptical, would be
better suited to this task.

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Glen Gordon
glengordon01 at hotmail.com
Kisses and Hugs
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