Recoverability

[Sean Crist]

On Tue, 13 Jul 1999, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote:

> But that is not what you do in cases where only modern languages are
> available: You do not pick two and ignore the rest, you take all there is.
> In the case of IE, you would take _all_ modern Germanic languages, if need
> be with their dialects; you take all Slavic languages, you don't forget
> about Lithuanian and Latvian or Modern Greek which gives quite a lot;

[...]

> This is a LOT - and
> NOBODY could even thgen be in doubt that this is indeed a family of
> related languages sprung from a common source. True, we would still be in
> doubt or indeed ignorant about many a finer point which is only added by
> languages of old texts - and of course even they do not contain
> everything, so doubt will remain - but the general utline and subgrouping
> of the family would stand firm even on the sole basis of modern languages.

As far as this goes, it is quite right.  However, I don't think the point
was that we ought to actually try to attempt to reconstruct PIE on the
basis of only modern English and Albanian, or otherwise arbitrarily limit
our selection of data.

I think the point was something more like this.  Suppose for the sake of
argument that there is in fact a genetic relationship between
Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic (to take one possible example). Even
if this were true, and given the evidence which we actually do have at
hand, would we expect to be able to _show_ that there is such a relation?

Here, the problem _is_ like trying to reconstruct PIE on the basis of only
modern English and Albanian.  Even tho external evidence might lead us to
guess that there could be a relation between PIE and PU, the cognations
are so obscured by millenia of sound changes, loss of old lexical items,
the noise of new lexical items, etc., that it might well be impossible to
show a genetic relationship on the basis of the available information.

Suppose, for example, that PIE *d corresponds to PU *z (I don't know that
there is a *z in PU; I'm making this up).  Even if there were originally
dozens of words showing this correspondence, it might well be that case
that only one such pair exists between the small subsets of the original
lexicons of PIE and PU which we can reconstruct.  Given the fundamental
assumptions of the Comparative Method, you _can't_ show that the two words
are cognate when you've only got one example of the correspondence.

You need multiple examples of sound correspondences to be able to conduct
the Comparative Method at all; and when the the cognates become as
rarefied as they are this time-depth, the likelihood of having access to
an adequate number of examples to work out the relevant sound changes
becomes proportionately smaller, eventually reaching what for practical
purposes is an impossibility.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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