PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language)

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Lloyd and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: <ECOLING at aol.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 1999 10:51 AM

> Patrick Ryan wrote:

>> I simply do not understand why some find it difficult to understand that
>> reconstructing the Proto-Language is only primarily different from
>> reconstructing Indo-European in the wider selection of source languages
>> for
>> data. Of course, secondarily I have labored to reconstruct the underlying
>> monosyllables by analysis of attested compounds.

Lloyd Anderson wrote:

> I strongly support work on earlier language families not part of the
> standard doctrine today.
> Against those who say (very nearly) that everything which
> can be discovered has already been discovered.
> That is of course a charicature, but with some truth to it.
> (Or they say this while specifying "using the comparative method",
> and defining it circularly to mean only the existing tools,
> and only those ways of using those tools,
> which are well known today.)

> However, the above statement by Patrick Ryan I find highly surprising.

> Of course it is going to get RELATIVELY more difficult
> to reconstruct to greater time depths.
> The mistake of those who reject all Nostratic and similar work
> is in drawing a sharp fixed line,
> saying that short of that time depth it can be done,
> beyond that time depth it cannot be done.

> The mistake of Patrick Ryan in the quotation above is to neglect
> that it does get substantially more difficult as the time depths increase,
> or in particular language families, because of the specific nature
> of the sound-changes and grammatical changes which occurred,
> or etc.

Pat responds:

First, let me say that I agree substantially with everything you have
written in this posting. But I really think the "difficult"  part is
correctly factoring in what may be sound-symbolic influences.

Lloyd Anderson continued:

> There is no sharp break.
> There is a gradually increasing difficulty with time depth and
>     with depth of changes (the two correlated but not the same concept).
> There is ample room for expanding the tools used,
> and for empirical studies of what sorts of changes each tool is
> capable of penetrating beyond, and to what degree.

> To give merely one example, one factor, sound symbolsim:

> If there are sound-symbolic ideal forms for lexemes having
> certain meanings,
> then the more arbitrary ones (farther from those sound-symbolic
> ideal forms)
> have greater value as evidence for historical connections
> of specific languages or language families,
> simply because they are less likely to have resulted from
> later pressure towards the sound-symbolic ideal.

> This is of course a terribly difficult circularity,
> because it means that look-alikes which are more widely attested

Pat interjects:

Here I think you are dangerously introducing the mistaken terminology of the
opposing argument. I do *not* look for "look-alikes"; I only am interested
in "cognates" the phonological forms of which can be supported through
multiple comparisons. For example, one set of interesting IE and Sumerian
"cognates" shows IE *-wey- = Sumerian -g{~}-; interestingly, this
development *is* found in *some* IE languages, like nearby Armenian.

Lloyd Anderson continued:

> for a given meaning or set of related meanings
> may be EITHER relics of an earlier historical unity
> (whose changes were perhaps ALSO retarded by sound-symbolic forces),
> OR the results of pressure towards some sound-symbolic ideal forms,
> from diverse original and unrelated forms.
> Much more subtle and difficult reasoning is therefore needed to
> establish what are results of sound-symbolism and what are results
> of historical common origins.
> EVEN when we have a suprisingly widespread statistical sound-meaning
> correlation.

> The usual procedure is also circular.
> Simply taking a sample of purportedly unrelated languages
> and attempting to determine how many look-alikes word lists contain
> is a bit naive,
> because the languages may not be totally unrelated,
> because chance resemblances may be more common in certain
> meaning or sound ranges,
> because the biases of different types of sound-system structures
> are not yet well handled,
> and for many other reasons.

Pat concludes:

Lloyd, I think the real hinge of this question is how one defines "loss";
and, after calculating "losses", what kind of percentages one arrives at for
"vocabulary loss". Having worked extensively with language-family
comparisons, my statistically unsupported "guess" is that there is amazingly
little vocabulary loss if one allows reasonably semantically-shifted pairs
to be counted as "retained".

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St.
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