Tailing off with depth

[Larry Trask]

On Wed, 8 Sep 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

> And just incidentally, I note once again that
> Multilateral Comparison has some strengths in this regard
> which are still not correctly represented or even understood.
> If we take Nostratic as the result not of study of a fixed set
> of language families chosen A Priori, but rather as a set of
> language families selected by Multilateral Comparison
> from among the language families of the world,
> then the hypothesis of Nostratic is merely that these language
> families appear (by their data, not their geography)
> to be likely to be more closely related to each other
> than to other language families outside that set.
> And the geography would then be a confirmation,
> not a fact included in the process of selecting the set
> of language families.

But the proponents of Nostratic -- Illich-Svitych, Dolgopolsky, and
others -- have *not* worked with MC.  Whatever one may think of
Nostratic, it cannot be adduced as an example of the application of MC.

> Neither McLaughlin nor Trask have really taken up
> my challenges on getting EMPIRICAL data on the rate of
> tailing off of information usable for reconstruction.

That's because this problem is very hard, perhaps even intractable.
The term `rate' implies a time element, yet comparative reconstruction
has no time element within it.

> In the case of Albanian, Trask refers to what may be
> an excess of loanword etc. influences from neighbors,
> so that it took linguists using the Comparative Method
> enormous effort to conclude that there was a stratum
> of vocabulary inherited from PIE via a specific set
> of sound changes peculiar to Albanian,
> rather than borrowed from IE language neighbors.
> [I believe that is what Trask was saying.]

Yes; that is right.

> I do not think I have ever seen a discussion of how
> Multilateral Comparison might handle situations of
> massive loanwords, or might be enhanced to handle
> such situations better, short of the full effort of the
> Comparative Method referred to above.

That's because there isn't one.  The proponents of MC, implicitly or
explicitly, dismiss the problem of loan words as inconsequential.
Read pp. 12-14 of Ruhlen's 1994 Wiley book, in which he dismisses
borrowing as a trivial issue.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk