"Related" debate unproductive?

[ECOLING at aol.com]

I want to be perfectly clear at the outset that "the point"
of a discussion may be different for different participants,
what I am trying to focus on here is what points have in
fact been brought up, as distinct from the straw-man element
of many messages, and which points, if we discuss them,
are likely or not likely to be productive.

The debate, now ongoing for months, about the term
"related", seems to me to have been singularly unproductive.
I agree with most of the posting by Bob Whiting today,
but feel that it is not to the point, at least not to the important
points where we might make progress (and I am not particularly
singling out this posting).  To too great an extent,
it is a battle about words, not about content at all.
And it is getting *v e r y* boring.

There are probably a number of quite sane people among us

who believe that the traditional meaning of (genetically) related is useful,
(so all discussion of abolishing the use of the term "related"
in that sense is not to *our* point at least, it seems only a red herring),

and who are *not* discussing creoles or any other special cases
of similar kinds (so discussion of creoles is not to *our* point at least,
and contributes nothing new to the discussion we thought was
ongoing),

and who do not need a long textbook stating the obvious.
Many of us I think are concerned with much more subtle
and sophisticated problems.

By considering primarily extreme cases where we probably all
agree, we make no progress towards handing the difficult ones.

**

I would note first that it is probably impossible in practice to
avoid a mixture of ordinary language with technical usage.
When Whiting says today in response to someone's

>>Genetically (in your terms), English is equally related to both
>>French and Italian.

as follows:

>They're not my terms; I didn't invent them -- they are standard
>in historical linguistics textbooks.  But I agree with the
>premise -- except that I wouldn't say "equally related"; I would
>say "related at the same level."

I of course agree.
Perhaps our common reluctance to use the phrase
"equally related" here is that it has a portion of its ordinary-language
meaning, and we know clearly English *is* especially closely related
to French, as *all* linguists recognize.
(English loans from
Hindi or Chinese or Afrikaans or whatever, are also not really
to the point, I think, because such extreme cases were not mentioned
by those wishing to question an overly narrow sense of "relationship".
So bringing *them* up is at least not to the point of what I
believe many of us are concerned with, such would also be red herrings.)

**

It is perhaps my personal interest and bias,
but the problem that remains as a subtle and sophisticated one,
and which has clearly *not* been resolved by previous scholarship,
is the handling of trees vs. dialect areas, and the implications of
the following paragraph, which I did not write,
and which was referred to by Whiting today:

>(b) The idea that there must be a single language progenitor of
>daughter languages is widely disputed. Some people accept the
>idea that a collection of interrelated languages might never have
>had a single ancestor, but as far back as you care to go were
>simply a collection of inter-related languages.  The
>language/dialect issue comes up here.  We talk of IE "dialects"
>within PIE, but this is simply terminology.  The point is that
>there is no need whatever for there to have been a single unified
>PIE language.

The example Whiting mentions of the Altaic "family"
(or perhaps not a family, if long contact and mutual influences
and massive borrowings were involved)
is closer to a propos to the view expressed
by the author of the above paragraph, it seems to me.
The possibility that PIE was some close complex of languages
which exchanged even morphology, but which retained traces
of various distinct substrates or whatever one wishes to discuss,
is a real possibility.  Not necessarily to a great degree,
not necessarily as much as Altaic, but to some degree,
it is quite possible and an entirely reasonable hypothesis
consistent with *traditional* views of historical linguistics.
Merely one that is mostly not discussed, rightly or wrongly.

This possibility, which may exist for many proto-languages,
*does* have practical, as opposed to purely terminological,
implications.  To recognize that this is a possible situation
for a proto-language,
we must handle vocabulary and morphological
distributions across *portions* of the dialect network of any
proto-language in *at least* the frameworks of the following

1) simple family tree, innovations on one branch,
     replacement on one branch, etc. branch then dividing.
2) wave spread of items across a part of a dialect network,
    which may have no relation to the family-tree structure
3) persistence as areal dialect-net isoglosses of what were
     substrate inheritances in only part of the territory of
     an eventual proto-language, the substrate inheritances
     in another part of that territory being from a different
     language or languages.  When substrates are strong,
     and morphology can spread, the difference between
     the various kinds of "inheritance" can become quite blurred.
4)  proto-languages need not (not even by the narrow
     definition of "genetically related") be completely uniform,
     they need not be indivisible points with no internal dimensions
     Living languages do not fit such a simple model,
     so what business do we have insisting that dead languages did?
     That would make them theoretical constructs, useful primarily
     for making it easier for us to think about them,
     so artificially simplified.
     In limiting special cases, sure, when a single family or village
     migrated, and became the nucleus of a new language family.
     But those are limiting special cases, they do not define a narrow
     total range of possibilities which historical and comparative
     linguistics should restrict itself intellectually to being able
     to deal with.
5)  Any proto-language need not be pure, it may share substrate
     inheritances from quite a number of substrates,
     substrates which either are known as separate language
     families, or which have become extinct as independent
     languages, or in an intermediate situation, which may appear
     as substrates also for some other language or language family.
     It may be possible to reconstruct part of the vocabulary even
     of a language or family which survives *only* as substrates
     to two or more other languages or language families,
     if we can determine that the substrates within each of those
     latter are indeed substrates, rather than being later innovations in
     some area which crosses language boundaries,
     or later loans from part of the area of one language or family
     to part of the area of another language or family.

So let us sharpen our existing tools, develop new tools,
avoid oversimplifications, *and* recognize the inherited
wisdom of comparative and historical-reconstructive linguistics.
There is absolutely no reason we should need to choose
between these as if they were mutually exclusive alternatives.

And let us treat the contributions of others by always trying
to find the *most* reasonable view of them, or the part of them
which we believe we can make the most productive contributions to,
rather than spending most of our words trying to defeat them.

There is absolutely no reason to throw out *any* of the tools
of comparative-historical linguistics.  There *is* reason to
sharpen those tools and to add more tools and to add
less simplistic formats for recording results of using those tools.

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics