What is Relatedness?

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

[I'm using asterisks instead of brackets on Mr. Crist's quotes because this
e-mailer has seemed to have gone south in honor of Y2k.  Hope it doesn't make
the reading too difficult.]

On Nov 5, 1999, I wrote:

<< If - for example - a language has innovated and borrowed so wildly that it
retains very little of the ancestor, it may be "more closely related" in some
chronological sense.  But in fact we can imagine it being far more different
from the immediate ancestor than say some conservative cousin that retained
the attributes common to the family.>>

In a message dated 1/11/00 1:52:22 AM, Sean Crist replied:

**No.  The _amount_ of innovation is not the basis on which we draw
Stammba"ume; we draw these trees on the basis of what is _shared_.**

I think if you look closely you'll see that you cannot identify "shared"
innovations if they are no longer there to identify.

Putting aside for the moment the question of how much that is lost is
recoverable, I think you'll agree that a language that has changed quickly
and radically could have lost some or all of the evidence of "sharing" that
you draw your Stammbaume with.

I am simply trying to proceed one point at a time.  The only issue is how you
know that evidence of what was shared has not disappeared.  Which is why I
wrote:
<<If some languages had those shared characteristics, but lost them before
they became documented in writing or otherwise left no evidence - it would be
taken as evidence of relative unrelatedness.  But what might actually have
occurred is
that the evidence of relatedness might have been innovated or borrowed away
in a frenzy of change.>>

Sean Crist wrote:
**The presence of loan words doesn't alter the genetic affiliation of a
language.**

Maybe not.  (I think that may be terminological again.  Since a language that
is made up entirely of loan words would have no genetic affilation except the
languages it loaned from.)

But the real question is not genetic affilation but EVIDENCE of genetic
affiliation.  In dealing with prehistoric languages, we don't have God's eye
on things.  We can only go by the evidence we have.  And a robust language
exposed to  new ideas and things may be too interested in change to retain
the very shared attributes and innovations that you might be using to show
relatedness.

If this is true, it should throw up a big caution sign in terms of measuring
relatedness in the context of varing rates of change among languages.

If I subject a group of plants to a good does of radiation and they mutate
like crazy and then compare the next generations to their unmutated
relatives, I may be hard put to call them very closely related at all.  Their
genes are markedly different.  Their phenotypes are markedly different.  If I
didn't know about the induced mutations, I would HAVE conclude that they were
not related at all.

(And in a certain respect, they are not.  And, please, there is no reason to
think the same sort of thing cannot happen to languages.)

Sean Crist wrote:
**Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor did not just "count" any old differences; what
they were specifically looking for are shared characteristics which cannot
reasonably be attributed to parallel innovation.**

Nevertheless, Ringe, et al., are still counting.  And "the shared
characteristics" may not all deserve equal weight.  See my prior post in this
thread.

Sean Crist wrote:
**No, no, no.  It's well known that things such as morphological categories
can be independently lost; this is a very common sort of parallel
innovation.  Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor were well aware of this, and dealt
with this problem by assigning a separate numeric code to each language in
the case of such loss so that such spurious groupings would not occur.**

Yes, yes, yes.  Ringe, et al., did not create a separate numeric code for
"was never there."  And in some cases, it might be argued that what is being
called "lost" in this category may "never have existed" - as the two
categories often look exactly alike -evidence is absent.  AND conversely
things that are truly "lost" - unidentifiably so - might have altered the
shared characteristic scheme showing a completely different evidence of
relatedness.

Sean Crist writes:
**A _separate_ value is assigned for each branch to mean "lost".**

Not relevant here.  "Lost" logically means that the absence has been
accounted for, the character was once shared and the characteristic does not
negate relatedness.  "Was never there" is the opposite, showing that a
characteristic may never have been "shared"  and shows unrelatedness.  Using
the "lost" value can be seen in some cases as a means of creating evidence
where there is none.

I also wrote:
<<New tenses might suddenly be needed to indicate matters of time and
relationships that simply did not matter in the old days.  People who
calculated time only in terms of the seasons might need to start perceiving
and discriminating befores and afters, duratives and completedness, perfects
and aorists.>>

Sean Crist replied:
**Languages can certainly develop new tense markings over their history, but
the explanation you've given here is teleological.  There's nothing that
would suggest that languages develop more complex tense systems upon
coming into contact with a technologically more sophisticated culture.**

I think I will be able to challenge you on this one.  I'm hoping to have some
evidence of what happened to modern primitive languages when they are exposed
to more complex cultures.  I will pass it along when it comes.

But let me point out that the highest and therefore earliest "node" on the
UPenn IE tree - Anatolian - includes a language - Hittite - that lacks
syntactical aspects (e,g,. gender) that arrive in lower and later "nodes" and
that those new features certainly add new complexity to those languages and
hide to some degree the old simplier system.  Conversely, English's loss of
inflection has been attributed to contact with and the need to communicate
with the Danes.  AND finally the evolution of Frankish to French may be
direct and historical evidence of a how a language with insufficient
resources needed to alter substantially to absorb a much more complex
cultural situation.

As far as "teleological", I'd prefer ontological.  After all, it seems to
make common sense that when you suddenly have a lot of new things to talk
about, you are going to need lots of new ways to say them.

Regards,
Steve Long