"is the same as"

[Stanley Friesen]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

At 03:26 PM 1/25/00 +0000, Larry Trask wrote:
>Why "absurd"?

>At least in biology, such relations as "can interbreed with" or "cannot
>readily be distinguished by eye from" need not be transitive -- I agree.  But
>by what right can we identify the relation "is the same as" with one of these?
>And what would be the point of doing this?

Because:

A) language is a biological phenomenon, and behaves like other such.

B) language differentiation acts *very* much like biological speciation,
except for happening much faster.

C) the 'mutual comprehensibility' definition of separate languages is
almost exactly equivalent to the biological species definition as a
criterion for recognizing species.

D) as others have been pointing out here, the similarities are so close
that it is even useful to apply cladistic methodology in the study of
historical linguistics.

In other words, the two sets of phenomena are so extremely similar that it
is ineffective to try and treat them very differently.

[P.S. the salamander ring I mentioned is formally considered one species
for taxonomic purposes].

>>  The same sort of situation can, and *does* hold for languages.  The West
>>  Romance area is a dialect continuum, with chains of locally similar
>>  dialects connecting all of the separate "languages" in West Romance.  So,
>>  does one treat all of West Romance as one language?  It seems silly to call
>>  French and Portugese the same language, does it not. Yet they are connected
>>  by a series of pairwise similar dialects.

>Indeed, and this is a common state of affairs.  But how does this constitute
>an argument for treating "is the same as" as a non-transitive relation?
>Better, I suggest, to forget about this last relation altogether, and to speak
>instead of some more appropriate relation, such as "is readily mutually
>comprehensible with" -- which again I agree is not going to be transitive.

That is more or less what I *mean* by "the same as".

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com