The Single Parent Question

[Rich Alderson]

On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 13:30:46 EDT, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote:

> In a message dated 6/27/2001 12:29:59 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

>> And what is that?  So far as I know, all I have ever claimed about the
>> comparative method is that it cannot produce proto-languages that never
>> existed.  And that's just true.  Do you want to challenge this?

> Yes.

> There are perhaps a number of ways in which the comparative method might
> "produce" a language or a part of a language that that never existed.  There
> is perhaps one way that is relevant to this discussion.

> If you assume only one parent where there was more than one parent, the
> comparative method can be used to reconstruct a language that never existed.

> If a language family "inherited" from more than one prehistoric parent, the
> comparative method will not be able to distinguish more than one parent - IF
> you assume only one parent.  If you assume all reconstructible features
> descended from one parent - where there were actually multiple parents - you
> will reconstruct a language that never existed.

I still don't think you know how the comparative method works, but let that go.

You seem to be claiming that if we found a group of languages descended from a
prehistoric Michif, we could not reconstruct the two parents thereof.  You are
probably correct.  However, from the point of view of the comparative method,
these languages do *not* have two parents, but only one, the paleo-Michif.

If, on the other hand, we were dealing with a larger set of languages, some
descended from the left-hand parent of paleo-Michif; some, the right-parent;
and some from paleo-Michif itself, we could (if the events in question were not
so far in the past as to prevent our dull tools from working at all) in princi-
ple work out the relations of all and sundry.

								Rich Alderson
								linguist at large