Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns"

[Larry Trask]

--On Saturday, June 30, 2001 10:01 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> Then let my rephrase my question.  Can more than one proto-language be
> reconstructed from a "group" of languages?

No.

> And, if so, then will those
> additional proto-languages show up in reconstruction if one assumes before
> hand that there was only one proto-language?

It makes no difference what one assumes in advance.  Comparative
reconstruction will return either one proto-language or no proto-language.
It can't do anything else.

> If on the other hand the
> answer to the first question is no, then why not?

Because the comparative method is a tool for identifying descent by
divergence from a single common ancestor.  It doesn't do anything else, and
it can't do anything else.  It is not a piece of magic which can give us a
video of any piece of prehistory we happen to be interested in.

When I was a kid, I used to read a comic book featuring the exploits of
Prince Ibis.  Prince Ibis owned a magical gadget called the Ibistick, which
could project any desired piece of history onto a blank wall, as though the
whole thing had been videoed.  If we had an equivalent in linguistics, we
would be delighted.  Unfortunately, we do not, and the comparative method
in particular is not an Ibistick.  It does what it does, and its magic does
not extend any further.  It does not recover any arbitrary piece of history
at all: all it does is to tell us whether a single common ancestor can be
recovered or not.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)