One Step at a Time

[Larry Trask]

--On Saturday, July 14, 2001 2:44 am -0400 Muke Tever
<alrivera at southern.edu> wrote:

> Suppose the parent of a "half-a-dozen languages" was a language that had
> two  different classes of verbs:  those from a language X that conjugated
> one way  and those from a language Y that conjugated another way.  (I
> think there was a  Greek dialect of Arabic that had a feature like this
> mentioned on the list  earlier?)

> The child languages would either:
> - retain this odd feature and both classes
> - reduce to one class, analogizing or dropping the forms of the other
> - lose both classes

> (Even in those that followed the latter two paths, irregularities--relics
> of  the proto-system--might still survive.)

> Why shouldn't the comparative method be able to reconstruct the verbs
> into a  "class 1" and "class 2" based on the evidence of the daughter
> languages,  similar to the way that, say, gender of PIE words is
> reconstructed?

> Why shouldn't the comparative method be able to take these two classes,
> and  discover that "class 1" forms correspond regularly to cognate forms
> in  language X and its relatives, and that "class 2" forms correspond
> regularly to  cognate forms in language Y and its relatives?

OK.  First of all, what is being asked about here is something entirely
different from what Steve Long has been talking about.

What Muke is asking about is a *single* language, with two classes of
verbs, which gives rise to some daughters.

If this happens, then there is no obstacle in principle.  The comparative
method will be able to reconstruct the ancestral language and its two
classes of verbs -- providing only that sufficient evidence survives.

Recall the familiar limitation on reconstruction: we cannot reconstruct a
feature of the ancestral language which has disappeared without trace in
all attested daughters.

However, if the ancestral language contained two classes of verbs, and
enough evidence of those two classes survives in the daughters, then we can
reconstruct the original two.  For this purpose, it makes no difference how
the ancestral language itself came into existence, or how it acquired its
characteristics.  The comparative method has nothing to say about the
origin of a proto-language, unless there are yet further languages that can
be compared with it normally.

> If X, Y, and relatives didn't survive, other clues might lead to
> disparate  input hypotheses.  Of course, Ockham's Razor might cause these
> to be  disregarded unless there are other clues, such as differing input
> phonologies("Why can 'class 1' verbs have *[?] or *[H9] in them, while
> 'class  2' verbs never do so?").

> It may be implausible for such a language and resulting family to arise,
> but I  don't see how the comparative method wouldn't be able to handle it
> should such  a situation appear.

Indeed.  The method would have no difficulty in principle.  But this is not
the kind of thing that Steve Long keeps asking about.  He is asking about a
hypothetical cases in which there is no ancestral language, and an assembly
of languages is constructed by selecting varying chunks of two languages.

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)
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