Thresholds of Comprehensibility

[Ante Aikio]

On Tue, 17 Jul 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> Hopefully, you see the problem in this.  You appear to be saying that you
> DON'T know what rate of change in a language is, but you are SURE that it
> cannot be measured by changes in individual sounds or words.

> Now, I don't know whether the latter is true or not.  I think that one would
> have to do some real measuring among recorded languages to know the answer to
> that.

I'm sorry, but I cannot understand what you might mean here. Are you
saying that you would find out whether you are measuring the right thing
if you just went ahead and measured? This seems just circular.

> But it is not logical to eliminate such a way of defining "rate of change in
> a language", when you say you have no definition of those terms yourself.

I don't think so. "The rate of change" is of course not an established
term with an exactly defined meaning, but this does not mean that any
definition could be accepted, if no one suggests a better one. It should
be pretty obvious that sound change is a poor metric of language change.
This is no a priori assumption, but one based on observation. For example,
a small amount of conditioned sound changes may trigger a typological
shift which has radical consequences to the morphosyntax of the language.
In these kinds of cases, your metric would show only little change.

> One definition of dissimilarity that can obviously be measured is the point
> at which changes cross over into incomprehensibility.  And this would apply
> to sounds, grammar and even syntax.  And though the measure is binary (yes or
> no), binary data can carry enormous meaning when viewed cumulatively, across
> a language system.

I must ask how exactly would you "measure" comprehensibility. Moreover,
comprehensibility is obviously a poor metric of similarity. For instance:
Sami /njuolla/ 'arrow' and Finnish /nuoli/ 'arrow' are pretty similar, but
the mutual *comprehensibility* of Finnish and Sami is simply zero. If I
uttered, out of the blue, a sentence containing the word /njuolla/ to a
monolingual speaker of Finnish, he wouldn't understand a word, so your
metric would presumably give "no similarity" as a result.

Regards,
Ante Aikio