[Lingtyp] Temporal features?

[David Gil]

Johanna,

I'm not "determining ages of languages".  I'm studying contemporary 
languages and making inferences from them with respect to languages in 
the distant past, without any commitment to specific ages.

More specifically, I'm arguing, based on contemporary patterns of 
cross-linguistic variation, that human language didn't undergo a single 
quantum leap from nothing at all to systems like those of, say, 
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and English, but rather passed though at least 
one way station of intermediate complexity, in which it bore a closer 
resemblance to contemporary small-polity langauges such as, say, 
Ju|'hoan, Tikuna, Mentawai and Marind (to list just 4 such languages 
that I've conducted the experiment on).  But I have nothing to say about 
whether the development of that particular intermediate stage took place 
20 thousand or 2 million years ago.

David


On 01/10/2018 22:46, Johanna NICHOLS wrote:
> I don't think I see a problem with that either (not off the top of my
> head anyway), but my question was about "ancient languages",
> "contemporary languages", "more recent languages".  How are you
> determining ages of languages?
> On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 8:38 AM David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
>> Joseph (and all),
>>
>> On 01/10/2018 22:22, Joseph Brooks wrote:
>>> Seconding Johanna Nichols' questions and adding :
>>>
>>> how is "greater socio-political complexity" determined? and who
>>> exactly is in a position to determine that? If my guess is correct, we
>>> are assuming larger industrial and/or hierarchical societies are more
>>> complex socio-politically, which seems pretty problematic (at least to
>>> me).
>>> Joseph
>> Until recently I have been working with the following 4-valued scale of
>> socio-political complexity:
>>
>> national language >
>> local variety of national langauge >
>> local language historically part of larger polity >
>> local language only recently part of larger polity
>>
>> It would seem to me that this is relatively straightforward.  In work in
>> progress I am developing a more refined scale incorporating date from
>> the D-Place database (https://d-place.org/home), specifically the number
>> of levels in what they refer to as the "jurisdictional hierarchy beyond
>> local community".  Again, I don't really see any problems with this.
>>
>> David
>>
>> --
>> David Gil
>>
>> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
>> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
>> Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
>>
>> Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
>> Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
>> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816
>>

-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany

Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816