[Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

[Volker Gast]

Hi Martin and Jürgen,
According to Wikipedia, 'founder effect' does not refer to the retention 
of traits that were prominent in the original population (though this 
meaning seems to be intended by Cysouw 2011), but to the "the loss of 
genetic variation that occurs when a new population is established by a 
very small number of individuals from a larger population". This was 
also Atkinson's point about (the reduction of) phoneme inventories, if I 
am not mistaken.

Is Stassen's work on A-languages and B-languages the same as his work on 
black and white languages?

https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-31480/cq2yncuh/16_Black_and_white_languages_Stassen.pdf

I don't think that he implied anything with respect to inheritance from 
Proto-World. I heard this talk in the late 1990s and I asked him what 
the implications of this distribution were, and how it was motivated. I 
remember quite well that he had no particular motivation in mind. He 
said that he had noticed it, and that he "got intrigued". The paper 
referred to above mentions "that geographical contact may have been much 
moreextensive than has been assumed up to now" (p. 335).

Best,
Volker

Am 20.01.2020 um 18:57 schrieb Bohnemeyer, Juergen:
> Dear Martin — I’m surprised you didn’t mention Atkinson 2011, the proposed (and intensely argued-against) founder effect on phoneme inventory complexity.
>
> Also, I remember Leon Stassen giving a talk in the late 90s in which he argued that if you throw a large set of typological properties in the hopper and look for the broadest clusters, you find two types of languages, which he called 'A-languages' and 'B-languages’. I’m not sure whether he explicitly suggested that these clusters have been inherited from a stage equivalent to Proto-World (on a polygenesis scenario), but that is definitely how I interpreted the talk at the time. However, as far as I know, Leon never published this study.
>
> Best — Juergen
>
> Atkins, Quentin D. (2011). Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. Science 332: 346-349.
>
>
>> On Jan 20, 2020, at 12:45 PM, Haspelmath, Martin <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
>>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> Does anyone know a case where it has been proposed (or suggested) concretely that an observed universal tendency (or absolute universal) is due to inheritance from Proto-World?
>>
>> Cysouw (2011: 417) has suggested this as a possibility:
>>
>> "It is possible that there are still founder effects available in the current distribution of the world’s languages, i.e., that there are preferences in the current world’s languages that go back to incidental events during the spread of languages over the world (Maslova 2000)."
>>
>> But while this is logically possible, are there any concrete suggestions with a global scope?
>> Word order universals such as the Greenbergian correlations, or phonological universals such as vowel dispersion cannot be due to Proto-World (or some other founder effect), because the universality lies in the implicational patterns, not in specific structures that all languages share. Has anyone suggested that any other universal properties (e.g. the fact that all languages can express negation or questions, or that agent-patient organization is universal, or that all languages have recursion) may be due to Proto-World inheritance?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Martin
>>
>> ************
>>
>> References:
>> Cysouw, Michael. 2011. Understanding transition probabilities. Linguistic Typology 15(2). 415–431.
>> Maslova, Elena. 2000. A dynamic approach to the verification of distributional universals. Linguistic Typology 4. 307 – 333.
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Martin Haspelmath (
>> haspelmath at shh.mpg.de
>> )
>> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
>> Kahlaische Strasse 10	
>> D-07745 Jena
>> &
>> Leipzig University
>> Institut fuer Anglistik
>> IPF 141199
>> D-04081 Leipzig
>>
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