34.2768, Review: Historical Linguistics, Language Documentation: Olander (ed.) (2022)

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Date: 23-Mar-2023
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Historical Linguistics,  Language Documentation: Olander (ed.) (2022)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.3603

EDITOR: Thomas Olander
TITLE: The Indo-European Language Family
SUBTITLE: A Phylogenetic Perspective
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson

SUMMARY

This book is about the prehistory of the Indo-European language
family.  Reconstructing the ancestry of languages before they were
attested through writing is a discipline which was pursued throughout
the twentieth century by methods which would have been perfectly
familiar to the Neogrammarians of the late nineteenth century, until
around the millennium it was electrified – some would say,
revolutionized – by the introduction of a “computational cladistics”
technique pioneered by a team led by Don Ringe (Ringe et al. 2002,
Nakhleh et al. 2005).  Ringe is one of seventeen contributors to the
book; there are three U.S. contributors, while more than half of the
seventeen work at either Leiden or Copenhagen Universities.
        For Indo-European, the problem with which this book is
concerned can be stated as follows.  It is more or less
uncontroversial today that Proto-Indo-European broke up into ten main
branches:  roughly from west to east, they are Celtic, Germanic,
Balto-Slavic, Italic (i.e. Latin and extinct sister languages such as
Oscan), Albanian, Greek, Anatolian, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and
Tocharian.  (There were also meagrely-attested extinct languages such
as Phrygian and Messapic, for which the evidence is enough to show
that they were Indo-European but not enough to assign them with
certainty to a particular branch.)  Each of the main branches is taken
to have begun as a single proto-language, though most of them went on
to diversify into multiple later languages.  (Armenian and Albanian
have remained single-language branches, with dialect differences of
course, and the same might be said of Greek, though Lucien van Beek in
chapter 11 here argues that Phrygian was a sister language of Greek,
so that the subfamily could appropriately be called Graeco-Phrygian.)
It does not seem likely that all ten branches separated
simultaneously; more probably, PIE broke into two or three daughter
languages, which may have survived for long periods as single
languages before some or all of them split again, and so forth.  So we
would like to draw a tree structure with PIE at its root and the ten
subfamilies as leaves, showing which subfamilies separated relatively
late and which are more remotely related.  We would like to know more,
of course, for instance we would like to be able to give rough dates
for the various splits, and the book under review contains some
discussion of questions like that.  But the central issue with which
it is concerned is the shape of the family tree linking PIE to its ten
subfamilies, and the detailed evidence for that phylogenetic
structure.
        For an idea about how wide the differences between various
scholars’ hypotheses have been, consider a few tree-structures that
have been proposed.  (I represent tree-structures via bracketings.)
The first proposal was by August Schleicher in the 1860s, when the
Anatolian and Tocharian subfamilies had not yet been discovered:

        ( (Gmc BaSl) ( ( (Cel Ita) (Alb Grk) ) InIr) )

Armenian does not appear in Schleicher’s tree, because he believed it
was part of the Indo-Iranian branch.  In 1985 Tomas Gamkrelidze and
Vyacheslav Ivanov (Mallory 1989: 21, Fig. 10) proposed:

        ( ( (Gmc BaSl) (Grk (Arm InIr) ) ) ( (Cel Ita) Toc) Ana)

Their tree omitted Albanian, which is generally recognized as
difficult to place in the family tree because, unlike in the case of
the other branches, our data on Albanian reach back only as far as the
sixteenth century A.D.  Don Ringe’s group offered the following
(Nakhleh et al. 2005: 397), with uncertainty about the position of
Albanian:

        ( ( ( (Cel Ita) ( (Gmc ?Alb) ( (BaSl InIr) (Grk Arm) ) ) )
Toc) Ana)

Eric Hamp (2013) suggested:

        ( ( ( ( (Cel Ita) (Gmc ( (BaSl Alb) Toc) ) ) (Grk Arm) ) InIr)
Ana)

Hamp also proposed that Burushaski, a language of India normally
regarded as an isolate, was in fact a top-level sister of the
Indo-European family.  He and some of the others mentioned made
suggestions about how less well-attested languages fitted into their
trees, but I show just structures proposed for the main subfamilies.
        These structures are only a sample of those that have been
proposed, but they give an impression of the extent of disagreement.
Some features recur:  none of these trees depart from Schleicher’s
idea that the Celtic and Italic subfamilies were closely related, and
since Anatolian (Hittite and its sister languages) was recognized as
Indo-European, it has generally been seen as the first branch to split
off from the rest of the family.  But many other features differ
widely.  Most linguists have held that the Tocharian group also split
off early (this was a pair of languages attested from the fifth to
tenth centuries A.D. far from the Indo-European heartland, in oases on
the northern edge of the Tarim Basin in what is now Chinese Sinkiang);
but Hamp saw Tocharian as embedded deep within the language-family.
        The novel approach introduced by Ringe is to use automated
techniques to search the solution-space of possible tree structures to
find the structure with fewest features making that structure
implausible.  For instance, if two subfamilies share some unusual
language-change, rather than supposing that the change occurred
independently in separate branches of the tree it is more parsimonious
to hypothesize that it occurred only once, at a time when the
subfamilies had not yet split apart – but after one takes numerous
different language-changes into account, it becomes impossible to find
any structure that avoids all such implausibilities, other than at the
cost of introducing new anomalies (such as a branch which undergoes a
language-change and later reverts to its previous state).  The best
one can do is to look for a tree structure which reduces anomalies to
a minimum.
        Historical linguists who are sceptical about computer
techniques often call them “quantitative methods”, which strikes me as
a misunderstanding:  linguists who prefer traditional methods are also
seeking answers which reduce anomalies to a minimum.  The advantage of
what I would call “automated methods” is that they permit something
closer to an exhaustive search of a solution-space than unaided human
brains can achieve.  (Even if we assume all splits are binary, there
are more than 34 million alternative tree structures over ten
subfamilies, if I am correct in thinking that the number of full
binary trees with labelled leaves and n nonterminal nodes, but no
ordering among daughters of a node, is (2n)! / n! . 2^n.)  The term
“quantitative” leads traditionalists to reject approaches like Ringe’s
because of associations with glottochronology, which aimed to yield
dates for language splits via an axiom about constancy of rates of
language change which proved to be unjustified (Bergsland and Vogt
1962).  But the real limitation on Ringe’s approach is that the metric
for assessing “goodness” of a candidate tree can take into account
only well-defined, countable features, whereas it is clear from this
book that traditional methods draw on a much broader range of
intuitive judgements.  The easiest features to apply automated
tree-optimization to are cognate vocabulary items, but they are among
the least reliable indicators of relatedness between languages because
of the propensity of languages to borrow vocabulary from one another.
        Ringe himself offered his automated approach as merely one new
tool for the historical linguist’s toolbox, and in his editorial
Introduction to this book Thomas Olander comments that “Over the last
couple of decades, computer-assisted approaches have, in my view,
received more attention than can be justified by the results they have
produced.”  Olander goes on to describe the book under review as “in
some way, an attempt at reinvigorating the traditional methodology”.
        (Undue credulity about the potential of automated methods in
historical linguistics is only one minor symptom of a far larger
problem.  Gross overestimation, by educated people who are not
themselves computer professionals, of the extent to which computers
can contribute to the achievement of human goals has become a serious
disease of 21st-century public life, cf. Sampson 2012.)
        In his Introduction, Olander outlines the problem situation
which I have sketched, pointing out that standard general works on
Indo-European linguistics have tended to devote surprisingly little
attention to the early phylogeny of the family.  Olander discusses the
precise meaning of historical-linguistic terms that are often taken
for granted without their ambiguity being noticed.  “Proto-language”,
for instance, might refer to a language immediately before it splits
into distinct descendant languages, or might mean a language that has
evolved through time from the point when it became distinct from its
sister languages down to the point when it splits into separate
daughter languages – in terms of tree diagrams, a node of a tree, or a
branch between mother and daughter nodes.  Olander ends his
Introduction by briefly summarizing the contents of the fourteen
following chapters.
        The first three of these are on general subjects.  James
Clackson’s chapter 2, “Methodology in linguistic subgrouping”, surveys
the history of research on the issue and identifies some of its
methodological axioms – notably that recognition of a clade or
“subgroup” must be based on shared innovations rather than on shared
retentions of earlier features which have been lost from related
languages, and that one must be cautious about treating shared
features as evidence of relationship if they might have resulted from
language contact rather than from shared ancestry.  These two points,
of course, comprise much of the difficulty of linguistic genealogy:
it is often hard to know whether a given feature is an innovation or a
retention, and although vocabulary is specially prone to being
borrowed, I am not sure that any kind of language property will not be
found to have been transmitted in some cases through contact between
unrelated languages.
        Chapter 3, “Computational approaches to linguistic chronology
and subgrouping” by Dariusz Piwowarczyk, surveys various ways in which
computers have been harnessed to historical-linguistics research
tasks.  Don Ringe’s approach is one of these, but there have been
others:  for instance scholars including Adam Baker (2008) have
developed software which simulates the application of sound-change
rules to a vocabulary, so as to check that a series of sound laws
reconstructed on paper do in fact collectively yield the end results
that their authors suppose them to yield.  Patrick Sims-Williams
(2018) used a computer to “apply … forty-three sound changes [to] the
material of 159 selected Common Celtic forms”, enabling him “to find
amendments in the relative chronology of changes and identify usually
overlooked Celtic cognates from a Proto-Indo-European root”.
        The title of Don Ringe’s chapter 4, “What we can (and can’t)
learn from computational cladistics”, is self-explanatory.  Ringe says
in his opening paragraph that “To at least some observers, it has not
always been clear that what we can learn from computational cladistics
is limited.  This chapter is an attempt to explore those limits.”
        The remaining chapters are each devoted to one of the main
Indo-European branches, by an expert on the respective branch; and
there is also a separate chapter, by Michael Weiss, on the
Italo-Celtic grouping, since although all the sample trees I displayed
above treated Italo-Celtic as a lowest-level clade, according to Weiss
“It would be fair to say that Italo-Celtic is more debatable than any
other higher order subgrouping, certainly much more so than
Balto-Slavic” – and Tijmen Pronk, writing about Balto-Slavic, points
out that that clade was itself controversial for much of the twentieth
century, though not today.  (Weiss nevertheless tentatively concludes
that Italo-Celtic was a clade, the first group to have branched off
after Anatolian and Tocharian.)
        The chapters on individual subfamilies are written to a fairly
standard pattern, with sections on the innovations distinguishing the
respective subfamily from the rest of Indo-European, on its
relationships with sister subfamilies, and on its internal structure
(i.e. how members of the subfamily relate to one another).
        These chapters do not contain surprising, novel theories about
Indo-European phylogeny – that is not the purpose of the book.
Rather, it aims to set out the current state of play in this field,
spelling out the detailed evidence for (and against) conclusions about
tree-structures which are often generally accepted.  Nevertheless,
where up-to-date evidence settles issues that have been seen as
debatable until recently, the authors are not afraid to say so.
Notably, Don Ringe describes the archaeologist Colin Renfrew’s
“Anatolian hypothesis” (Renfrew 1987), that the Indo-European
languages spread into Europe from Anatolia rather than from the
Eurasian steppe, as having been decisively refuted (not by his own
work!) – which will probably surprise few linguists who have taken an
interest in this controversy.  Inevitably, different contributors’
ideas about the relationships between “their” subfamily and sister
subfamilies are not always mutually compatible.  Bjarne Hansen and
Guus Kroonen’s chapter on Germanic, for instance, surmises that
Proto-Germanic “broke off from Proto-Indo-European after Anatolian and
just before or after Tocharian”, which would presumably contradict
Michael Weiss’s conclusion reported above about Italo-Celtic.
        (Olander remarks that “Interestingly, the different
conclusions reached in the various chapters only rarely seem to hinge
on discrepancies in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and its
development into the individual daughter languages, although one might
have expected such discrepancies to play a significant role.”)

EVALUATION

This is an outstandingly valuable book, bringing together facts and
hypotheses which have been scattered through the professional
literature.  It will surely become a convenient reference source and a
starting-point for scholars who develop new hypotheses in this field.
Not the least of its virtues is that the Jubilee Fund of the Danish
Riksbank has made it available from the publisher on open access, free
for all to read.
        The book is not flawless.  I am not qualified to detect
errors, if there are any, in forms from most of the ancient languages
discussed, but I did wonder about apparent illogicalities in some of
the contributors’ discussion of them (though I may well have
misunderstood through lack of expertise).  Hansen and Kroonen list
phonological innovations distinguishing Proto-Germanic from the rest
of Indo-European, one of which is *ā  >  *ō; their first example is
Gothic /sōkjan/ “seek” v. Latin ‘sāgīre’, which is straightforward at
least with respect to the phonemes, but their other example is Gothic
/blōma/ “flower” v. Latin ‘flōs’.  The Latin word is ‘flōs’ not
‘flās’, and according to Mallory and Adams (1997, s.v. FLOWER) the PIE
form giving rise to the Gothic and Latin words is likely to have been
*bhloHdhos (where H represents an unspecified laryngeal); so where did
*ā come in?
        Listing sound-changes which established Goidelic as a separate
clade within Celtic, Anders Jørgensen includes a rule which deleted
nasals before voiceless obstruents, giving as one example Proto-Celtic
*krenxtV-  >  Old Irish ‘crécht’ “wound, scar”, to which in brackets
he adds Middle Welsh ‘creith’.  (In the modern language the word is
‘craith’.)  But Welsh is Brittonic rather than Goidelic Celtic, so why
is the /n/ lost there too?  Two pages later the same author appears to
say that Brittonic nasal mutation arises through a rule which
nasalizes voiced stops, ND  >  NN.  But Welsh nasal mutation applies
to all stops, not just voiced stops – hence the surprise often felt by
visitors to Wales who notice the exotic consonant sequence in the
signs at the border, ‘Croeso yng Nghymru’, “Welcome to Wales”, with
the /k/ of ‘Cymru’, “Wales”, mutated to a voiceless /ŋ/ following
‘yn’, “in”.
        In his Tocharian chapter, Michaël Peyrot argues that it is
necessary to posit a Proto-Tocharian ancestral to the attested
Tocharian A and Tocharian B languages, because neither attested
language can be derived from the other; for instance, Tocharian A
‘want’, “wind”, cannot have yielded Tocharian B ‘yente’, so some
intermediate proto-form must be hypothesized.  But if the problem is
the initial consonants, then I note that all cases of Proto-Semitic
word-initial /w/ became /j/ in Hebrew, so why could a similar
sound-law not have applied in Tocharian?  (I do not doubt that the two
Tocharian languages were sisters rather than mother and daughter, but
I cannot see how Peyrot’s remark is evidence for that.)
        In a few places contributors assume general principles which
look questionable.  Objecting to a scenario proposed by Henning
Andersen according to which alternative forms of a given word in
dialects of Proto-Balto-Slavic “continued to coexist throughout the
Proto-Slavic and Proto-East-Baltic periods and, in some cases, in the
modern Slavic and Baltic languages”, Tijmen Pronk objects that “Such a
long period of coexisting variants of the same words is highly
unlikely”.  Is that clearly true?  Some English-speakers pronounce
‘economic’ with initial /i:/ and others with /ɛ/; so far as I know,
that has been so for quite a long time, and I see no reason to assume
that one pronunciation is bound eventually to eliminate the other.  In
Chinese there are many words with alternative pronunciations resulting
from contacts between dialects, with the alternatives typically
belonging to different speech registers but recognized as the same
word (Ho 2015: 155–6).
        A recurring problem (as it seems to me) is that contributors
often treat words from separate languages as cognates without feeling
that they need to explain large differences in meaning.  Adam
Hyllested and Brian Joseph in the Albanian chapter derive Albanian
‘thundër’, “hoof”, from a PIE derived noun of the form “sting + er”
which also yielded Greek ‘kéntron’ “point, goad; nail”.  From
“stinger” to “point” or “goad” is straightforward, but how is
“stinger” to “hoof” a plausible semantic development?  Michael Weiss
sees a Hittite word meaning “press” as cognate with the PIE root
meaning “sow”, from which that English word, Latin ‘serēre’, and other
Indo-European words all derive.  A gardener may sow individual seeds
by pressing them into the soil, but surely serious agriculture would
have proceeded by broadcasting seeds and hoeing soil over them?  (And
I notice that Mallory and Adams, 1997 s.v. SOW, say that the PIE root
is “Ultimately the same” as a homophone meaning “throw”, which sounds
more like broadcasting than pressing.)
        There are quite a few instances like these.  Conversely,
Birgit Olsen and Rasmus Thorsø in their Armenian chapter see the fact
that Greek ‘mētryiā’ and Armenian ‘mawrow’ both mean “stepmother”
rather than “mother’s sister”, which is the meaning of a parallel
Germanic derivate, as a coincidence so striking that it suggests joint
innovation.  I should have thought it a very natural development which
could easily have happened more than once independently.  It is a
sticky moment for any man when he introduces his young children to his
new wife; surely it would be natural enough for him to smooth the
situation by saying “Come and meet your auntie Sue” (or whatever her
name might have been)?
        Some of these contributors link their conclusions about
language relationships to relevant findings from archaeology or from
human genetics.  For instance, Tijmen Pronk writes “A study of the Y
chromosome of Slavic populations supports the hypothesis that the
Slavic expansion started from present-day Ukraine”, and, later, “If
the Balto-Slavic proto-language is associated with the (earlier phases
of the) Middle Dnieper culture, which seems reasonable, the split
between Baltic and Slavic can be dated no later than [2000 B.C.].  …
After the split, Baltic and Slavic developed independently for over
two millennia … [and] shifted to a more agriculture-based mode of
subsistence, as is shown by their distinct agricultural terminology …”
Other contributors discuss exclusively linguistic facts.  That could
be because archaeological or genetic research relevant to the
languages in question is not available, or is available but suggests
no particular implications for language relationships.  Alternatively,
it might be that some contributors prefer not to examine
non-linguistic evidence.
        If the latter were true, it would be regrettable.  Modern
conditions of academic employment encourage narrow specialization, but
those who prioritize the expansion of human knowledge over career
advancement have to resist that pressure.  In his discussion of the
failure of Renfrew’s Anatolian hypothesis, Ringe says that the
decisive evidence against it has been produced “neither by
archaeologists nor by linguists; the crucial evidence is ancient DNA
evidence” (Ringe cites Haak et al. 2015).  For Ringe, the most
important contention of his own chapter is “that information from all
disciplines must be used”.  If one aims to discover the truth about a
topic, it is illogical to ignore evidence that bears on that truth,
wherever it comes from.
        The issue here is not just about how best to arrive at truth,
but that the public is entitled to expect academic researchers to make
connexions which lead outside their specialization.  Someone might be
able to demonstrate that, without any doubt, linguistic subfamily A
split from the ancestor of subfamilies B and C centuries before B and
C separated; but if the demonstration tells us about nothing other
than the early history of the A, B, and C language groups, many of the
taxpayers who have paid for the research might reasonably respond “So
what?”  If on the other hand the linguistic developments shed light on
the evolution of human cultures and the origins of nations, far more
members of the public will accept that their money has been well
spent.
        One very minor niggle is that it is a pity that the editor of
this book did not amalgamate the reference lists in the many separate
chapters into a single list at the end of the book.  It would have
saved a great deal of flicking back and forth to check individual
citations.
        But enough nit-picking.  This is a fine book.

REFERENCES

Baker, A.  2008.  “Computational approaches to the study of language
change”.  Language and Linguistics Compass 2.289–307.
Bergsland, K. and H. Vogt.  1962.  “On the validity of
glottochronology”.  Current Anthropology 3.115–53.
Gamkrelidze, T. and V. Ivanov.  1985.  Indo-European and the
Indo-Europeans (in Russian).  English translation published by de
Gruyter Mouton (Berlin), 1995.
Haak, W., et al.  2015.  “Massive migration from the steppe was a
source for Indo-European languages in Europe”.  Nature 522.207–11.
Hamp, E.P.  2013.  “The expansion of the Indo-European languages: an
Indo-Europeanist’s evolving view”.  Sino-Platonic Papers, 239.  Online
at <sino-platonic.org/complete/spp239_indo_european_languages.pdf>.
Ho, Dah-An.  2015.  “Chinese dialects”.  In W. S.-Y. Wang and Chaofen
Sun, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, pp. 149–59.
Oxford University Press.
Mallory, J.P.  1989.  In Search of the Indo-Europeans: language,
archaeology and myth.  Thames & Hudson.
Mallory, J.P. and D.Q. Adams, eds.  1997.  Encyclopedia of
Indo-European Culture.  Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.
Nakhleh, L., D. Ringe, and T. Warnow.  2005.  “Perfect phylogenetic
networks: a new methodology for reconstructing the evolutionary
history of natural languages”.  Language 81.382–420.
Renfrew, C.  1987.  Archaeology and Language: the puzzle of
Indo-European origins.  Cambridge University Press.
Ringe, D., T. Warnow, and A. Taylor.  2002.  “Indo-European and
computational cladistics”.  Transactions of the Philological Society
100.59–129.
Sampson, G.R.  2012.  “Whistleblowing for health”.  Journal of
Biological Physics and Chemistry 12.37–43.  Online at
<www.grsampson.net/AWfh.pdf>.
Sims-Williams, P.  2018.  “Mechanising historical phonology”.
Transactions of the Philological Society 116.555–73.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University
in 1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate
student at Yale University before teaching at the universities of
Oxford, LSE, Lancaster, Leeds, and Sussex. After retiring from his
Computing chair at Sussex he spent several years as a research fellow
in Linguistics at the University of South Africa. Sampson has
published in most areas of Linguistics and on a number of other
subjects. His recent books include ''The Linguistics Delusion''
(2017), ''Voices from Early China'' (2020), and ''God Proofs'' (2022).



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