LL-L "Language varieties" 2003.12.01 (03) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 01.DEC.2003 (03) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: Jan Strunk <strunkjan at hotmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2003.12.01 (02) [E]

Hello folks,

Ron wrote:
> What do you think of this theory below
>
> It's interesting all right, as I said, but I don't know what's supposed to
> be so "stunning" about it.  Isn't this just another case of apparent
> confirmation of what has been floating around for quite some time?
>
> Of course, I know practically nothing about the methodology and the
details
> of the findings.  I therefore advise caution at this point, in large part
> also because I wonder how exactly the methodology copes with data noise
> caused by direct and indirect loaning, bearing in mind that linguistic
> mingling does not necessarily coincide with genetic mingling in all
details.
> Has basing language family evolution findings merely on collections of
> words, though useful in a very general way, not been shown to lead to
> oversimplifications?  If this study and similar ones are as sophisticated
as
> I hope they are, they ought to be compared with findings derived from
> DNA-based data.  As I said, I don't expect a complete match, but a
> cross-discipline approach of this sort should be pretty interesting in a
> general way.  This reported study seems to confirm this.  But was it
> conducted free from influence of these genetic data?
>
> Of course, it doesn't exactly help that we are getting this information
> through the filter of the popular media.

Let's just say that serious historical linguists mostly have a lot of
criticism concerning "rampaging" bioligists who make big discoveries in
historical linguistics.
The last big article in nature (or some journal like that) also featured a
biologists using tree building
methods to estimate the time of splitting between different branches of
indoreuropean languages.
This article caused un uproar and a heated debate on the linguist list. And
in the following discussion much of the methodology used was torn apart at
least in my opinion.
But may real linguists are just jealous why their research does not get into
the popular media while
biologists seem to make breakthrough discoveries about language every and
publish them in nature every two month or so. (Haha, you can tell that I am
bound to become a linguist....!)

But seriously, oftentimes the methods used in such studies are quite
dubious. Just comparing
the superficial similarity of "possible cognate words" and using just a
handful of them. Such as the socalled Swadesh list of about 100 terms.
Moreover, all these studies make the assumption that the rate of lexical
change (that is losing lexical items) is approximately constant for
calculating the
time of different splits in a language family tree.
This however is not clear at all. Last but not least, there are some
historical linguistics which doubt that the tree model of language families
is really valid (at least for all families and times), e.g. Dixon for
Australian languages.

An interesting thing would be to use the tree growing methods used in these
studies on the Lowlands languages for which we have considerable knowledge
of linguistic history and to see how accurate a picture we get.
Maybe someone should propose this....

Gued gaon!

Jan Strunk
jstrunk at stanford.edu
strunk at linguistics.ruhr-uni-bochum.de

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