Time Depths and Comparisons

[ird]

Has anyone found a good way to handle time in presenting reconstructions along with dated language data, especially across languages?  Dates of transcriptions, accurately interpreted and updated, must reflect language states over a period before and after recording, say two or three generations, maybe 75-100 years.  Sometimes the beginnings of continuing changes have been documented, like */s/ > /h/ observed in IOM by Whitman.  I am also aware that change accelerates during periods of rapid change (e.g., the striking differences betweeen the English in my faqmily Civil War letters and contemporary English in the same locale).

The farther back we go, the harder to date a reconstruction, and if we attempt comparisons among related langues widely separated across space as well, whether in their lexicons or structures, we need to observe the speech communities' changed environments and interactions with neighbors and trading partners, and should date acquisitions of loans if possible.

I'm trying several things in my works-in-progress.  First, I use visual alignment as pioneered by Haas in listing items to be compared, phoneme by phoneme, morpheme by morpheme, but the order of languages, and thus of data cited, is given as a continuum of similarities, which de-emphasizes fixed boundaries for the subgroups we have been calling Mississippi Valley (Winn.-IOM, Dakotan and Dhegihan), Missouri River, and Ohio Valley.  Mandan isn't isolated, and Catawba is right in there, not separated out.  A (genetic) continuum line can also be shown with curves or loops to suggest spatial arrangements, and thus likely closeness among speech communities who were neighbors at different time periods.  I haven't seen how to combine a tree and a continuum.

To attend to time differences in compared forms, I try to fill out an adjacent column for estimated and recorded dates.  This column can be graphed as on a bar chart, turning the language-continuum line on its side and showing higher filled bars for still-current forms, lower ones for obsolete ones, still lower ones for reconstructions theorized as viable over designated prehistoric spans.  This allows presentation showing linguistic similarities along the continuum plus degrees of variations over time.  Discussion explains the evidence and inferences underlying the dating of reconstructions.

Does the Comparative Siouian Dictionary (archived at U. of Colorado I think) handle comparative time depths?  I have mislaid information on how I might access it.  I would appreciate ideas and pointers to published work that deals with changes in (or snapshots of pieces of?) the Siouan languages over a timespan greater than from European contact to the present.

Irene