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Editor for this issue: Martin Jacobsen <martylinguistlist.org>
ix.netcom.com>I have some simple observations addressed to the original prompt for the discussion concerning the state of comparative linguistics. While I do not wish to push the beleaguerd analogy between language change and the evolution of biological species, there are some striking similarities between the methodologies of biologists and comparative linguists. What is more striking to me, given these similarities, is the contrasts between the public reception of the field of evolutionary biology versus that of historical/comparative linguistics and how each is perceived even within their larger fields respectively. This contrast fundamentally reflects how linguistic knowledge is accepted and thus the position of the entire discipline of comaprative linguistics. My point is this: Despite the fact that linguistics has preceded biology in several important discoveries, natural historians have been far more successful in dissemin ating their findings. This is the real issue with the state of comparative linguistics as I see it: how do we improve relations with other disciplines and the world at large? I don't feel bashful about bragging about our discipline in this forum, so I'd like first to point out that linguistics, in at least two places that I know of, has preceded biology in making significant and virtually identical methodological and theoretical claims . First, as Roger Lass points out, the idea that phylogeny is the product of "descent with modification," (Darwin's phrase) has a predecessor in the work of early Indo-Europeanists. Thus, Lass writes, "the idea of 'evolution' or 'mutability of species' was part of the linguist's conceptual armory long before biologists accepted it" (Lass. "Historical Linguistics and Language Change. 1997:109). The potent irony here is that even Lass uses the analogy of biological evolution to introduce the concept of linguistic change in his book. The biologist have greater notoriety and public interest, so quite naturally it's the best way to open the subject of comparative linguistics to novices. The second development in which linguistics preceded biology is methodological. There has been a great deal of excitement in the realm of Natural History over the relatively recent comparative method called cladistics or phylogenetic systematics. It has been used to establish, among other highly celebrated findings, the evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs (Padian and Chiappe 1998; Gaffney, Dingus, and Smith 1995). Cladistics looks for common features, or "shared derived traits" among species to infer a common ancestor; the authors of a recent Scientific American article describe it this way: "two groups of animals sharing a set of such new, or 'derived', traits are more closely related to each other than they are to groups that display only the original traits but not the derived ones. By identifying the shared derived traits, practitioners of cladistics can determine the relations among the organisms they study" (Padain and Chiappe 1998:42 ). "For example," write the authors of a column in Natural History, "the group designated 'dinosaurs' is contained within the larger group 'vertebrates,' because dinosaurs, along with all other vertebrates, have a backbone. The backbone is a known shared derived character for the group called vertebrates. Each group, or clade, is defined by a set of such shared derived characters inherited from a common ancestor" (Gaffney, Dingus, and Smith 1995:33). I'm certainly not an expert in the natural sciences, but I cannot differentiate in a broader methodological sense what a practitioner of cladistics does from what a comparative linguist does. What I see are essentially the same methods. (for a discussion of cladistics in context of linguistics, see Lass 1997:113-118.) The remarkable thing about these similarities to me is that while biologists have also recognized certain problems with cladistics (chance similarities, or "convergence" in biology, hybridization, etc.), as a whole, I have the impression that the field has generated tremendous general interest with its findings. Moreover, the entire field of historical linguistic inquiry is largely absent from public discourse, at least in the sort of way that evolution occupies public attention. When was the last time you heard undergraduates passionately disputing the biblical account of Babel versus African Monogenesis? In contrast, on any single campus this very morning there are probably dozens of term papers in progress that address creation versus evolution. Granted, Indo-European correspondence tables certainly don't generate the fervor in eight year olds that a T. rex skeleton can, and Proto-Nostratic doesn't seem to threaten people's religious faith as directly as theories of human evolution, but I still must ask why? Why, for example, don't the recent claims about Amarind or Nostratic generate the kind of hubbub that recent claims about birds' descent from theropods do? Certainly Greenberg and Cavali- Sforza also got their article in Scientific American, but the larger question for this discussion is this: Why are we even having a discussion about the state of comparative linguistics, when in the natural sciences people are heralding scores of important new claims based on what amounts to the very same methodologies that linguists have employed since Bopp and Grimm? Thus, I think the questions that initiated this discussion are directed more at the relationship of the discipline of comparative linguistics to other disciplines and to the outside world. How can we make others understand the importance of our findings? Many biologists think that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Isn't it at least as significant that some linguists consider the languages of North America to belong to three families that reflect migration onto the continent? email: jirsaMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
alpha.montclair.edu>On Sun, 29 Mar 1998, The LINGUIST List wrote: > Date: Sun, 29 Mar 1998 19:42:03 -0400 (EDT) From: MARK HUBEY > <hubeyhMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
fas.harvard.edu>I thank my colleagues for responding to various remarks I have made during this discussion. First, I need to apologize to Benji Wald for being unclear about what I referred to as the American fallacy of thinking that comparative linguistics was nothing but statistics with word lists. Here I was only trying not to repeat what I had already given, complete with references, in 9.338 of this series. way back on March 7, when I traced this attitude back to Powell in 1891, and most influentially, to an aberration of Kroeber's in 1913. Lexicostatistics, Benji, is another sad story, not this one. I want to mention in this connection the brand new book by R.M.W. Dixon, published by Cambridge University Press, "The Rise and Fall of Languages". More an essay than a book , to be honest, Dixon tries to preserve what we know to work with family tree theory, without throwing out areal linguistics. He does so by an analogy to Stephen Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium. Thus areal influence is the normal situation, but it can be interrupted, and in these periods languages seem to separate the way family tree theory postulates. I have tried to point out the difference as lying in the way languages are transmitted. The grammars children learn are based on the data they hear, which includes the performance output of their parent's grammars PLUS all of the accretions resulting from the parent's speech exposure, but the grammar the kids arrive at in heir heads accounts for all of this, hence the main way in which grammars change. In situations of contact, borrowing can be 100%, we call this language learning. Where interim inferences about diffused vocabulary extend into grammatical similarities we have partial language learning,as I have suggested. In the strictest sense, we borrow what we hear, and you can't hear grammars any more than you can see planets. This covers several of the comments colleagues have been good enough to make on what I said, but not yet one R. Ratcliffe. I allowed myself to be conversational enough in my approach to make analogies between what I do in writing descriptive grammars and what I do in writing comparative grammars, having worked in both fields, and passed on my casual observations that I do much the same thing in each case: elicit data and invent a system to account for it (a grammar). For thus daring to chat about what I do I draw the response "It is I think a grave methodological error to treat historical linguistics as an extension of descriptive linguistics" Yes, it certainly is; I would never dream of doing so! Having thus built up his straw man, Ratcliffe proceeds to pontificate. He would build a mathematical model of language change. Great idea, I would encourage him. He goes on to say that what we have to do is to show that similarities between languages are not due to chance. I commend him for this, it brings him all the way up to date with comparative linguistics of about a hundred years ago. Now the question is how do we do this? Apparently he has in mind statistics, which is a good idea, but everybody who has tried to apply this for the past hundred years to language classification has fallen much short of the goal -- take Morris Swadesh and more recently Isidore Dyen, not to speak of Greenberg et al. The best argument anybody can cite that I know of is still Meillet's in which he shows that Latin 'duo' and Armenian 'erku' are related piece by piece, in that both fit into a complex system of rules of change. It is, in fact, still fitting into a system that tells us whether languages are genetically related or, as I have otherwise put it, writing a grammar of the protolanguage. As for this business about how far back we can go, which has also come up, we don't know that except by trying: it will certainly be true that we do not have enough data after a cetain point to consturct a grammar, but we can't know that until we go to work at it. So I would just say, let's get to work and try to construct grammars of protolanguages as much as we can, and stop worrying about unattainable methodologies. This does not mean that I do not eagerly anticipate Mr. Ratcliffe's new pioneer mathematical model of language change, more power to him! Best to you all, kvtMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue