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uiuc.edu>Alexis Manaster-Ramer makes an important point (actually several). In fact, as it appears to me at least, there are at least two sources of very dfferent sorts for the idea that there is, or ought to be a sort of upper limit on the capacity of at least available comparative methods to demonstrate more or less unambiguously (notice the deliberately weak phrasing here) genetic relationships. On the one hand, as AMN says, there are some order-of-magnitude numbers associated with this sort of claim and those numbers are in fact calculated in the framework of glottochronology. Such stuff is, of course, dubious both because of the dubious character of glottochronology itself and because by now no one seems sure what these numbers are or ought to be (and, yes, Nichols indeed waffles on this matter egregiously). In this connection the question is not so much whether such stuff is still taught (it is) but rather whether glottochronology is still being taught. Yes, in some places it is, namely, in the cntext of anthropological linguistics (a hybrid sometimes uncharitably caricatured as being practiced by people who can excuse themselves by noting that they are not actually either linguists or anthropologists), and the reason, so help me!, is that, though it may be exploded, 'we have nothing better' for trying to calculate depths of divergence. That is to say that some historical anthropologists would like to be able to refer to some independent linguistic evidence for their estimates of intergroup relationships, and they seem to feel that they can rely on very someone else's definite numerical claims, apparently based upon 'rigorous' calculations, without having to know much about the field in which those calulations have been made However, the other source is actually not one that can plausibly produce this sort of upper limits at all. Rather it is the proposition, possibly not very controversial, that beyond some point, and especially given the 'thinness' of the corpus of evidence and generalised or formulaic character of reconstructions for supposedly very remote relationships, it simply becomes increasingly hard to distinguish between similarities due to genetic relationships and those due to convergences based on the aforesaid universals (e.g., possible typological generalisations). Any upper limits associated with such an argument cannot possibly, however, be given as even ball-park definite numbers (give or take the odd few millenia, as AMR says), but only as a rate of increasing difficulty with an <underline>arbitrarily great</underline> upper bound. I suspect that at least some people involved in this sort of work may not understand that 'limits' of this sort are not to be associated even in principle with definite numbers. For current practical purposes, of course, and given the fact that our methods can always use refining and the fact that our understanding of, say, phonetic/phonological universals is extremely gross and uncertain, there may indeed be a <italic>pro tempore</italic> more definite upper limit (God knows what it is!), but it is not fixed in principle. The matter gets very sticky, of course, at this point because the farther back one attempts to extend one's comparative methods, the more it becomes possible to claim <underline>either</underline> that universals are themselves due to very distant genetic relationships <underline>or</underline> the contrary, and at this juncture the arguments seem to become circular and confusing. In fact (here AMR is better qualified than I am, certainly) the question arises whether, in the context of such numbers and methods, the arguments as between universals and monogenetic origins of language are computationally resolvable. F. K. Lehman Department of Anthropology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 109 Davenport Hall 607 South Mathews Avenue Urbana, IL 61801 U. S. A.Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
siu.buap.mx>I have published in a couple of articles the claim that vocabulary considerations limit us in principle to more or less 20,000 years in time depth. The calculations are simple. Glottochronology supposes (on the basis of test cases like Vulgar Latin and others) a rate of change around 17 or 18% loss per millennium. A simple series of multiplications (.83 to the twentieth power) will give a residue well under 4% (2.4 to 1.8%) after 20 millennia. Others (I can't at the moment remember who) have calculated, using some fairly noncontroversial assumptions about the phonetic structure of languages (maybe it was Greenberg), that any two random unrelated languages are likely to score about 4% on the Swadesh test just by pure accident, with that then being the lower limit for showing a relationship other than chance. Therefore, after 20,000 years of separation, any two languages are likely to show less than a 4% similarity in basic vocabulary, and therefore not be provably related via glottochronology. Of course, there still remains the good old comparative method, which, depending on what the residue is, might just be able to provide some evidence, and syntactic or morphological evidence, which is supposedly (reference: general knowledge osmosed in the linguistic community) more resistant to change might also allow us to push the limen back. Also, if one takes different figures from the 17% or 18% which is generally accepted, the dates would need to be correspondingly changed (eg a 15% rate would give almost exactly 4% after 20,000 years). In one of the aforementioned articles, I provide evidence supporting the now generally accepted age of modern human language as a probable minimum of 100,000 years (I don't think anyone anymore accepts a figure under 40,000 years, and almost everybody would probably push the minimum to at least 50,000 years), which figure could go back even as far as 300,000 years ago or more. The clearcut conclusion is that the theoretical limit on Swadesh's method ALONE is about 16,000 years for nonchance resemblances. Considering the advances (believe it or not) in studies on human language origins over the last decade or so, I certainly would never eliminate the possibility of going very far back in reconstructions, via some methods yet to be thought of, or maybe even just inventive applications of methods already though of. It does seem unlikely to me, however, that, even if the hypothesis of the monogenesis of language is correct, we will ever be able to prove it, just because of the huge time depth and the necessary imprecision of the instruments we have for reconstruction and language comparison. Jim James L. Fidelholtz e-mail: jfidelMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue