Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM said:
> Mark P. Line scripsit:
>
>> I therefore believe that anybody who wants to claim that Cham has never
>> undergone creolization should be prepared to show evidence, and that the
>> rest of us have no particular reason to believe it until she does.
>
> In that case, I don't see that Thurgood's remark:
>
> 	Although it is
> 	quite evident that the language was heavily influenced by
> 	intense contact with the Mon-Khmer languages of Vietnam,
> 	there is no historical data to suggest Cham ever underwent a
> 	pidginization stage; thus, there is no basis for attributing
> 	Cham's transparency to development from an earlier pidgin.
>
> constitutes a *claim* that Cham is not a creole.
He doesn't state the claim as baldly as my paraphrase, but he implies it
in several places. Further, in his conclusion he states: "The combination
of new, more transparent grammar and older, more opaque grammar argues for
long term contact, not prior creolization of a pidgin as part of its
language history."

This sentence can be read to mean that Thurgood believes that long-term
contact but not prior creolization of a pidgin were part of Cham's
history.

The fact of long-term contact is beyond debate. But as I said earlier, I
think he is claiming that creolization can be excluded for the history of
Cham and that he believes that he has somehow shown why. This is what I
disagree with -- I don't believe he's given us any reason to exclude
creolization from consideration as a possible source of change in the
history of Cham.


> In any case, the maxim "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"
> must be taken with a grain of salt: after 100 coin-flips all coming up
> heads, the betting is that the coin is either weighted or has two heads:
> likewise, suspects against whom there is no evidence are cleared or
> acquitted, not merely left as "not proven".
In coin-tossing, we have perfect data about all the trials, and we have
access to the coin itself to come up with an explanation for the data.
Historical sociolinguistics is very different from that (imperfect and
incomplete data, no access to the target system).

The example from criminalistics has to do with fairness (a social
construct that has only been in existence in certain places at certain
times) towards citizens who have come under scrutiny by the legal system
but have done nothing illegal (that we know about). It has nothing to do
with the logic of empirical science. In science, a hypothesis for which
there is no evidence and which has not been falsified remains a
hypothesis. Forever. Because there is an infinite number of hypotheses for
which there is no evidence, almost all of them fail to gain any mindshare.
That doesn't make them not hypotheses -- and sometimes, supporting or
falsifying evidence turns up for long-ignored hypotheses, and then the
mindshare suddenly happens.

So it is in historical sociolinguistics. There are two competing
hypotheses (at least in a non-Popperian sense, see below): (a) there has
been creolization in the history of Cham; and (b) there has been no
creolization in the history of Cham. There is no reason to favor one of
these hypotheses over the other as long as neither is falsified, unless we
see evidence piling up in favor of one over the other.

This formulation may seem unusual, and this deep difference in thinking
may be behind John and me not being on the same page here -- and it's
probably taking us too far from conlanging in any event. If anybody is
inclined to argue, I recommend Bas van Fraassen's work (try _The
Scientific Image_) in the philosophy of science, or perhaps you can google
for "pragmatic empiricism". We're a very different animal from either
positivists or classical (Humean) empiricists -- but it's the only way I
want to study language.

I'll be happy to argue in private or on one of my web fora, of course... :)


-- Mark

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