Re: Language family trees

On Monday 03 February 2003 7:15 pm, Erich Rickheit KSC wrote:
> Tristan wrote:
> > ... "A significant proportion of linguists no longer subscribes to the
> > theory of a language tree"
>
> Well, as an amateur I might be wrong about the details of the theory,
> but the metaphor is clearly severely flawed.
>
> 'tree' suggests a structure where a node can have multiple descendants,
> but only one parent (yes, family trees are built upside down, don't
> give me grief about the terms). So the theory goes:
>
>   In the early Maldonian period, Old Bostonian was the primary
>   language.  Some early settlers to Revere began the use of nasalized
>   [r], while the Dorchester residents introduced the infix "fuckin'"
>   to show adjectival agreement. Old Dorchester as spoken in Jamaica
>   plain turned initial [T] into [D], and medial [T] into [sQuIki].
>   Cambridge maintained a close relationship with the mother language,
>   via the number 60 bus, reducing all color terms to the suffix
>   "-American". A splinter group of Unitarian-Universalists from
>   Cambridge later discover they had evolved forty-seven distinct
>   terms for 'snow' and therefore had to move to the Artic Circle,
>   where the invented their uniquely beautiful form of Nativity
>   poetry, (where each strophe begins with 'close the door' and
>   finishes with an antiphonal 'were you born in a damn barn?')
>
> See our neat little tree:
>
>   Boston   Modern Revere   Dorchester Jamaica Plain   Cambridge   Northern
> UU
>
>      |        |                 \        /                 \         /
>      |        |                  \      /                   \       /
>      |
>      |      Revere            Low Dorchester            Ancient Cambrige
>      |
>      |        |                    /                        /
>
>       \       |     --------------       -------------------
>        \      |    /                    /
>          Old Boston---------------------
>
> But we know the data doesn't fit this neat little metaphor; languages
> can have variable number of parents. Modern English is descended
> from French as well as Old English, and is chock-full of Greek
> borrowings as well. There must be a hundred pidgins and creoles,
> each put together from two or three languages. Esperanto, it could
> be argued, has a half-dozen parent languages.
>
I disagree.  English has only one Ancestor, Old English.  Sure, it has
borrowed a significant percentage of it's vocabulary from Old French, but
borrowings do not an ancestor make.   English has almost all of its grammar
derived from Old English(simplified, of course), and most of its vocabulary.
English is merely a more devloped Old English with a lot of words from
French, Latin, Greek, and some from Old Norse(them, they and their, most
prominently.)