Mark P. Line scripsit:
> I tend to take with a grain of salt *any* claim of the type "language L is
> a member of family F" where there are no historical records as supporting
> evidence (what I call, but apparently nobody else calls, *prehistorical*
> linguistics).
So you accept the Romance-language hypothesis (which is amply documented)
but are skeptical about the Indo-European one?
> I think that prehistorical linguistics should concentrate on finding
> evidence for claims of the form "language A is more closely related to
> language B than it is to language C"
The difficulty is to create an appropriate scale of relatedness such
that pairs of languages can be compared in this fashion. Biological
cladists tend to count characters, but one person's character is
another's suite.
> rather than trying to invent
> unfalsifiable, Rube-Goldberg-esque networks of changes that attempt to
> describe apparent patterns in data from A, B and C. Discretizing the
> speech varieties of the four-dimensional planetary population into
> "families" seems both far-fetched and ill-supported by the available data.
The limitations of the Stammbaum have been well-understood for more than
a century now.
> In practice, though, these are
> problems of scale that tend to go away as the empirical database grows in
> size.
On the contrary, they tend to get worse as the database grows, because
more and more obscurities come to light that were hidden by a more
cursory search. This is well-understood in comparative lexical work,
but I think the principle is applicable more generally.
--
Using RELAX NG compact syntax to John Cowan
develop schemas is one of the simple http://www.reutershealth.com
pleasures in life.... http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
--Jeni Tennison <jcowan@...>