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Re: Questions about Japanese historical phonology.

From:Mark P. Line <mark@...>
Date:Wednesday, August 25, 2004, 21:42
John Cowan said:
> Mark P. Line scripsit: > >> Yep. The key lies in the concept of uniformitarianism. > > And a dangerous concept it is too. Lyell (who was by training a lawyer) > established the concept of uniformitarianism of natural law (a necessary > assumption for any scientific discipline: there are no causes for > historical events that are hidden from us today) and invalidly extended > the argument to uniformitarianism of state and of rate
Aye. Fortunately, my scientific worldview doesn't admit of natural law in the first place, so I can afford to use a much more pragmatic version of uniformitarianism. Obviously the principle can only be applied over a piece of time during which your invariants can reasonly be held to be invariant.
>> I don't >> know of any comparative lexical work that uses cladistic methodology, >> but >> it wouldn't surprise me if somebody had thought to try it. > > Take a look at Ringe and Warnow's stuff, which was briefly discussed > on the list in May 2003: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~histling/ et seqq. > A particularly interesting result, which certainly no one expected, > is that Germanic probably started out as a satem language that was > mugged by centum speakers later on, due to a migration into centum > territory.
Yeah, I googled that up last night after posting the above. The satem Germanic thing is the kind of surprising result I'd expect (as it were). -- Mark