Re: Questions about Japanese historical phonology.

John Leland said:
> In a message dated 8/24/04 9:13:24 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
> rfmilly@MSN.COM
> writes:
>
> << Japanese and the other Altaic
>  languages" (controversial, I guess, though it convinced me) >>
> For what it's worth (very little, since I am not a professionally
> qualified scholar in the field) it convinced me too,

I'm no specialist in historical linguistics, but I'm not about to keep
quiet just because of that. :)

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).

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" 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.

BTW, this is analogous to the emergence of the field of cladistics in
biological taxonomy, which calls into question the empirical validity of
traditional taxons and even taxon levels. Of course, the same
methodological difficulties seen in cladistics -- e.g. high sensitivity of
the results to the exact choice of features to be compared -- would apply
to prehistorical linguistics so practiced. In practice, though, these are
problems of scale that tend to go away as the empirical database grows in
size.

As for Japanese and Altaic, if I stipulate for the sake of discussion that
'Altaic' is to be defined topologically ('a language is Altaic if it is a
variety of Turkish, Mongolian or Manchu or is more closely related to an
Altaic language than to any language that is not Altaic'), then I'd have
to say that I haven't been shown enough evidence to convince me that
Japanese is more closely related to an Altaic language than to any
language that is not Altaic. That doesn't mean that Japanese is
necessarily *not* related to Altaic languages so defined, but that there
may not be enough surviving evidence to decide either way.

Other (prehistoric) evidence, albeit circumstantial, can be drawn upon to
help decide in some cases. Mitochondrial DNA and diffusion of material
culture are the ones that immediately come to mind.


-- Mark

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