Re: Questions about Japanese historical phonology.

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 -- not only is
the argument unsound, the conclusions are false, at least in geology
and biology.  Catastrophes do happen -- google for "Lake Missoula".

> I was referring to biological cladistics, in which the results become more
> stable as more characters are included to describe each taxon. 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.

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing
on my shoulders."
        --Hal Abelson

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