Re: Measuring language change

Nik Taylor wrote:
> Glotochronology has been discredited.  There's no consistent rate of
> change.  I have read of an Australian language that changed so much in
> just 15 years, that someone who had been away from the tribe during
I have over the years done a fair amount of work with Meso-American
lgs, it seems to be required to indicate something like "We all
know glottochronology has been discredited but here are stats for
my lg anyway".  I decided early on in my reconstructive work
with Proto-Taracahitic that I would not include any glottochronological
dates or numbers.


> like how fond the speakers are of foreign words.  There are cases of
> Australian languages replacing as much as 13% of their vocabulary in 50
> years, mostly with words from other Australian languages, apparently
> just because the speakers like to use foreign words!
Word taboos associated with the names of the dead are also important
in Australia.  I occasionally dig out some of the extinct languages of
Texas to play with and it was a problem there too.  There was a brief
but good description of this in "The Languages of Native America",
Campbell & Mithun, 1979.



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