Li7 Historical Linguistics

1
Li7 Historical Linguistics

• Megalo-
• comparison

2
Todays topics

• Two views on megalocomparison
• Some proposed macrofamilies
• Problems with megalocomparison

3
Two views on megalocomparisonQ Was there a
single original human language, and can we
reconstruct it?

• Answer 1 yes (macrocomparison)
• e.g. McWhorter apud Dreifus 2001
• the first human language emerged roughly 150,000
  years ago in East Africa
• Why do you say that?
• To some extent, language appears to be innate to
  Homo sapiens. The fossil evidence of Homo sapiens
  goes back to about 150,000 years ago. So we may
  assume that part of what distinguished the
  species when it arose was speech.

Dreifus, Claudia. 2001. A conversation with John
McWhorter How Language Came To Be, and Change.
New York Times, 30 Oct. McWhorter, John. 2001.
The Power of Babel A Natural History of
Language. New York Henry Holt and Company.
4
Two views on megalocomparisonQ Was there a
single original human language, and can we
reconstruct it?

• Answer 2 no ((anti-)megalocomparison)
• e.g. Pullum 1996
• What linguists typically disagree with Greenberg
  about is whether phonetic comparison of
  present-day languages could ever provide a
  warrant for suggesting a relationship going back
  12,000 years. It is extremely unlikely. Languages
  appear to change fast enough that over that sort
  of time scale the phonetic similarities within a
  group of languages would be irretrievably
  obscured. That conclusion is (contra Greenberg)
  fairly secure, and is quite independent of the
  existence of writing. The languages of the
  Americas could, of course, have had a common
  northeast Asian ancestor spoken tens of millennia
  ago. Historical linguists don't dislike that
  idea they just feel obliged to point out that
  linguistic evidence cannot confirm it.

Pullum, Geoff. 1996. Letter responding to The
Greenberg Hypothesis. Science 2741147-1448.
5
Some proposed macrofamilies

• Altaic
• Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Japanese, Korean
• Nostratic
• IE, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian,
  Dravidian
• c. 10K years ago
• Proto-World

6
Nostratic

• Bomhard, Illich-Svytich, Dolgopolsky, Shevoroshkin

7
Nostratic numerals

• One tu
• Two mun
• Three hul-mu
• Four lil-mu
• Five hitu
• Six rut
• Seven uri-mu
• Eight munri
• Nine tuhumri
• Ten humci
• Twenty mun-hum
• Thirty hul-hum
• Forty lil-hum

8
Proto-World

• Joseph Greenberg, Merritt Ruhlen
• the method of mass comparison
• Families of Proto-World
• Amerind
• IE/Uralic/Altaic/Korean/Japanese/Ainu/Gilyak/Chukc
  hi/Eskimo
• Dene-Caucasian (Basque, Ncauc, Sino-Tibetan,
  Na-Dene)
• Munda/Mon-Khmer/Thai/Miao-Yao/Austronesian

9
(No Transcript)
10
(No Transcript)
11
Problems

• Mass comparison yields large numbers of false
  positives
• Hindi lu? and English loot (borrowing)
• day and Latin dies (chance)
• have and Latin habere (chance)
• Large numbers of false negatives
• lu? and leaf
• two and erku
• date and dacha
• milk and lettuce
• more on next page...

12
Problems

• Languages that really are related have diverged
  much more in 6000 years than some of Ruhlen and
  Greenbergs words seem to have diverged in at
  least 10,000.
• Real Gujarati(?)-English cognates
• t??k? wheel
• p?nt? five
• s")g horn
• t??h six
• pisu flea
• Surely Ruhlen and Greenberg would be embarrassed
  to pick words this far apart as cognates for
  Proto-World with this level of phonetic
  resemblance, everything can related to
  everything.

13
Problems

• Ruhlen and Greenberg's world etymology maliq'a
  swallow, throat

14
Proto-Afro-Asiatic Afro-Asiatic mlg 'suck,
breast, udder' Arabic Afro-Asiatic m-l-j 'suck
the breast' Old Egyptian Afro-Asiatic mndy 'woman
's breast, udder' Proto-Indo-European Indo-Europe
an melg- 'to milk' English Indo-European milk 't
o milk, milk' Latin Indo-European mulg-ere 'to
milk' Proto-Finno-Ugric Finno-Ugric mälke 'breas
t' Saami Finno-Ugric mielga 'breast' Hungarian F
inno-Ugric mell 'breast' Tamil Dravidian melku 't
o chew' Malayalam Dravidian melluka 'to
chew' Kurux Dravidian melkha 'throat' Central
Yupik Eskimo-Aleut melug- 'to suck' Proto-Amerind
maliq'a 'to swallow, throat' Halkomelem Almosa
n m_at_lqw 'throat' Kwakwala Almosan m'lXw-'id 'chew
food for the baby' Kutenai Almosan u'mqolh 'to
swallow' Chinook Penutian mlqw-tan 'cheek' Takel
ma Penutian mülk' 'to swallow' Tfaltik Penutian m
ilq 'to swallow' Mixe Penutian amu'ul 'to
suck' Mohave Hokan malyaqe' 'throat' Walapei Hok
an malqi' 'throat, neck' Akwa'ala Hokan milqi 'ne
ck' Cuna Chibchan murki- 'to swallow' Quechua An
dean malq'a 'throat' Aymara Andean malyq'a 'throa
t' Iranshe Macro-Tucanoan moke'i 'neck' Guamo Eq
uatorial mirko 'to drink' Surinam Macro-Carib e'm
okï 'to swallow' Faai Macro-Carib mekeli 'nape
of the neck' Kaliana Macro-Carib imukulali 'throa
t'
15
Problems

• Seeing such a list is suggestive
• Consequence of human ability to make connections
  even in the face of near-random data?
• Rules for mass comparison here are too lax
• vowels are completely ignored
• the middle consonant varies from l to ly to lh to
  n to r to zero
• the end consonant ranges from g to j to d to k to
  q to q' to kh to k' to X to zero.
• switching around medial consonants seems to be
  allowed extra consonants and syllables can
  appear where needed.
• Semantic variation
• body parts ranging from neck to nape to throat to
  breast to cheek
• actions including swallowing, milking, drinking,
  chewing, and sucking
• it is entirely possible for a word to develop
  meanings as diverse as these, but every language
  will have several dozen words in this semantic
  range, and with so many words to choose from, it
  is likely that one can be found that looks like a
  plausible cognate to almost anything. (Burling
  1995, review of Ruhlen)
• One can pick and choose what languages from a
  family to include. If Greek doesn't do it for
  you, try Latin if Hebrew doesn't work, use
  Arabic.
• Lists like this are very easy to produce

16
Conclusions

• Even if they used reliable linguistic data (which
  they dont) and constrained and made consistent
  their rules for comparison (which they dont),
  this method would not yield reliable results.
• Indeterminacy of linguistic change

17
Suggested readings 1

• Campbell, Lyle. 1988. Review of Joseph Greenberg,
  Language in the Americas. Language 64.3591-615.
• Matisoff, James. 1990. On megalocomparison.
  Language 661106-120.
• Nichols, Johanna. 1992. Linguistic Diversity in
  Space and Time. Chicago University of Chicago
  Press.
• Ruhlen, Merritt. 1994. On the Origin of
  Languages Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy.
  Stanford University Press.

18
Suggested readings 2

• Kessler, Brett. 2001. The Significance of Word
  Lists. Chicago CSLI.
• The most strident controversies in historical
  linguistics debate whether claims for historical
  connections between languages are erroneously
  based on chance similarities between word lists.
  But even though it is the province of statistical
  mathematics to judge whether evidence is
  significant or due to chance, neither side in
  these debates uses statistics, leaving readers
  little room to adjudicate competing claims
  objectively. This book fills that gap by
  presenting a new statistical methodology that
  helps linguists decide whether short word lists
  have more recurrent sound correspondences than
  can be expected by chance. The author shows that
  many of the complicating rules of thumb linguists
  invoke to obviate chance resemblances, such as
  multilateral comparison or emphasizing grammar
  over vocabulary, actually decrease the power of
  quantitative tests. But while the statistical
  methodology itself is straightforward, the author
  also details the extensive linguistic work needed
  to produce word lists that do not yield
  nonsensical results.