From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: typology of Esperanto
Organization: SPSS Inc.
Distribution: usa
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1992 20:24:19 GMT

In article <1992Aug23.190212.107@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:
>>>I'm not sure what you mean by prototype theory.
>>
>>As found in Lakoff's _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things._
>
>I have to admit that I haven't read it.  I'd have appreciated a quick summary
>rather than a reference, but I'll check this out now that I have some time.

Usually I get in trouble for *not* providing a reference.  Oh well.

Briefly, Lakoff argues that the traditional view of categories as sets of
things which have some property in common, and in which membership is 
strictly binary, is wrong.  Instead, there are good examples (prototypes)
and bad examples of member of a category-- e.g. robins but not ostriches
are good examples of "birds".  Categories may have strict boundaries (e.g.
"bird") or not (e.g. "tall man").  Categories may be extended in various
ways, notably by metonymy, so that members may end up without any 
properties in common.  Categories are not "natural kinds" but products of
human cognition, and the links which establish a word's membership in a
category may depend on human culture.

(For details, arguments, and evidence, you'll have to read the book.)

Now, how does this apply to Esperanto and IE?  Well, it's clear that you
see IE as a clear-cut, binary-membership category.  You are certainly entitled
to do so.  I simply find your usage, though meaningful enough within 
historical linguistics, unsatisfactory when considering language in general.
I'd see "IE" languages as composed of a core class of languages (all good
examples) plus some more farfetched examples (the ostriches or bad examples):

goodness of
example    category              IE example                non-IE example
                       
great      natural languages     English,Russian,Latin     Chinese,Arabic
medium     pidgins etc.          Papiamentu,Krio           Swahili?
bad        artificial languages  Esperanto,Interlingua     Solresol
rotten     computer languages    Fortran,Pascal            APL?

It should be noted that, according to prototype theory, we normally reason
about categories based on the best members, not the worst.  We are more
likely (right or wrong) to think that what's true of robins is true of 
chickens than vice versa.  So when we think about IE languages we'd tend to
have English or Sanskrit rather than Papiamentu or Haitian Creole in mind,
and we wouldn't tend to apply conclusions about Papiamentu or Esperanto
to IE languages in general.  

It's questionable whether computer languages can be considered even rotten
examples of IE languages-- but then they're bad examples of languages, period.
The use of "language" to describe them is in fact an excellent example
of a prototype effect.  They are languages in an extended sense, and are
non-ideal examples of languages.  The only way to deal with them in classical
terms would be to relax the definition of what a language is, and declare
French and Fortran equally good examples of it; surely this offends most
people's intuitions.

>To take a classic example, do you consider English to be a Germanic language,
>or a Romance language, or even a Hellenic one?  After all, more of the extended
>vocabulary of English is derived from Latin (via Norman French or not) and
>Greek than from Proto-Germanic.

I think the prototype approach works very well here.  The prototypical 
example of a Germanic language would surely be German, not English.
Both are Germanic, but German is a better example of Germanic.
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