From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: Bulgarians - descendents of a Finnis tribe?
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 93 01:46:58 GMT

In article <Dec.31.19.29.26.1992.18979@pilot.njin.net>, hubey@pilot (Hubey) writes:
>In article <1992Dec30.211917.2524@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson) writes:
>
>>There is quite some doubt that they are related.  And with Turkic specialists
>>denying any relationship with Mongolian, though that is easily demonstrable,
>>I don't think that further research will be forthcoming until that whole mess
>>is cleared up.

>I keep wondering how it is that people can make assertions about relatedness
>of languages based on what I perceive to be a rather narrow definition of
>'relatedness'.

You bring this up every time an assertion of relatedness--or more frequently,
of NON-relatedness--is made in this newsgroup.  The answers aren't going to
change:  By maintaining strict (a term I like better than your inflammatory
'narrow') definitions of concepts of relatedness, we are able to proceed in a
principled manner with the comparison of languages, whether in search of the
members of a family or the history of a single language.

>It would seem to me that over along period of time languages diverge from one
>another. The closest languages share lots of words.

So far, so good.

>						     But that in itself cannot
>be the measure of relationship since words can be borrowed. We look for
>'regularity' and we try to show that the words that two languages share were
>not in fact borrowed.

You quote the word "regularity."  Why?  It is one of the defined, principle-
based terms of the area of study.

And we do not necessarily try to show whether words were borrowed or not.  The
concern is not with words in and of themselves.

>		       This is a recursive process since we don't know, a
>priori, which words belong to which language group.

More iterative than recursive.

>This implies that, in addition to sharing words, languages must also share
>other characteristics. In other words, finding lots of words in common, say
>between Farsi and Turkish, is no proof of relatedness since something else in
>these languages--something much more important and something at a more
>primitive level (fundamental)--is different. What are the characteristics of
>these primitive measures ? Is it morphology ? Is it synax ?

Certainly not syntax.  It is too limited in some ways, and too unbounded in
others, to suffice.

Morphology is the usual choice for preliminary investigation, because it tends
to be finite in extent, compartmentizable, and readily definable.  If the
morphology is too far off, even related languages may not be recognized as such
in a first pass.

For example, it is unlikely that without knowledge of the respective histories
of English and Hindi anyone would make a claim for their being related.  If
enough time were put into comparative work, a tentative hypothesis might be put
forward, but it would have to stand up to rigourous testing, and would likely
be accepted only if some external confirming fact came to light.

>Let's say two languages A and B which share a common ancestor diverged over
>8,000-20,000 years ago. It would be rather difficult to find any words in
>common in the descendants of these two languages. The phrase 'words in common'
>includes cognates or words that can be derived from each other by using
>regular transition rules. 

As has been stated many times by many people, the issue is not with "words."
The proper object of study in comparative study is the paradigm, either
"inflectional" or "derivational."  However, it is unlikely that in the time-
frame you posit anything will have left indisputable traces that could be used.
Look at the reconstructed Indo-European language and its descendant, English:
Almost the only morphological process in English which reflects an IE origin is
the ablaut in the "irregular" verbs, which is a marginal and non-productive
process in English, easily lost to analogical reformation in children's speech.

>			   What aspects of language change least over long
>periods of time?

This is one of the major issues of historical and comparative linguistics as a
(sub)discipline.  There are those who hold that there is a core vocabulary
which must change at a (near-)constant (and remarkably slow) rate; however,
they take this *as an axiomatic principle for their work*, rather than demon-
strating it via research.

		  Words themselves ?  Unlikely ? Would the morphology of the
>languages change/diverge as rapidly as the words themselves ?

Again, words are unimportant.  And clearly morphology diverges more slowly--
most especially, paradigmatic patterns diverge more slowly--than the phonology
which expresses it:  Vedic Sanskrit (c. 2000 BCE), Homeric Greek (c. 800 BCE),
and Old Lithuanian (1545 CE) have remarkably similar verbal morphologies, in at
least some tenses, even though the phonologies of the three languages had long
diverged.

>Would two modern languages say P and Q which seem to share morphological
>typology (i.e. patterns) but don't share any words be judged more closely
>related than if one of the languages say P, happens to share some words with
>another language, say Z (which belongs to another language group) ?

Now, do you *really* mean "typology"?  Or do you mean corresponding paradigms,
in the principled sense of a one-to-one correspondence for at least some subset
of the paradigm, with divergences clearly motivatable from within the morpho-
logy of each language?  Because the answer if you mean "typology" is most
likely "No," while if you mean the other, it's more likely "Yes."

But wait--there's more.  You state that one of the languages shares vocabulary
with a third.  Is vocabulary the *only* thing shared?  Then I would hesitate to
state that the two languages are related, until I had better evidence than just
the vocabulary.

>To make it more concrete, say P=Finnish, and Q=Tamil.  Let's say there are no
>words in common and neither can any words be constructed which can resemble
>each other via regular correspondances (even partially). On the other hand we
>find that Finnish shares X words with Swedish. But we find that Finnish
>morphology has more in common with Tamil. Say that they are both
>agglutanitive.  Let's say that the both have two regular sets of vowels, long
>and short. Let's say that both Finnish and Tamil don't have certain phonemes
>(consonants) like /f/ and /l/. Let's say that both Finnish and Tamil use a
>morpheme (in verbs)that includes /mina/min/mi for 1st person singular,
>/sina/sin/si for 2nd person sing. etc etc.
>
>Which of these observations (morphological vs word-matching) is more
>important. Is P than more closely related to Q or the language with which it
>shares more words?

Asked and answered.  You seem to believe that typology is a valid indicator of
language relationship; I do not.  I believe that if you polled a majority of
linguists most would agree with me, though I have little to back up this belief
other than 23 years in the field.

The kinds of things you posit in your example are too weak:  Many languages
have the same kinds of restricted phonologies, morphological processes, and so
on--would you expect them all to be related?

And the vocabulary shared between Finnish and Swedish on the other hand:  Even
if a Swedish borrowing, for example, has been regularized in its phonology (no
initial consonant clusters, for example), its non-derivability from Finnish
morphology and derivability from Swedish morphology would require the conclu-
sion that the word in question is indeed brrowed.

>PS. The use if statistical/scientific method is implicit.  That's what
>'regular correspondance' means. The use of statistical methods includes
>correlation-regression, autocorrelation, clustering analysis etc etc...

"Statistical" is not necessarily co-terminous with "scientific."  What
statistical method would you prescribe that would yield the result that the
English word <father> and the Armenian word <hayr> are cognate *even in their
morphology*?  How would you decide to compare these items in the first place,
along with the dozens or hundreds of other morphemes and words that would have
to be ground through your sieve, when they look so dissimilar?

IMNSDHO, the discrimination of one trained human is much greater than that of
your statistical methods:  Certainly, if there were no obvious patterns in
language, if the only way to see such patterns were by analysing thousands of
items, then we might need your statistical methods.  However, to the best of my
knowledge no claim for relationship between two languages has *ever* been based
on a statistical analysis of the correspondences between vocabulary (here
defined as not simply a list of words but of bound morphemes as well).

The way to test this is for a monolingual statistician to take large vocabulary
sets prepared by monolingual speakers of several languages, and run them, in
both binary and non-binary sets, through the various analyses you propose.
Would anything useful come of this?  Probably not, since from what I know of
statistical methods *you have to have some idea of the pattern you are looking
for in order to choose the right tests*, right?

Enough.  They've turned off the heat in the building and my fingers are getting
stiff.
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_