From: Dennis Poulter
Message: 2192
Date: 2000-04-25
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Odegard <markodegard@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, 23 April, 2000 12:47 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Glottochronology.
> Glottochronology is beguiling, but ultimately, it's dangerous.
> Everything I've read says the methodology is unsound. At best,
> some broad educated guesses are being made in assembling the
> figures. At worst, it's based on unsupportablely wild guesses.
> It's like trying to externally calculate the velocity of a
> moving object without calculus; until we get a Leibnitz/Newton
> to give us such a calculus, any claims made by
> glottochronology have to be taken with several
> salt-mines-worth of salt.
>
> Mark.
>
I couldn't agree more. In fact, building on your analogy of the calculus, I
would go further.
The calculus may be useful in calculating the mechanical movement of massive
bodies, but even here it gets into major difficulties once you have more
than two bodies interacting. In a language you have thousands, if not
millions, of bodies interacting, each body with its own history of
experience, its own sense of aesthetics and rhythm, its own creativity and
inventiveness. How can you produce a mathematical model of that complexity.
The only one that even comes near, is, in my opinion, the Theory of Chaos.
Chaos Theory claims to describe systems with integral feedback (the output
of one state is the input of the next), where stability is dependent on
highly complex and sensitive factors, a slight change in any one of which
may (or may not) lead to states of wild unpredictability until a new
stability is arrived at. Doesn't this perfectly describe language change?
Of course the problem is that, according to this theory, from one observed
state one cannot extrapolate with any certainty to a previous state, nor
predict any future states, or when, how or at what speed changes will take
place or what those changes will be. All you can do is sit back and observe
the beauty and intricacy of it all.
By the way, I agree totally with your posting on Zarathustra.
Cheers
Dennis