--- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:
> If a consistent set of regular historical changes can be proposed
to transform A into B and B into C at such time-scales, then B is
either ancestral to C or as close to its ancestral lineage as makes
no difference.
I think I'm on Piotr's side, but...
What has this got to do with reality? The matches may be good, but
will they be perfect? Can you get a regular derivation of spoken
Modern English 'one' from Old English 'a:n'? No. (There's a dialect
in which 'oats' undergoes the same non-standard sound change.) Can
you _regularly_ derive the Romanian word for 'six' from Latin? No (
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/14398 ), nor from
PIE. (The mismatch here is due to the sort of pattern making that
seems to plague the numerals.) Moreover, there will always be words
that cannot be traced back to the ancestral language.
The question then becomes the more difficult one of how one
recognises that something is seriously wrong. When is the fault in
reality and when is it in the model?
> For the above conclusion to be false, we would require a miracle --
the _independent_ development of B and a language ancestral to C
along the same path (implementing the same sound changes in the same
order and acquiring similar lexical and grammatical innovations), so
that after some 2000 years it's hard to tell the difference between
them. But then (apart from the fact that such things don't happen)
they would be the same language, wouldn't they? And historical
linguists, like palaeontologists, prefer the simplest scenario of
evolution, one that requires the fewest assumptions and no miracles.
No, you asking for too great a miracle. You require that the changes
from A to B preserve differences (or act like changes from A to C);
and that the grammatical innovations not preclude the grammar of C;
and that the lexical changes be very slow. This would be a lesser
miracle, but still a miracle. Even so, if B to C needed a
desatemisation, that would sound a klaxon, let alone a warning bell.
I still think the relevant key points are that:
(i) honest false models have been seriously attempted.
(ii) they have been identified as such despite the path from A to B
being short.
The interesting part of an answer would be the details of (ii).
Richard.