From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller
Message: 738
Date: 1999-12-31
----- Original Message -----
From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller <waluk@...>
To: Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>; <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 1999 7:06 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: The relationship betwen Spanish, Galician and
Portuguese
> Piotr, In your reply to David James, you failed to explain why he could
> (with knowledge of Spanish) understand Galician but could not understand
> Portuguese. Is there an easy answer to his question, or is the answer
> very difficult?
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There could be various reasons, e.g. the greater PHONETIC affinity
between Spanish and Galician.
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Gerry:
> I like the way you expressed the network effect of dialects rather than
> a branching tree. But then you used the branching tree analogy when you
> traced the Romance dialects back to Latin. It seems to me that way back
> 1.5 millenniums ago, the folks who spoke "Latin" didn't ALL speak the
> same language; there were still regional variations which some folks
> might have called dialects.
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Of course there were different Latins, just as there are different
Englishes. There is no living language spoken by more than a few hundred
people without any dialectal variation. Latin had a vast number of
speaker for its time, and was spoken all over the Empire. It had lots of
non-standard variants known colectively as Vulgar Latin. Still, local
differences existing two thousand years ago do not account for the
modern distribution of the Romance languages in a straightforward way. A
lot has happened in the meantime in terms of interdialectal "fusion and
separation".
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> Gerry: I think we need to somehow attain a simultaneous fusion and separation
> of languages but at present I don't have any concrete suggestions.
> Might you have a few ideas to offer?
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Various folks ARE working on such problems. What is already quite clear
is that there is no real contradiction between the "family-tree" model
(which describes the effects of splits) and the "wave model" (which
describes the spread of innovations within convergence areas), though
both have their fanatical adherents. They should be regarded as
complementary, more or less like waves and particles in modern physics.
Gerry: Yes, Piotr. This particle/wave duality was what Louis de
Broglie received his Nobel for. In 1929!
Areal linguistics comes in handy when you are interested in linguistic
"microevolution" (how and why change starts and spreads; this is like
the study of population genetics in biology); tree models are useful if
you want to capture long-term ("macroevolutionary") developments and to
express the notion of genetic relatedness (this is the analogue of
cladistic analysis in evolutionary biology).
Gerry (cont'd): I think that once we get beyond de Broglie's
particle/wave duality, we'll be on to something. Ian Hodder is trying to
attain a simultaneous fusion and separation of the present and the
past. He calls it Critical Hermeneutics. Any comments on Hodder's
ideas and any suggestions of your own?