Mark wrote
> 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.
Originally Glottochronology was based upon historically known
rates of linguistic change (eg. Romance, Germanic and Slavic
langauges) which not only began diverging at relatively known
points in time, but also had deep literatures as well. Recent work I
have seen on the subject based on other languages, gives quite
radically different results.
For instance, there is now evidence for the rates of movement of
Bantu
languages out of the Camerouns that are fairly well established and
the glottochronological calculations here seem quite different to the
European ones. This provides the subject with one line of evidence.
Another altogether different line of approach lies with work being
done on the dissemination of other cultural innovations through a
population. A number of factors have been found that is beginning to
make calculations possible from "the bottom up" rather than the top
down. The Russian Mathematician Nicholas Rashevsky began some of
this
work in the late 1960s, but it has since been extended elsewhere. I
don't know too much about this, but I know the literature has
recently
been picked up by those interested in Mimetics to see how fast
"memes"
pass through populations, and what factors increase or decrease the
velocity by which they spread.
Ultimately both the glottochronological and cultural dissemination
approaches need to come together, but we are still awaiting our
Darwin, Einstein or Newton in this field. If that ever happens,
though, it will still be difficult and the debates will still be
there
as most of the evidence on which such calculations will be based will
be missing (i.e. the historic size of population, its objective
"need" (i.e. how close to the subsistence breadline they are), the
nature of the connectivity with neighbours of equivalent cultural
level, and the amicability or otherwise of those relations etc).
Thus
the debates will still occur, afterall the acceptance of Darwinian
evolution has not abolished the debates within the science of
cladistics (although modern molecular genetics might!)
Hope this helps
Regards
John