Re: Which Manansala? (was [tied] a(i)s-)

----- Original Message -----

From: tgpedersen@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 12:22 PM

Subject: Re: Which Manansala? (was [tied] a(i)s-)

 

>>>> I think it is a good article, but it has some flaws.<<<<

 

It's a *very* good article, IMO, and the flaws are imaginary (see below). From your mention of Chinese/Quechua I gather you've read Rosenfelder's other essay on "Reconstructing Proto-World with the tools you probably have at home" as well. I recommend it very warmly to everybody on this list.

 

http://zompist.com/proto.html

 

>>>> 1) He wants all comparisons to be done on languages of similar age. That would rule out all comparisons of Lithuanian with Old Greek and Sanskrit. It would have to be done on New Greek and Hindi etc instead. That would invalidate a good deal of IE research.<<<<

 

Rosenfelder says no such thing. You've been (mis)reading between the lines. What he says is this:

 

"It's quite naive to compare individual Semitic languages with modern Cuzqueño dialect. On the Semitic side proto-Semitic or proto-Afro-Asiatic should be used; and on the Quechua side, reconstructed proto-Quechua. We also know some words in an even earlier form; for instance qocha is related to Aymara qota -- which looks even less like the proposed cognate gubshu."

 

Proto-Quechua and Proto-Semitic are not even approximately of the same age. What the above means is that *if possible*, the earliest attested or reconstructible forms should be used for comparison to eliminate recently accumulated noise. This is what we normally do. If a Proto-Slavic word is securely reconstructed, there is no need to cite its modern Bulgarian, Ukrainian or Slovene reflexes (except when some details of the reconstruction have to be discussed or justified). That would only darken the picture or oblige the author to add footnotes explaining language-specific changes (which are familiar to most of the interested readers anyway). Modern Greek forms are not used if Ancient Greek forms are available, and the same holds for French or Portuguese vs. Latin, Hindi or Panjabi vs. Old Indo-Aryan, etc. Branch protolanguages are already "pre-processed" for more effective comparison.

 

>>>> 2) He does run through a supposed non-valid list of comparisons between Quechua and Chinese, but he does not provide a counter-example of running through a supposed valid list of eg. pairs of words from two IE languages. If he had, his method would be in
trouble, since he does not take the context of phonemes into consideration. Therefore, if eg. one of the IE languages palatalizes before front vowels, he would have no option but to register this as slack, although we know for a fact that the palatalisation is
completely conditioned by the following vowel. Thus, if any context-sensitive rule has applied in the time the two IE languages have been separate, the outcome of his theory will tend to lead you to believe that the similarity between the two languages is a mirage.<<<<

 

Standard comparative analysis is what should be used in such cases. It's purpose is precisely to detect hidden context-sensitive correspondences. If you apply it to related languages, you get a historical reconstruction. If you apply it to Chinese and Quechua, you get nothing. Rosenfelder does not advocate any alternative "theory" of his own. What he shows is that a "method" based on counting eye-catching resemblances cannot be a reliable procedure at all.

>>>> The drift of the article (by opposition) is that recognized-as-related languages will have a low prior probability of similarity (so that the result, if they are, is significant).<<<<

 

No, Rosenfelder only claims that the notion of "similarity" is too informal, impressionistic and subjective to be of real use. Closely related languages will of course be very "similar" in most cases, but what's decisive for determining relationship at any historical distance is consistent correspondences, not lexical lookalikes.

 

>>>> Also, there is an implicit challenge in your posting: come up with a set of rules that will reduce the slack in comparing Austronesian and IE, so that the prior probability of them matching is low. But as I have shown, if those rules are context-sensitive, they can't reduce the slack. The whole theory would have to revised to take context-sensitive rules into account.<<<<

 

What theory? Sorry, I don't quite follow.

 

Piotr