--- Piotr Gasiorowski <
gpiotr@...> wrote:
> No, shared archaisms prove _nothing_ about genetic
> subgroupings. This
> may be counterintuitive, since we associate
> similarity with
> relatedness, but it isn't the only area where our
> intuition leads to
> illusions. "Phylogenetic linguistics" uses
> essentially the same
> methods that are employed in evolutionary biology or
> studies of
> manuscript filiation. Imagine three languages, A, B
> and C, with A and
> B descending from a more recent common ancestor
> (let's call it Proto-
> AB) than the protolanguage of the whole group
> (Proto-ABC). Let's
> imagine that C has changed rather slowly since its
> split from the AB
> branch, and that B is also rather conservative, but
> A has for some
> reasons undergone a number of innovative changes
> since its separation
> from B. As a result, A and B are more closely
> related in the genetic
> sense (they derive from Proto-AB, which is not
> ancestral to C), but B
> and C may appear far more similar than A and B. This
> happens more
> often than you might think. Note that in such a case
> what B and C
> have in common (excluding loans and parallel
> developments) is shared
> archaisms. What A and B have in common to the
> exclusion of C, on the
> other hand, is a unique sequence of innovations that
> occured during
> the history of proto-AB between the primary split
> that gave rise to
> it and the next split that separated A and B. There
> will be no
> similar sequence for the pairs {A, C} and {B, C}.
*****GK: OK about genetic subgroupings. Let's look at
it from a different angle then. This system (or
explanation thereof) may be a convenient way of
assessing "genetic" relationships (clearly important)
but not "similarities" or even "closeness" unless you
define "closeness" a priori as "genetic closeness"
rather than "apparent closeness" (based however on
non-arbitrary grounds like shared archaisms.) Clearly
there is nothing arbitrary or suspect about the shared
archaisms of B and C (which have been lost by A).
Isn't it a way of proving that ABC go back to a common
ancestor, which would not be as easy if one merely
compared A and C? And frankly the fact that A and B
have undergone significant innovations together (not
shared by C) cannot prove to my pragmatic and
nominalist mind that A is "closer" (in real rather
than technical terms) to B than to C if one assumes
that the "shared archaisms" of the conservative B and
of C are substantial. "Closeness" to me is a matter
which takes into account the whole complex of factors
defining linguistic relationships. Now we are
discussing this in the abstract, and I'm not
sufficiently adept at linguistics (to say the least)
to judge what would happen if concrete languages were
substituted for A,B, and C. Still, you would have to
come up with examples where B and C "look" close
(because of shared archaisms among other things) while
A and B are in fact "genetically closer" because they
derive from AB. Bottom line: if languages B and C
"look" closer because of traits about them which are
NOT arbitrary (REAL shared archaisms for instance
rather than accidental sound similarities or the
like), then the fact that A and B are in fact
"genetically closer" because of effected high quality
technical analysis seems to me something that ought to
be weighed in context. What kind of "closeness" in
other words are you looking for to classify languages.
And can you have parallel classifications? If not I
think you should have.*****
>
>
>PG: There is a well-known study by Toporov and
Trubachev
> (1962) on the
> hydronymy of the Dnieper basin, and several later
> articles by
> Trubachev, where he claims, quite convincingly, that
> several Iranian
> words did make it into Baltic independently of
> Slavic. The contact
> zone you mention looks real enough, but the scale
> and intensity of
> contacts was evidently more limited than in the case
> of Iranian and
> Slavic.
*****GK: I think that what happened here is not so
much that the contacts were less intense than those
between Iranian and (pre-proto-)Slavic, but (a) these
contacts did not penetrate into the interior of
"Baltia", and (b) the population which experienced the
contacts was thoroughly Slavonized in subsequent
centuries. Possibly some of THEIR contacts even
entered Slavic along with these populations?==== The
difference between "Baltia" and "Slavia" seems to me
to be that the former was once quite extensive
(judging by ancient Baltic hydronyms) and suffered
much contraction in historical times, while "Slavia"
started from a rather narrow base (somewhere south of
the Prypjat' and between Styr and Dnipro, where the
oldest Slavic hydronyms have been localized) and then
spread enormously.*******
>
> Piotr
>
>
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