From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 10623
Date: 2001-10-25
--- In cybalist@..., george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:
*****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?*****
Of course it is, though note the following: if you regard ABC as a
legitimate grouping, it is on account of the _unique_ shared traits
they show when you compare them with other langauges. The "shared
archaisms" of B and C may well prove to be shared innovations of A, B
and C (developed during the Proto-ABC stage).
To use a biological analogue: no-one would claim that, say, aardvarks
and red kangaroos are more closely related to each other than they
are to blue whales, because they are terrestrial animals with coats
of hair, teeth, large upright ears, four limbs, digits with claws,
tapering tails, etc. These features are shared archaisms (proto-
mammals had earlobes and hair as innovations setting them apart from
other animals, and the other characters mentioned originated in a
still more distant ancestors). Compared to whales, aardvarks and
kangaroos look superficially "similar": they share the general body
plan of mammals, inherited from their common ancestor. But in terms
of phylogenetic history, genotypic similarity, etc., aardvarks and
whales are of course closer relatives, though the common innovations
that demonstrate it (e.g. the fact that their females develop
placentas during pregnncy) may be invisible to naive observers, and
their importance may be difficult to understand to non-specialists
(which is why whales used to be classified as "fish"). Cetaceans
colonised a new environment and had to adapt to it, hence the
unusually large number of anatomical innovations in that group. They
lost hair, earlobes, hind limbs and claws, some of them lost teeth,
etc. Of course there are shared archaisms common to all three species
(endothermy, mammary glands, etc.). It is all the archaic features of
different mamals that help us to imagine what proto-mammals looked
like, but it is innovations that enable us to subclassify mammals in
a non-arbitrary way.
*****GK: 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.*****
There are several types of parallel classifications: areal
(geographic), typological (grammatical similarity), and even purely
pragmatic (when you attempt to impose any kind of order in a chaotic
collection of several hundred poorly investigated languages -- this
is what African linguists have to face). In zoology, too, you can
classify animals according to their habitat, behaviour, usefulness,
culinary properties, colour, size, etc.; all these parallel
classifications may be useful for some practical purposes, but you
have to remember that they are based on artificial principles.
In linguistics, genetic taxonomies have their problems (they ignore
lateral diffusion), but on the whole they are more natural and
therefore less arbitrary than others, since they reflect directly the
_history_ of language groups, their splits and diversification,
rather than the practical needs of the researcher. Their deficiencies
can be controlled to a certain extent if you have a flexible model of
language history, in which phylogenetic trees and convergence areas
are regarded as complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
*****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.*******
I agree that on the whole Slavic is more coherent and has been more
innovative than Baltic. It is debatable whether we should talk of
Proto-Baltic and proto-Balto-Slavic as distinct proto-languages. The
surviving Baltic languages may represent "basal" subgroups of the
Balto-Slavic branch, perhaps even with East Baltic being genetically
closer to Slavic than either group is to West Baltic. Their most
recent common ancestor would be no other than Proto-Balto-Slavic,
which could then be renamed as Proto-Baltic for simplicity. This
would make Slavic just a large and aberrant subbranch of Baltic. I
wonder what Sergei thinks of this idea (which recurs in linguistic
discussions).
Piotr