Juha:
>Still, I see very little light in the end of the tunnel here. But as
>somebody must have
>greater powers of discrimination, let he or she enlighten us here.
I'm not a fan of glottochronology however I do notice based on the various
languages
I've come across that first and second singular pronouns tend to be more
resistant
to replacement than other pronouns. Of course, we do find languages where
pronouns have been replaced. I wouldn't doubt that there are certain words
or
morphemes that resist replacement, but I'm doubtful that one can estimate
the
rate of replacement due to the pesky factors of variance and ignorance.
There is too much variety in this rate for such a calculation to be
meaningful. A word
could be replaced now, two hundred years from now, or 10,000 years from now.
There's no limit to when this might occur.
And let's say we only concentrate on first and second person singular
pronouns.
How does one calculate this rate of change given our limited 6000-year
knowledge
of language change? If one can accept the premise of Nostratic, for
arguement's
sake at least, it would seem that some of these languages have kept these
pronouns in some form or another for fifteen thousand years! Some appear to
go
astray and cave in after ten thousand years, like Japanese.
Yet, how long did Nostratic itself retain its pronouns then?? This could go
on for
tens of thousands of years before that, in the nether regions of the
tropical
paradise that is the pre-Ice-Age... One becomes boggled by unanswerable
complexities.
So all I know is that the 21st century is not the century for
glottochronology.
Maybe somebody will get a handle on glottochronology in the year 3560.
= gLeN
_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963