Re: Related languages (Re: A China-Sumer connection)

From: John Atkinson (johnacko_at_bigpond.com)
Date: 03/24/05 

Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 08:05:46 GMT

<phippsmartin@hotmail.com> wrote...

> > "Neeraj Mathur" <neemathur@hotmail.com> wrote...
>
> Yes, BUT when I was studying Mandarin Chinese the teacher made the
> comment that if you trace back the pronounciation of words in Chinese
> (presumably if you found ancient rhyming dictionaries?) then you will
> find that words used in Vietnamese to mean the same thing are, in
fact,
> the same word.

Yes, if they belong to the fairly large group of words which Vietnamese
borrowed from Chinese, mostly during the period when the Chinese ruled
Vietnam.

> He went so far as to speculate that Vietnamese sounds
> more like ancient Chinese than modern Chinese does

True (for these words) in many (but not all) respects.

> (presumably due to
> the influence of Manchu pronunciation on Mandarin).

You presume wrong. The sound changes in Mandarin (mostly?) have nothing
to do with any influence of Manchu speakers. The changes started well
before the Manchus conquered China.

> Yet people on this
> group have insisted that Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) and
> Vietnamese belong to unrelated language groups.

They do.

> Comm suggests that
> this is a paradigm, that people are classifying Chinese languages as a
> group for political reasons

They aren't. (What political agenda do you think these linguists have?)

> whereas, in reality, Cantonese differs from
> Mandarin to the same extent that Vietnamese differs from Cantonese.

The words of Chinese origin in Vietnamese are (arguably) closer in
pronunciation to Cantonese than the Cantonese pronunciation is to the
Mandarin pronunciation. The pronunciation of native Vietnamese words in
Vietnamese is unrelated to that of words in any Chinese language.

> Who is right?

Depends what you mean by "to the same extent". But if Comm means what
she seems to mean, the answer is, "Not her".

> > > All of the trees that linguists draw up are based on patterns that
> arise
> > > from tracing the histories of the individual words of a language.
> They
> > > exclude borrowing because that would make things too complex: you
> can only
> > > have one source from which to 'inherit' words, and you can only
> 'inherit'
> > > them at one point in time, while you can borrow words from as many
> sources
> > > as you like and in as many moments in history as your fancy
> takes. The
> > > tree diagrams are simply shorthands for showing the inherited
> > > relationships; the vocabulary comparisons that you will see
> philologists
> > > make are specifically of those words that are inherited, not
> borrowed.
>
> Fair enough, but note your use here of the word "inherited". I've
been
> criticized for saying that there should be a correlation between
> genetics and linguistics: if you trace back different groups speaking
> different languages and assume that they were once one group speaking
> the same language then you would have to argue that they must also
have
> a genetic relationship. The only other possibility is that there was
a
> language shift, that people, for whatever reason started speaking
> another language.

Indeed, we talk of "inheritance" and "genetic" both with respect to
people and with respect to languages (and lots of other things, of
course). While there may be a *statistical* correlation between
people's ancestry and their language, to say that a language X
"inherited" something from another language Y, or that X and Y are
"genetically related", has absolutely nothing to do with whether all, or
some, or none of their respective speakers are genetically related --
any more than it has anything to do with whether speakers of X share a
monetary inheritance with speakers of Y. No one (well, hardly anyone)
would dream of confusing the two.

> It has been pointed out by many people that this
> does happen when one group is conquered by another (even though I was
> criticized, yet again, for making this very suggestion).

It's obvious that people not infrequently speak a language which is not
genetically related to the one spoken by their ancesters.

Whether or not being conquered by another group is or is not a common
reason for such a switch (which, as you say, was the subject of
considerable argument just now), no one denied that switches occur.
Which is why confusing genetic relationships of languages with those of
their speakers is not only illogical, but also leads to ridiculous
conclusions.

> > > It is true that a complete description of the history of, say,
> > > English would need to talk about the French influence,

Of course.

And "influence" has nothing whatever to do with "relationship". No more
for languages than for people. If I'm adopted by a family, what sort
of person I grow up to be will almost certainly be influenced by them,
whether or not they're genetically related to me.

[...]

> Now, in the case of English, we are descended from Angles and Saxons,
> Germanic tribes, so it is natural to say that the oldest English words
> are from German, even if most of the modern words were borrowed from
> other languages, mostly French and Latin. Fair enough. But in the
> case of people in South America, for example, who speak Spanish but
are
> presumably descendents of local people, couldn't we argue that they
are
> still speaking their traditional language but that they have borrowed
> vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation from Spanish? This is an
extreme
> example. I'm just asking if vocabulary can be borrowed then why not
> everything else? In which case we are all speaking whatever language
> we inherited from our ancient ancesters plus any elements that were
> borrowed along the way. We would then expect a 100% correlation
> between genetics and "inherited" as opposed to "borrowed" language.

You *could* say things like this, but what's the point? Linguistics,
like any other science, only uses models which are of some use, have
some explanatory power.

It's a contingent fact that languages almost always obtain most of their
grammar and basic vocabulary from a single ancestor. People who are in
the process of switching languages (like in South America) usually learn
the new language while still retaining the old one -- they don't
gradually replace things in one by things in the other till the first is
the same as the second -- they keep the two more or less separate.
That's why the tree model is a useful one. Just as the model of genetic
inheritance is a useful one in biology, since organisms normally obtain
most of their genes from either one or two immediate ancestors.

When this doesn't happen, as (arguably) occurs in creoles, which are
rare and arise only under unusual circumstances, we do throw the tree
model away and try to devise other models (such as Bickerton's
bioprogram). Again, Bob Dixon and others have argued that under certain
conditions (which hardly exist in the modern world) the genetic model
for languages breaks down on a wider scale, being largely replaced by
areal diffusion. See his book, "The Rise and Fall of Languages". The
most likely example is pre-conquest Australia.

Sorry for carrying on like this, but you still don't appear to have
grasped the way linguists (and everyone else) uses the word "genetic",
and why.

John.

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