Re: Historical Linguistics to the Max

rogerprince@xxxxxxxx wrote: 
September 23, 2005

Evolutionary Tools Help Unlock Origins of Ancient Languages

The key to understanding how languages evolved may lie in their
structure, not their vocabularies, a new report suggests. Findings
published today in the journal Science indicate that a linguistic
technique that borrows some features from evolutionary biology tools
can unlock secrets of languages more than 10,000 years old.

Because vocabularies change so quickly, using them to trace how
languages change over time can only reach back about 8,000 to 10,000
years. To study tongues from the Pleistocene, the period between 1.8
million and 10,000 years ago, Michael Dunn and his colleagues at the
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics developed a computer program
that analyzes language based on how words relate to one another. They
developed a database containing 125 "structural language features,"
which include traits such as verb placement within clauses, for two
sets of languages. Sixteen Austronesian languages made up the first
set, whereas the second was composed of 15 Papuan languages. (The image
above shows an outrigger sailing canoe in a region where languages from
the two sets are spoken called Island Melanesia, which is east of Papua
New Guinea and northeast of Australia.) When the researchers used the
new approach to reveal historical connections between languages, the
results for the Austronesian languages closely resembled previous
results that were based on vocabulary.

In contrast, the vocabulary-based method could not yield results for
the Papuan languages but the novel technique did. It suggests that the
languages are related in ways that are consistent with geographical
relationships between them. In an accompanying commentary, Russell Gray
of the University of Auckland in New Zealand cautions that the new
technique still has uncertainty. But he contends that the approach "is
likely to be widely emulated by researchers working on languages in
other regions. In the future we may see the development of Web-based
databases for the languages of the world."

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=00074F10-365F-1333-B65F83414B7F0000

I do not have access to the original article (your link is only to the Sci Am article, which you reproduce in full anyway), but something seems to be awry here.

There is nothing particularly new in applying techniques from evolutionary biology to the relationships between languages: the whole of the latest issue of Transactions of the Philological Society is devoted to papers in this area - and it is far from the case that only vocabulary is considered. In fact some of the papers concern studies to determine which kinds of features of languages seem to give the best results.

Obviously I do not know what the 'structural language features' are that the paper is concerned with, but 'traits such as verb placement within clauses' are scarcely less labile than vocabulary: after all, French is very different from Latin in this respect.

Unless they have uncovered some traits at a completely different level from anything hitherto studied, I simply don't believe that they could recover anything from tens of thousands of years ago. And while I cannot rule out that possiblity, the Sci Am article hasn't given any hint of what these revolutionary properties might be.

	Colin
.

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