Re: Are Linguistic Changes Accelerated by...


"Darkstar" <darkstar100@xxxxxxxx> wrote...
>
> John Atkinson wrote:

>> "Darkstar" <darkstar100@xxxxxxxx> wrote...
>> >
>> > I don't understand what your 'ambiguity' is or where it comes from. If,
>> > say, a tribes of hunters-gatherers exists long enough, it would finally
>> > fill up all the linguistic gaps that have any ambiguity considering the
>> > simplicity of life they lead, and the development would stop.
>>
>> There are several approximations to your hypothesised tribe. The
>> Tasmanians
>> were completely isolated for perhaps six thousand years, though their
>> island
>> was large enough (total population a few thousand) that they actually
>> formed
>> ten or a dozen "tribes" which interacted. Same with the Andaman Islands,
>> though they no doubt had occasional visitors from outside too. There are
>> also much smaller communities, like the Chatham Islanders or the Easter
>> Islanders, but they were only isolated for a millenium, which isn't
>> really
>> long enough.
>>
>> Nevertheless, even though these aren't perfect realisations of your
>> proposed
>> situation, they are close enough to disprove it -- none of their
>> languages
>> showed any sign of having reached a stationary state without
>> "ambiguities"
>> when their speakers were recontacted. Admittedly, in the case of
>> Tasmanian
>> and Andamanese, there's practically no evidence of their rate of change
>> in
>> the centuries just prior to contact. But in the polynesian examples, we
>> can
>> compare them with related languages, and readily deduce what changes have
>> occurred at a rate typical of languages elsewhere.
>
>> That's not to say anything about your assumption of "simplicity" in
>> hunter-gatherer culture, and its putative effects on language. No
>> linguist
>> has taken this sort of thing seriously for over a century.
>>
>> John.
>
> I mean, hypothetically.

In other words, you're postulating what might happen if there was an
isolated group which, by some weird chance, didn't have the complex culture
and technology which every known group has, and which seems to be an
intrinsic property of being human.

> I need a theoritical model for that enigmatic
> 'ambiguity' and a more or less precise definition for it. Consider
> water looking for a best track.

An excellent analogy.

> Sooner or later all possible tracks
> would be occupied with no 'two's about them'.

You reckon? I recommend you walk one of the braided streams on the east
side of the NZ Alps (the Rakaia or the Waimakariri, say) and see if you
still say this. Those rivers have been creating new "tracks" every year
since the last ice age, and they show no sign of settling down any time
soon. They'll settle down when the mountains are all washed into the sea,
sure, but that's not going to happen for tens of millions of years --
despite all the erosion, the Southern Alps are getting higher at present,
due to tectonic uplift.

> In this ambiguity model
> you either must suppose that water constantly makes mistakes and
> chooses bad tracks or that the brook beds vary all the time because of
> some external events.

Not so. The water makes no mistakes. It solves one problem (what to do
with the glacial debris that's suspended in it), and in the process causes
another (the stream gets shallower). Next flood, it solves this new problem
by overflowing its banks and forming a new stream. At the same time, it's
washing material away from the outside of bends and making them bigger -- a
problem it eventually solves by taking a short cut through the neck of the
bend. And so on, ad infinitum.

> It varies all the time Otherwise, the functional would be near its local
> optimum, and there'd be no changes...

There are local optima, but they vary all the time, since they depend on the
values of the functional, which is varying as it attempts to achieve them.
>
>> at a rate typical of languages elsewhere
>
> What 'typical rate'? Just a month ago I've been severely attacked for
> even mentioning Swadesh.

I said "*A* rate typical of ...", not "*the* rate...". Rates vary from one
language to another, and the rates for these isolated languages spoken by
small non-agricultural cultures seem to fall well within the normal ranges;
certainly there's no sign of them slowing down.

John.


.

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