Re: New Methodology on Analysis of Language Change

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:14:24 GMT, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> Joseph W. Murphy wrote:
>>
>> I ran across this last night. Does anyone know any more about the
>> specifics of this and the methodology employed?
>
> Didn't we discuss this here? or was it only at ANE List?
>

Well, if we did, I must have missed it.

> It's basically the same technique used by Ringe et al., which was
> published in the last-but-one *Language* but which I reviewed in the
> 1998 Mair volume on the peoples of Inner Asia; it comes down to GIGO.
> The results depend more closely than usual on the selection of the data
> to be analyzed.
>

I tried to figure out exactly what they were doing but failed. The quest
took me to the "Science" website and I have to pay $10.00 for a day pass to
read the bigger article.

Apparently word order was only one of the 125 features that were programmed
in. Presence or absence of word "gender" was another.

"The researchers made a database of 125 grammatical features
in 15 Papuan languages. This included how word types, such
as nouns and verbs, are ordered in a sentence, and whether
nouns have a gender, as they do in languages such as German
and French."

So now I know 2 features. I'm in the dark on 123 of the others.

> Word order is of course a highly unstable property over time, so I
> wonder why they chose to use it at all.

I might add that grammatical gender is can be unstable too.

>
>> Evolutionary Tools Help Unlock Origins of Ancient Languages
>> Scientific American - 9/23/05
>>
>> 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
>> evolve 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; 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, it
>> 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 geographic
>> 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. "

Is grammar less resistant to change than vocabulary? That seems to be the
assumption underlying the methodology Dunn and his group employed.

Joe Murphy
Boy Linguist
.

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