Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

In article <1180073501.701765.282770@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Darkstar <darkstar100@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 25, 4:46 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I mean "Where language 1 has phone X in environments E and F, language
2 systematically has phones Y and Z respectively".

By your tally, you might not be able to prove the relation between
English and Spanish.

Of course you can, because it's been done. Hint: you don't start by
comparing English directly to Spanish. You compare English to the
other Germanic languages to derive Proto-Germanic, and you compare
Spanish to the other Romance languages to derive Proto-Romance. Then
you compare the proto-languages together.

Trying to derive PIE from English and Spanish would be an epic
nightmare!

Have you tried this sort of experiment with your
students?

Yes, using the method outlined above.

Besides, you're forgetting that I'm using Swadesh lists, which are
highly stable,

There are well-known problems with blind adherence to the Swadesh
lists.

Even if the Swadesh lists were totally viable, with the random
tolerance for superficial correspondence you're using, you're
predicted to classify up to a third of *any* list as cognate between
any two randomly selected languages.

Here's the simplified mathematics: you are only concerned with one or
two consonants in the word. To be generous, let's say you're
consistently looking at the first two consonants and require them both
to be similar between languages. You count consonants as being
similar if they have the same major place of articulation (so p, b, m,
f, and v all correspond). There are essentially only three major
places of articulation (labial, coronal, and dorsal), so each word on
the Swadesh list fits into one of 9 (3x3) categories, which means any
given word has roughly a 1-in-9 chance of being in the same category
of phonetic similarity in two languages (this simplistically assumes
the categories are the same size...). Now, since you often only
consider one consonant, you can have as large as a 1-in-3 chance of
finding similarity that arises randomly.

That is, just on articulatory similarity alone, pure dumb luck causes
your method to have 11-33% *accidental* similarity between languages
that absolutely nothing at all to do with real genetic relationships.

not just words off the top of my head (as usually
examplified in that type of practice). [And that Chinese has a reduced
number of syllables which differ only by pitch, so it's particularly

Not Old Chinese. The modern tones are derived historically from
consonants, many of which have disappeared.

suitable for that excercise. Neither that anyone has ever proven that
Chinese is tottaly unrelated to any other European language (such

No such proof is possible. We can prove that two languages are
related, or we can fail to prove that relationship. That is all that
can be said (without a time machine).

lexemes as "ma" for "mother" or numerals might in fact be not so far
away from the rest of the world because they're consistent with a lot
of other families).]

Your idea of consistent does not match the scientific idea of
consistent. Just because two words both start with [m] doesn't mean
they are related.

What you have is, roughly, "Where language 1 has phone X, language 2
randomly has V, W, Y, or Z".

I say, "Where language 1 has phone X, language 2 randomly has Y1, Y2,
or Y3, where X is phonetically related to Y"

That right there is a problem. Many common sound changes
(debuccalization, syncope, apocope, epenthesis, metathesis, rhotacism)
or sequences of sound changes (palatalization of k to tS/ts followed
by simplification to S/s (as in many IE languages); acquisition of a
secondary place of articulation and subsequent loss of the primary
place of articulation (as with Polish *l > w); frication of t to T
followed by a shift in place from T to f due to acoustic similarity
(as in Rotuman); etc.) need not result in obviously related sounds.

In light of the vast range of possibilities that actually occur in
real sound changes even over relatively short periods of time, the
fact that your method can get so many results just with (place of
articulation) similarity should be a big red flag that you're not
doing something right.

Just think for a second about how overwhelming this can actually be:
we know of sound changes that can cause n to correspond to N, N to g,
g to k, k to ts, ts to s, s to z, z to r, r to l, l to w, w to b, b to
p, p to f, f to h, h to ?, ? to t, t to d, d to dZ, dZ to Z, Z to j...
essentially, any consonant in one language could in theory be related
to any other consonant in a different language, given the proper
sequence of sound changes. The classic example of how this can happen
in real languages is the pairs of real cognates English "horn" and
Hindi "singa", or English "five" and Spanish "cinco", which do not
look like cognates at all.

Just because [b] and [m] are both voiced bilabial stops doesn't mean
that they are randomly interchangeable between languages.

They're easily interchangable within the Turkic languages (as well as
within Monglic and Tungus-Manchu) so I figured there's nothing wrong
with this patricular example. It should be part of their respective
proto-languages.

I didn't say "easily"; I said "randomly". In your examples, there is
no rhyme or reason why one language has /b/ but another has /m/. When
such an alternation occurs in languages known to be related, it is
systematic (i.e., rule-governed), not random. Finding correspondences
is only part of the challenge; the next (and most important) step is
finding the systematic sound changes that create those correspondences.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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