Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

In article <1180285900.719794.120670@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Darkstar <darkstar100@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 25, 8:20 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1180073501.701765.282...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

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

It's good to adjust for the margin of recent phonological deviations
by going to a family proto-state. But you're making it look as if
stand-alone isolates couldn't be compared at all.
If English and Spanish had no family realtives, would we never prove
they are related??

I didn't say it was impossible, only difficult. But the relationship
could not be proven solely by finding a list of superficially similar
words, because just statistically, we expect there to be quite a few
of those just by random chance.

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.

It's a long story. You make it sound as if the Swadesh lists were
tottaly unsuitable for anything. But that greatly depends on *how* you
count the potential cognates. Swadesh can't be blamed if a
comparativist is not able to perform phonological analisys. So the 33%
you've mentioned one can only get if one is tottaly impartial or
indescriminate.

As you have been in choosing your "cognates".

1) In practice, there are more places of articulation than "just 3".
You're forgetting vowels, semivowels, glottals as well as differences
in vibrants, spirants, affricates, etc which all sound different to a
discriminate observer.

But you yourself don't make those discriminations, which is why I
ignored them in calculating the chance of accidental similarity:

You claim erku, alto, and iki as cognates. You have a vowel
correspondence set of e~a~i. In other words, you don't care what the
vowel is, as long as it exists.

But even then, you also have oj, tul, and jilan as cognates, showing
that an initial vowel in Armenian doesn't always correspond to an
initial vowel in Burushaski and Turkic.

Similarly, you have aun, ha, and ev, which shows that initial vowels
in Armenian and Turkic may not necessarily correspond to an initial
vowel in Burushaski.

And you have astl, asii, and sulus as cognates, showing that initial
vowels in Armenian and Burushaski may not correspond to an initial
vowel in Turkic.

There is no pattern to your arbitrary groupings. You just find a
handful of words that "look the same", without any apparent thought to
systematicity.

No one's analysis is as dumb as just taking
vowles, labials, coronals and dorsals in the first syllable.

Look at your correspondences for Armenian, Burushaski, and Turkic.

As stated above, you allow initial vowels of any type to correspond to
each other, though this is later contradicted by multiple examples of
initial vowels that do not correspond to initial vowels.

You have labials randomly corresponding to other labial: m~m~b, m~b~m,
v~b~m, b~b~b, p~b~ü.

Ditto for dorsals: k~g~x, k~q~q, k~kh~q.

Your coronals are, in theory, split into different groups, but in
practice, your groups overlap with each other (and of course, are not
consistent within themselves anyway): s~s~j, s~tS~s, j~ts~s, h~t~j,
d~Ø~s, Z~d~t, ts~d~t, l~j~t, l~tr~t, etc.

Plus, you throw in some random ad hoc correspondences that cross your
previous categories, such as h~G~u and j~r~Ø.

In addition, you allow for semantic variation (father/man/person,
blood/meat, sun/fire/burn, etc.), which exponentially increases the
chances of finding accidental similarity: with your lax criteria of
(a) unpatterned similarity within (being generous optimistic) 5
similarity categories and (b) semantic variation up to (being
generously conservative) 2 meanings deep, any given word has a chance
of having an apparent cognate of 1-(1-1/5)^2, or about 36%.

In reality, you have only about 3 similarity categories and allow
semantic variation up to three meanings deep. This results in a
chance of similarity of 1-(1-1/3)^3, or about 70%!

And this is just noise due to accidental similarity that has nothing
to do with true historical relationships. As long as you allow
yourself to use broadly arbitrary correspondences regardless of
conditioning environments or consistency within a language (any vowel
can correspond to any vowel, any dorsal can correspond to any dorsal,
etc.), you're going to have this problem, and you can't escape it
until you find *SYSTEMATIC* correspondences.

2) Moreover, I always adjust for lexical stability. Some lexemes are
particularly stable (I, not, this, that, thou, mother, water, foot,
fauna/flora, numerals),

What do you mean by "stable"? Surely not phonetically stable! Sound
change is regular, so it affects all words equally. On top of that,
the most frequent words of a language are more likely to look
irregular in the long run because they are more resistant to
morphologically regularizing forces like analogy.

while others can be slangy, compound and
semantically vague (fat, good, kill, cloud, rain).

If this means that you intended "stable" to mean "semantically
stable", then you're still wrong.

The demonstratives (this/that) easily rise and fall (e.g., in
Romance), and some languages don't distinguish between "this" and
"that" with single morphemes (e.g., French has ceci and cela, which
are transparently bimorphemic: ce=this/that, ci=here, and la=there).

Words for animals and plants are unstable. Look at the history and
cognates of English deer, hound, sow, worm, ***, daisy, bark, rose,
fruit, flower, bush, forest, etc., many of which do not have the same
meaning as some of their cognates in related languages and/or have
been borrowed.

As for "water", you're wrong here too. There are at least two
distinct IE cognate sets for "water": PIE wed (English water, etc.)
and PIE akw (Latin aqua, etc.).

And you've already been shown to be wrong about numbers.

2) The phonological stability and the proto-phoneme stability must
also be taken into consideration. "Cinco-five" case is so distinct
because phonetic monsters like *qwinqwe are highly unstable. But "dos-
too" is similar because pure initial coronals rarely dissipate.

Coronals change just as much as any other sounds change. Spanish has
[dos], but German has [tsvai], and English has [tu], showing
differences in voicing and in affrication. German d- corresponds to
English T- (denken~think), but in some English dialects, this has
changed to f- (fink). Coronals are particularly vulnerable to
palatalization (t > tS/S as in nature/nation), and we even find pure
coronal to dorsal shifts, such as the Austronesian shift of t to k in
Hawaiian.

If
proto-language had many affricates, clusters and vowels, we couldn't
expect much correspondence. But if it had almost pure ptk-structure,

"Pure ptk-structure" is pretty rare in the world's language families.
Off hand, I can't even think of a major language family that doesn't
have at least one member language with doubly-articulated consonants.

it can survive much longer. For this reason, if you cannot reconstruct
ptk-type phonemes, but have some vague correspondence in vowels,
spirants, and glotal stops, there's your big red flag.

If you have any "vague" correspondence, you have a red flag. If you
can't construct regular, systematic sound changes, you have not
identified a genetic grouping.

3) Prothetic phenomena and other types of inclusion are rare.

Hardly! I'd be rather surprised if there was any language in the
world that had no epenthesis at all in its history.

4) There is supposed to be some typological similarity in grammar,

Which you haven't even looked at in this case!

otherwise you won't be able to reconstruct grammatical morphemes. For
instance, the absence of classifiers in English indicates that it
would be difficult to relate English to Niger-Kongo.

Nonsense. As I understand it, Tibetan does not have classifiers, but
it is definitely related to the other Sino-Tibetan languages (which do
have classifiers).

Further, I seem to recall that Old Chinese did not have classifiers,
and I don't think we would have much trouble showing that Old Chinese
is related to Mandarin.

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.

What you're forgetting is that for infinite changes, you will need
*infinite* amount of time.

I said nothing about infinity. You only need a few attested sound
changes to go all over the map of the consonant system.

Suppose your proto-sound is *t. Then one daughter language could have
the development t > k (like Hawaiian), while another could have t > ts
(like German).

From these, you could have further developments such as k > h (like
Germanic) and ts > s (like Pipil), resulting in a possible
correspondence set of t~k~h~ts~s after a maximum of two sound changes
per language.

Now, just add in a few more changes, and the diversity of possible
correspondents is staggering. Consider the sound changes h > Ø
(Romance), Ø > v or j (Slavic), Ø > ? (German), s > r (Latin), and r >
l (Samoan). This gives us the 11-member correspondence set
t~k~h~Ø~v~j~?~ts~s~r~l, all from no more than four sound changes in
any one language.

Four sound changes in one language's history is a miniscule number in
the time range needed to find a common ancestor for Armenian and
Turkish.

So for a phone to move ten steps away, it
will take ten temporal units,

False. Sound changes do not happen in regularly-spaced time
intervals. You can easily get sweeping changes in just a few
centuries (the Great Vowel Shift in English, the period of
disintegration in Slavic, etc.).

Finding correspondences
is only part of the challenge; the next (and most important) step is
finding the systematic sound changes that create those correspondences.

Okay. I agree. I do have some laws, they're just not sufficiently
elaborated.

That's an understatement!

Nathan

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