Re: Why do you say glottochronology is crap?

On Sep 19, 3:52 am, "benli...@xxxxxxxxxx" <benli...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 19, 7:06 pm, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:





"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...

On Sep 18, 9:53 pm, "benli...@xxxxxxxxxx" <benli...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 19, 12:49 pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What kind of time spans are involved? Or are those rates
already normalized to a fixed period?

Brian

The figures cited are not rates but net retention in the modern
languages, from their common ancestor. The time period, by most
indications, would be around 4000 years. I haven't tried to work out
what standard GC would predict. Bellwood (Prehistory of the Indo-
Malaysian Archipelago) says that given the standard GC replacement
rate, and the date for PMP which he sees as supported by the
archaeological evidence, the western languages look more "normal" and
the Oceanic replacement rate must have been accelerated.

I thought the archeologists make claims that are completely
contradicted by the linguistic evidence -- at least John Tyrrell of
Field Museum (who actually took me to lunch to argue about this)
insisted that An _must_ have originated in SEA, the ancient diversity
on Taiwan be damned!

That's a new one on me. But I admit I'm not completely up to date on
this stuff, if it's something that's just come up in the last year or
so.

There are certainly a number of archaeologists who don't like Taiwan
as an AN homeland, and not surprisingly they tend to be negative about
the use of linguistic evidence. Terrell has been at odds with the
linguists for years.

Am I conflating his name with that of Susan Tyrrell, the actress who
lived in the residential hotel where I worked the summer of '72? (I
still see her name now and then -- she never really made it, and maybe
the most significant thing she did was that summer when she was in
Tennessee Williams's *Small Craft Warnings*. The night I saw it, he
himself was playing (reading from a legal pad, actually) one of the
parts -- and the guard wouldn't let us go backstage to greet her (and
meet him). It was her last night in the show, and that very evening
was mentioned in his memoir not long after. But I digress.)

His book was published in the late 80s.

But it's probably irrelevent to what Ross's talking about, which goes
back only to PMP, which presumably existed somewhere in the
indonesian/philipino archipelago, independent of whether PAN was in
Formosa or SEA or somewhere else entirely. No?

Yes.

.

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