Language as a Clue to Prehistory

[lpetrich]

The Nilo-Saharan hypothesis tested through lexicostatistics: current state of affairs | George Starostin - Academia.edu

Like Greenberg, I follow a «step-by-step» methodology in trying to progressively assemble larger taxonomic blocks from smaller ones. The crucial difference, which becomes more and more important as one goes deeper in time, is that the methodology tries to reconstruct the optimal equivalent for the required Swadesh meaning on each taxonomic level and then proceed to compare it further, instead of allowing to compare any form from any modern language with a wide range of meanings semantically connected to the Swadesh meaning. This is a serious safeguard against «garbage parallels», caused by sheer accidence or by linguistic contacts between parts of the family (e. g. West Nilotic languages of the East Sudanic family with Moru-Maɗi languages of the Central Sudanic family).

Very good methodology. Compare protoforms as far as it is feasible to do so.

He finds groupings East Sudanic, Central Sudanic, Saharan, and Koman-Gumuz.

A deep-level (no less than at least 12,000 years) genetic relationship between ES and CS is potentially explorable — only under the condition that well-elaborated etymological corpora for both ES and CS have been constructed and tested, based on systems of regular correspondences. Exploration of genetic links between ES/CS, on one hand, and Saharan and/or Koman, on the other hand, is likely to be quite unproductive even if reconstructions for Proto-Saharan and Proto-Koman-Gumuz are produced.

ES and CS share some pronouns:
1sg: *a- > ES *a-, CS *ma
2sg: *i- > ES *i-, CS *i ~ *mi ~ *ngi
CS likely had a prefix for them: *m-
1pl *ag- (with a plural marker)
Other possible ones: "two", "who", "fire", "name", "nose"

Of the NS isolates, GS identifies some of them as distant relatives of ES or CS, with three having almost none of the vocabulary list in common with the others: Kuliak, Shabo, and Songhay. Meaning that they diverged well into the Pleistocene.


Roger Blench has also worked on a possible relationship between Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan: Niger-Saharan, though I've also seen Congo-Saharan. He is very careful about that, accepting only a small amount of semantic spread. But he does find several words in common.

 

[lpetrich]

(PDF) Lexicostatistical comparison of Omotic languages with PDF: In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory : Essays in the Four Fields of Anthropology : in Honor of Harold Crane Fleming - FlemingFs_ed_by_JBengtson.pdf

It's a whole book, and I decided to read it and comment on it.

Geography, selected Afro-Asiatic families, and Y chromosome lineage variation
An exploration in linguistics and phylogeography
Shomarka Omar Keita

"The overall pattern is consistent with a model of the first speakers of Afro-Asiatic having emerged in or near the Horn of Africa or in the Nile Valley." with Proto-Semitic speakers moving into Syro-Palestine.

"The evidence is also consistent with the biohistorical Africanity of the base populations of the Horn, Maghreb, and Nile Valley." - North Africa

"The genetic data do not support a model of demic diffusion by farmers from the Levant to explain the Neolithic in northern or eastern Africa, or the spread of Afro-Asiatic languages into Africa (Ehret et al. 2004)."

Which supports a NE African AA homeland.

"It is significant that the words in Old Egyptian for sheep, goat, wheat and barley are not Semitic; nor are they Sumerian, a language isolate."

"The Amazigh (Berber) spoken today apparently shows relatively shallow time depth, based on how little it seems to have differentiated (Newman, personal communication)."

A dental anthropological hypothesis relating to the ethnogenesis, origin, and antiquity of the Afro-Asiatic language family
Peopling of the Eurafrican-South Asian triangle IV
Christy G. Turner II

Diachronic comparisons of dental morphology in North and East African groups shows a marked difference through time in North Africa after the end of the Pleistocene. Further comparisons with archaeologically-derived Near Eastern dental samples suggest that the temporal changes in the North African teeth were due to population replacement or admixture from the north. On this basis, it is further suggested that Afro-Asiatic was introduced into Africa along with the migrating immigrant farmers and herdsmen from the Near East 10,000 to 7,000 years ago.

The opposite conclusion. It's essentially expansion of Neolithic farmers. How does that fit in with the previous paper's genetic data?

Could there be two dispersions? An earlier one that lead to the African populations of AA speakers, and a later arrival of Neolithic farmers from the Middle East?

 

[lpetrich]

Václav Blažek himself wrote
A lexicostatistical comparison of Omotic languages
Me: one of the branches of Afroasiatic, near the Omo River in E Ethiopia

Erosion in Chadic
Herrmann Jungraithmayr

Notes an odd sort of change in Hausa: replacement of many verbs with constructions meaning "to do <something>" (yí <something>). Reminds me of how Chinese verbs are borrowed into Japanese as "to do <something>" (<something> suru). Like ai "love (noun)" and aisuru "love (verb)".

 

[lpetrich]

The problem of pan-African roots
Roger M. Blench

A problem of establishing macrophylic relations in Africa is the existence of common lexical items that are shared between the phyla in ways which do not suggest can they be used as evidence for a genetic connection. This suggests that proposals for large-scale language classification in Africa may be flawed by a failure to consider the transphylic distribution of many roots.

Considering these hypotheses:

1. they are ancient loanwords
2. they are convergent because of common phonaesthemes -- me: sound symbolism
3. African language phyla really are all related
4. they are retained from an early stage of world language diversification

"... a consequence of trawling the literature has been the identification of proposed Niger-Saharan glosses are also shared with Afroasiatic and even Khoisan, which rules them out as evidence for a genetic connection."

"... why should body parts such as “knee” be more convergent than more “head”?"

Checking on the Swadesh list and similar lists, I found that "knee" is a more stable meaning than "head"..

Then asking why aku (African grey parrot) is better-preserved than words for several other kinds of birds. Is it recent to keep AGP's as pets?

After grumbling about some researchers not citing sources,

Semantically, the datasets given below are extremely conservative, since permitting a wide range of comparanda is the most common critique of “world etymologies”.

Great.

He also grumbles about inadequately-researched putative protoforms.

He proposes some trans-African roots, and also mentions some as having cognates outside of Africa:

*kala "crab": Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic, and outside of Africa: Japanese, Korean, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Andamanese, SIno-Tibetan, Kusunda, Dravidian, Indo-European, Basque

The Indo-European ones: Latin cancer, Greek karkinos, Sanskrit karkata

*pur- "to fly, jump" outside of Africa, it's associated with "to flee" rather than "to jump".

Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Kartvelian, North Caucasian, Indo-European, Uralic, Dravidian, Nivkh/Gilyak, Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan

Indo-European: *plew-, *petH-, *(s)piHn-, ...

There is probably no one expla- nation for these forms, but it is striking that so many confirm the general formula k + back vowel + r/l. “Turtle”, “skin” and “knee” have no obvious link and are only joined by the phonaesthetic qualities of their canonic form. Even “cut” and “crab” have kVr- structures although the vowels are more diverse. Exactly how this works is unclear, but it seems that some canonic forms prevent words from undergoing the usual diversification typical of language genesis. Some of these are apparently confined to Africa, while others are more global. Another canonic form, not collated here, is #koro for “round, wheel, circular’, which has cognates across Eurasia, the Pacific and the New World as well as throughout Africa.

Like Indo-European *kwel- "to roll", *kwekwlos "wheel"

RB also suspects that a widespread word for dog was a wander word, traveling with this domesticated animal.

 

[lpetrich]

Some thoughts on the Proto-Indo-European cardinal numbers
Allan R. Bomhard
1 to 10.

Some Old World experience of linguistic dating
J.A. Janhunen
Noting that Eurasian language families are much younger than the populations of their speakers.

Also noting that if one handles Indo-European like how Uralic is often handled:
Anatolian - rest of IE
Samoyedic - Finno-Ugric
IE's reconstructed vocabulary goes down. Also if Uralic is treated like a comb or rake or lawn, like IE, its reconstructed vocabulary goes up. Either way makes IE and Uralic more comparable.

Then noting how FU and Samoyedic have only 2 and 5 in common, how Proto-FU has 2 to 6, and how the branches filled out the rest of 1 to 10.

In any case, the crucial cultural innovations denoted on the Indo-European side by words representing the protolanguage-level of reconstruction (“horse”, “cart”, “wheel”, and others) were unknown to Proto-Uralic speakers, and remained so to Proto-Finno- Ugric speakers.

Proto-Uralic had a word for metal, as PIE did, suggesting a limited acquaintance with metals.

 

[lpetrich]

JAJ then continues with various levels of language family, though the dividing lines are rather arbitrary.

1. Deep level: 8,000 - 5,000 years ago - Neolithic, Mesolithic - Uralic, Indo-European, Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Austronesian
2. Medium level: 3,000 - 1,000 years ago - Iron Age - Branches of Indo-European, Uralic, Sino-Tibetan, also Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Japonic, Yeniseian
3. Shallow level: 500 - 0 years ago - isolates like Ainu, Nivkh/Gilyak, Yukaghir, Korean, members of families like Continental Scandinavia and East Slavic

He expressed skepticism about an Altaic etymological dictionary with 3,000 roots (Starostin, Dybo & Mudrak 2003) -- far too many to plausibly go back to Proto-Altaic, and including words for later inventions like "stirrup".

He is also skeptical about a Nostratic - Sino-Caucasian comparison with 213 items, including 22 pronominal roots. He considers it far too high to be plausible.

 

[lpetrich]

Then the hypothesis of Paleolithic continuity for Indo-European and Uralic -- that involves very slow rates of language change.

There is also plenty of documentation of language change for some places with long recorded histories. Anatolia, for instance.

• Hittite and other Anatolian IE langs, Hurrian, Urartian, Kaskian
• (Bronze Age collapse)
• Greek, Phrygian, Urartian, Armenian
• (Alexander the Great, Roman Empire)
• Greek (dominant), Armenian, Kurdish
• (Turkish conquest)
• Turkish (dominant), Greek, Armenian, Kurdish

Here it was from conquest and socially dominant groups.

He concludes with (1) Quality before quantity. (2) The extralinguistic explanation of expansions. (3) The shallowness of the linguistic map.

Rather disappointing that well-established language families go back only to the mid-Holocene, around 6,000 years ago.

 

[lpetrich]

The languages of northern Eurasia
Inference to the best explanation
John D. Bengtson

• Eurasiatic/Nostratic: Indo-European, Kartvelian, Uralic, Yukaghir, Altaic (with Korean and Japonic), Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut -- (more distant) Dravidian, Elamite
• Dene-Caucasian: hypothesis includes Basque, Caucasian, Burushaski, Sino-Tibetan, Yeniseian, Na-Dene

He will be discussing only those two, and not Afroasiatic or Austric, the rest of Eurasia.

Then noting that Eurasiatic seems to have gotten much more interest among long-rangers than Dene-Caucasian. He then discusses differences between the two macrofamilies.

DC has "lateral affricates", like tl, tl' (ejective), and dl; Eur doesn't. Though in some DC branches, they are reduced to more ordinary sorts of sounds. In some putative DC - Eur cognates, DC tl ~ Eur l (plain lateral).

Proto-Afroasiatic also had them. Here are some putative "Borean" cognates:

• PAA *tlap- "leaf" (Chadic, Cushitic) ~ DC *tl'api "leaf" ~ Eur *lVp'V "leaf, bark" > IE *lewbh- "leaf, rind" > English "leaf"
• PAA *tlV(n)f- "lip" (Semitic, Egyptian, Cushitic) ~ DC *tl'ânpV "tongue, lip" ~ Eur *l(a)pV "lip, to lick" > IE *leb- "lip" > English "lip"

DC also had "postvelar" or "uvular" sounds, like what's written as q in Roman-alphabet transcriptions of Arabic words. like velars like /k/ but made lower down in the through.

For Eur, uvular sounds are posited only from Kartvelian, and that may be an areal influence from North Caucasian. In some branches of DC, they were either merged with velars or lost. AA also has uvulars, though they don't agree with DC in position.

 

[lpetrich]

Then to morphological differences. Some branches of DC have noun classes (N Caucasian, Burushaski, Yeniseian), while some have fossilized prefixes (Basque, Sino-Tibetan). Na-Dene has a different system.

In Eur, however, Uralic, Altaic, and Kartvelian have no gender systems, so it was likely an invention in Proto-IE, likely derived from an earlier opposition of active and stative, and an associated one of animate and inanimate. Proto-AA had masculine and feminine.

Personal pronouns:

• Eur: 1 *m- > *b- ... 2 *t- > *s- ... interr *k-, *m-
• DC: 1 *('a)ngV, *('a)dzu ... 2 ('u)Gwu, ('a)wu ... interr *s-, *n-

The DC 1 and 2 ones were likely suppletive, like IE *egHo-, *me- > English "I", "me"

John Bengtson then discusses "Fruitfulness" - does a hypothesis help us learn new things?

JB proposes words with similar form having related semantics: "bottom" ~ "left (hand)" and "barefoot" ~ "footwear" ~ "to put on footwear"

 

[lpetrich]

Slaying the dragon across Eurasia
Michael Witzel

Myths relating the slaying of a large reptile by a hero or trickster deity appear in many mythologies across Eurasia and beyond, in Polynesia and the Americas. They are an important part of the creation myths. The killing of the monster liberates the dammed up waters as to make the world fertile and inhabitable for humans. Related is the connection between summer solstice and the marriage of the dragon slayer (or a hunter) with a local virgin, ultimately, the marriage of sun and moon, as found from Old India via China and Japan to the Kekchi Mayas.

He proposes that that is a part of "Laurasian" myth motifs; he proposes a split between that and "Gondwanan" myth motifs. I've discussed Laurasian vs. Gondwanan mythology in more detail in: The Cosmic Hunt | Internet Infidels Discussion Board

I think that the detailed storyline of Laurasian mythology was an outcome of having to do a lot of planning to survive the northern Eurasian winters.

Linguistically, these N Eurasian colonists likely spoke Borean, the ancestor of Eurasiatic, Dene-Caucasian, Afroasiatic, Amerind, and maybe also Austric. But Borean may seem almost impossibly speculative. If one's not sure about any of these descendants, than one must be even less sure about Borean.

Trombetti
The forefather of Indo-Pacific
Jonathan Morris

The work of the Italian linguists Alfredo Trombetti and Riccardo Gatti on their hypothesis of genetic relationship between the languages of the Andaman Islands, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania, and the Dravidian languages is discussed in detail. It is shown that Trombetti and Gatti had formulated a coherent precursor of the “Indo-Pacific” hypothesis (Greenberg 1971) by 1906.

Alfredo Trombetti was a long ranger, a macro-linguist who lived a century ago, and his colleagues thought that he was going way too far.

 

[lpetrich]

Otomanguean loan words in Proto-Uto-Aztecan maize vocabulary?
Jane H. Hill

A suite of words for the maize plant, its cultivation and cuisine can be reconstructed for Proto-Uto-Aztecan (PUA), suggesting that its speech community included cultivators. Evidence is presented that some of this maize vocabulary may have been borrowed from an early stage of Western Otomanguean, no later than the breakup of Proto-Oto-Chinantecan. If this episode of contact can be supported, PUA was probably located in the northwest quadrant of Mesoamerica, no further north than approximately Queretaro, at 5000–4500 years ago. The possibility that the PUA/Western Otomanguean resemblances are descended from some ancient common source is considered, but contact seems a better explanation.

Otomanguean is likely 6000 years old.

After getting corn, Uto-Aztecan speakers spread northward, going into what's now SW US.

Historical interpretations of geographical distributions of Amerind subfamilies
Larry Lepionka

Rather difficult to follow, and that paper could have used a summary timeline. But the maps of language distributions suggest very patchy spread.

 

[lpetrich]

Current topics in human evolutionary genetics
Stephen L. Zegura

"A concluding addendum"

Humans were anatomically and culturally modern long before they reached Europe (Wong 2005). Afro-Pacific languages diverged from a Khoisan stock and were the first languages spoken outside of Africa. Indeed, people colonized Australia and many parts of Asia thousands of years before they arrived in Europe (Oppenheimer 2003). The hypothetical major genetic changes invoked by Klein (1999) to explain the supposed sudden appearance of the European Upper Paleolithic as well as human language remain hypothetical and are weakly supported at best, notwithstanding Balter (2005d) and Evans et al.’s (2005) generalizations about the MCPH1 locus. In a similar vein, publication of Diamond’s (1997) Great Leap Forward Model predated much of the African Middle Stone Age evidence that directly contradicts the position that so-called modern behavior essentially began about 40,000 years ago in Europe (Wong 2005). Of the 14 material culture components of modern behavior discussed in McBrearty and Brooks (2000), 13 have now been shown to antedate the 40,000 year threshold with only cave art images appearing after that date (Wong 2005).

 Behavioral modernity - southern Africa: 80,000 years ago.

• Southern Africa: Khoisan
• Central Africa:
  • Central Africa: Congo-Saharan: Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan
  • Eurasia:
    • Southern Eurasia: Indo-Pacific, Australian
    • Norhern Eurasia: Borean: Eurasiatic, Dene-Caucasian, Afroasiatic, Austric, Amerind

This is mainly from population branching. Linguistic evidence is still very weak, with only a few word forms having any plausibility of being well-preserved over all that time.

 

[lpetrich]

A wild 50,000-year ride
Philip Lieberman

The study of languages in prehistory critically involves the ever changing sound patterns of human languages, in short speech. Speech is the default medium for language, and it most likely has a long evolutionary history. However, the fully human speech anatomy which allows us to produce the most common, “universal” vowels [i], [u] and [a], first appears in the fossil record in the Upper Paleolithic (about 50,000 years ago) and was absent in both Neanderthals and earlier humans. Recent genetic evidence also suggests the appearance of the neural substrate that is necessary to regulate human speech within the past 100,000 years. Thus, we have had a wild ride – creating thousands of languages since the Upper Paleolithic start-point for fully human linguistic capacity.

Can Paleolithic stone artifacts serve as evidence for prehistoric language?
Ofer Bar-Yosef

From whether one would need language to describe how to make them and use them.

 

[lpetrich]

The age of Mama and Papa
Alain Matthey de l’Etang & Pierre J. Bancel

Finding them usually well-preserved over the ages of the better-established language families, and with hints of going back further. Even so, there is plenty of variation, and terms of address for parents ("mom" and "dad") are often different from generic words for them ("mother" and "father").

They claim that nasal consonants are often used for one's mother - mama, nana - and oral consonants for one's father - papa/baba, tata/dada. Often with the first consonants omitted - ama, ana, apa/aba, ata/ada - or just one syllable - ma, na, pa/ba, ta/da. I still think that the language-acquisition hypothesis is plausible - a child would be closer to its mother than to its father. Merritt Ruhlen noted kaka for more distant male relatives and aya for more distant female ones. That's more plausible evidence for ancestry, at least if kaka - aya do not often get switched, as sometimes happens for mother and father words (Georgian mama "father" deda "mother"). These are words for more distant relatives, and as a child grows, he/she would both learn to make more sounds and become more aware of more distant relatives.


The millennial persistence of Indo-European and Eurasiatic pronouns and the origin of nominals
Pierre J. Bancel & Alain Matthey de l’Etang

Finally, we propose a conjecture about the fact that, like most other ancient pronominal roots in the world’s languages (Ruhlen 1994b), the m‐ and t‐ Eurasiatic pronouns are built from the same consonants as Proto-Sapiens kinship terms. In our opinion, the ancestral kinship terms have been the precursors of personal pronouns.

Except that these pronoun forms are far from universal: Once Again on the Comparison of Personal Pronouns in Proto-Languages and a theory that explains Eurasiatic *m- and *t- ought to explain the others.

The End of this book.

 

[lpetrich]

Linguistics locates the beginnings of the Austronesian expansion – with Indigenous seafaring people in eastern Taiwan

Proto-Austronesian speakers traveled from South China to Taiwan around 5500 - 5000 BP (3500 - 3000 BCE), around the time of the Proto-Indo-European speakers.

An offshoot population then traveled from there to the Philippines around 4000 BP (2000 BCE). But how was its language, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, related to the Taiwanese Austronesian langs. A traditional viewpoint is that it is coequal with the Taiwanese branches, but is it possible to go further?

Is Malayo-Polynesian a primary branch of Austronesian?: A view from morphosyntax

Our new research provides this missing linguistic evidence, based on an overlooked grammatical affix. It suggests the Amis of eastern Taiwan are the closest relative of the Malayo-Polynesian people (including Māori) in the Austronesian language family.

This finding complements recent research in archaeology and genetics, which also suggests the Austronesian expansion likely began along the east coast of Taiwan. Contemporary Indigenous groups in this part of Taiwan are known to have long-standing seafaring traditions.

...
In our research, we discovered new evidence relating to Malayo-Polynesian’s root. It comes from a special use of the grammatical affix ma in four Indigenous Austronesian languages. Spreading along the east coast of Taiwan, all four languages (Amis, Kavalan, Basay-Trobiawan, Siraya) show a special use of ma that allows the actor of an action to be included in the sentence, for example:

Amis: Ma-curah ni Kulas ku lumaq. Kulas burned the house.

It's absent from other Taiwanese Austronesian langs, but it is common in Malayo-Polynesian:

Tagalog: Ma-sunog ni Kulas ang bahay. Kulas will burn the house.

 Symmetrical voice - Austronesian alignment - a marker on a verb that indicates whether the main noun is for a subject or an object or a location or something else.

Then noting strong seafaring traditions among the speakers of these langs.

Our findings point to a revised linguistic subgrouping more consistent with the socio-historical view that a seafaring community began the out-of-Taiwan expansion.

It coincides with recent findings in archaeology, which put the starting point of the Austronesian expansion in eastern Taiwan. It also aligns with three recent genetic studies. All three reveal a particularly close connection between the Amis and Malayo-Polynesian populations.

• Tracking Austronesian expansion into the Pacific via the paper mulberry plant | PNAS
• Learning from Paleo-Landscapes: Defining the Land-Use Systems of the Ancient Malayo-Polynesian Homeland | Current Anthropology: Vol 59, No 6
• A Predominantly Indigenous Paternal Heritage for the Austronesian-Speaking Peoples of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania - ScienceDirect
• The Ami and Yami aborigines of Taiwan and their genetic relationship to East Asian and Pacific populations | European Journal of Human Genetics

There is also some vocabulary that is shared between Malayo-Polynesian and Amis, though I think that that should be tested with Swadesh-list statistics.

 

[lpetrich]

What wind, currents and geography tell us about how people first settled Oceania

Just look at a map of Remote Oceania – the region of the Pacific that contains Hawaii, New Zealand, Samoa, French Polynesia and Micronesia – and it’s hard not to wonder how people originally settled on these islands. They’re mostly small and located many hundreds to thousands of kilometers away from any large landmass as well as from each other. As our species colonized just about every region of the planet, these islands seem to be the last places our distant ancestors reached.

...
Among the many intriguing aspects of the colonization process is the fact that it occurred in two rapid bursts separated by an almost 2,000-year-long hiatus. Starting around 3,400 BP, the region between the source areas and the islands of Samoa and Tonga was mostly occupied over a period of about 300 years. Then there was a pause in expansion; regions farther to the east such as Hawaii, Rapa Nui and Tahiti were only colonized sometime between about 1,100 and 800 BP. New Zealand, to the west of Samoa and Tonga but located far to the south, was occupied during this second expansion period. What might have caused that millennia-long lag?

• 5200 BP - Taiwan
• (pause)
• 4000 BP - The Philippines
• Southward and eastward spread
• 3400 BP - Samoa and Tonga
• (pause)
• 1200 BP - Eastern Polynesia: Society Islands, Hawaii, Rapanui, New Zealand, visit to South America

The authors speculate about why it took so long to go east of Samoa.

As for that 2,000-year-long pause in migration, our simulation provided us with a few ideas about that, too. The area near Samoa is marked by an increase in distance between islands. And no matter what time of year, El Niño or not, you need to move against the wind to travel eastward around Samoa. So it makes sense that the pause in the colonization process was related to the development of technological advances that would allow more efficient against-the-wind sailing.

But one these people learned how to do it, they could then go very far, out to Hawaii, New Zealand, Rapanui, and South America.

Needing to develop new technologies may have also caused the first pause, from Taiwan to the Philippines.

• How Accurate and Robust Are the Phylogenetic Estimates of Austronesian Language Relationships? | PLOS ONE
• Austronesian language phylogenies: myths and misconceptions about Bayesian computational methods
• Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement | Science with link to PDF at Language phylogenies reveal expansion pulses and... - Google Scholar

Austronesian > (settlement pause) > Malayo-Polynesian > Central-Eastern MP > Eastern MP > Oceanic > Central Pacific > Polynesian > (settlement pause) > Eastern Polynesian

 

[Person19960]

Hey LP, I gave myself homework; I think it's a distraction from my mind's chaos.

I am not going to be able to read the entire pdf. Is this relevant to you or to this thread? It seems weird and wrong but maybe it is I who am... it is definitely I who am weird and wrong, but, what about this? Can you tell me?



In Defence of Linguistics as an Empirical Light of Mario Bunge’s Defence of the Scientific Treatment of Biology

Dorota Zielińska 1

Abstract—Although few linguists currently embrace the empirical paradigm, there are increasing calls for the development of tools for studying language that resemble those in exact sciences. This trend can be observed even in top mainstream linguistic journals, such as the Journal of Pragmatics, as exemplified by Xiang (2017).Today, however, linguists who adapt the methodologies from more advanced sciences face isolation from the mainstream linguistic community. This is because the majority of linguists in philological and philosophical departments remain convinced that the object of their studies is fundamentally different from those studied by physicists. Therefore, they argue that linguistic methodology cannot resemble that used in empirical sciences. As a result, linguistics is often seen as requiring interpretation rather than an explanation, and evaluation of linguistic research is based on acceptance within the scholarly community rather than empirical testing.

1 Dorota Zielińska has an M.S. in Physics and a Ph.D. in English Philology from the Jagiellonian University, Poland. She started her career as a physicist at Fermilab and at Northeastern University, USA. Upon returning to the Jagiellonian University, she focused on adapting the methodology of socio-natural sciences to linguistics in the framework of Mario Bunge. In 2013, she received qualification for a professorship in philosophy of language from MIUR, Italy, and now she continues as an independent researcher. She has established two linguistic laws, formulated within Mario Bunge’s paradigm. One law, referred to in this article, pertains to the ordering of adjectives in Polish noun phrases (Zielińska 2007b). The other law addresses the position of “counterfactual if clauses” in English and Polish sentences and was presented in more detail in Zielińska (2019)

It's part of a longer long pdf that I am NOT reading. This is on Page 206.

https://philpapers.org/archive/MAUMSG-3.pdf#page=206

 

[lpetrich]

I read it, and I've never seen the sorts of opinions on linguistics that author Dorota Zielińska rebuts. Everything I've ever seen on linguistics presents it as an empirical science. Looking at the myths that she cites, some people in academia seem to have simplistic ideas about linguistics and/or excessively restrictive notions about what qualifies as a science. Some of her rebuttals parallel similar rebuttals by philosopher Mario Bunge about the biological sciences.

Myth One: Linguistic rules are non-nomothetic, while empirical sciences are concerned with natural phenomena describable with nomothetic laws.

Nomothetic?  Nomothetic and idiographic

• Nomothetic - interest in general laws
• Idiographic - interest in individual instances

A lot of linguistics involves various general laws and more-or-less general ones.

Myth Two: History plays an important part in linguistics, but not in physics.

Geology-astronomy and biology all involve history.

Myth Three: Linguistics can explain at most the facts which have occurred, while physics both accounts for past observations and makes predictions of future events.

Linguistics is no different from geology-astronomy and biology in that regard.

Myth Four: Physics studies classes of identical objects, while humanities are concerned with idiosyncratic ones (such as the speaker’s meaning, specific pieces of literary works). Since mathematics can be of value only when describing classes of identical objects—but not of idiosyncratic objects, it can be used only in physics.

There are well-developed ways of studying similar but not identical entities.

Furthermore, macroscopic-object physics-chemistry involves study of entities that are never completely identical, even if their smaller constituents are sets of identical entities.

[b[Myth Six: While the physicist uses objectively measured empirical data to create his theories, the linguist must rely on his intuition to interpret a text.[/b]

Most linguistics research is not literary interpretation, though something like it may be involved in trying to determine the semantics of words and grammatical constructions.

Myth Seven: Unlike in physics, linguistic data is never “pure”, and no collection of linguistic data can ever be complete. Therefore, empirical data cannot serve to build a model of language.

Philosophers of science have concluded that there is no such thing as a "pure" observation. Every observation has some theory associated with it, even if unconsciously.

Also, observational selection is a familiar effect - observations are limited to what is observable, even if that gives us a very incomplete picture of what ones wants to study. So one most easily observes the largest asteroids, the largest moons, the brightest stars, the brightest galaxies, ... and not so much any smaller or fainter ones.

That happens with linguistic corpora - those from different sources may have different features, like conversations vs. literary works vs. technical works. But that is recognized by those who work with them, and sometimes exploited, like looking for different authors' stylistic variations.

Myth Eight: It is commonly believed that physical theories can be tested broadly and with great precision, i.e., received physical theories and models give predictions in perfect agreement with experimental results, while—to use Sapir’s words—“all grammars leak”

There are lots of imperfectly-fitting models in common use, often because the data have a lot of scatter.

 

[Person19960]

Thank you for reading the paper and for posting this summary, with links. I appreciate your work, LP.

 

[Swammerdami]

Myth One: Linguistic rules are non-nomothetic, while empirical sciences are concerned with natural phenomena describable with nomothetic laws.

[*]Nomothetic - interest in general laws

I've noticed that some linguists treat their science almost like plane geometry, with immutable theorems. I'll give two examples.

(1)

The location of the language with the highest diversity measure is heuristically identified with the homeland.

This is OFTEN a good heuristic but not always. Some used it to insist that the I-E Homeland must be in S.E. Europe with its huge diversity (Greek, Albanian, Slavic, several extinct languages, even Romanian!) and not near Ukraine (all Slavic). This ignores the effect of geography and topography.

(2) In his brilliant book The Rise and Fall of Languages (introducing his "punctuated equilibrium" model) Dixon writes

There is a tradition of relating proto-languages to what archaeologists recognise as distinctive innovations in material culture.
... [But] Really, linguistic dating should be based on linguistic evidence. There is no way of knowing how long it took to go from the presumed homogeneity of proto-Indo-European to the linguistic diversity of proto-Indo-Iranian, proto-Celtic, proto-Germanic, etc. The changes could have
been rapid (as on Woodlark Island) or slow. We simply don't know.

Actually there is a way to date IE's branches if we disobey Dixon's injunction that only linguists' opinions are relevant. Archaeologists know when the wheeled wagon was invented. Almost all IE languages EXCEPT Anatolian share several words for 'wheel.' The split between proto-Hittite and IE Proper occurred just before the wheeled wagon was invented.