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From: zohrab_p@atlantis.actrix.gen.nz (Peter Zohrab)
Subject: Re: historical linguistics
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Date: Tue, 14 Feb 1995 17:21:44 GMT
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In article <3hof5k$o74@darkwing.uoregon.edu>,
Scott C DeLancey <delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu> wrote:
> In article <D3y5L0.B10@actrix.gen.nz>,
> Peter Zohrab <zohrab_p@atlantis.actrix.gen.nz> wrote:
> >When a language or language group (say Thai or Tai) resembles one language or
> >language-group ( say Chinese) phonologically, morphologically and
> >syntactically (aka typologically), but does not resemble it in that portion of
> >its vocabulary which is deemed to be least likely to have been borrowed, by
> >what precise chain of logical reasoning does one conclude that the two
> >languages/language-groups are not genetically related, which is what people do
> >seem to conclude -- or by what reasoning do you reach any conclusion at all in
> >such cases ?
> 
> You've not got this quite right, actually.  There are very few
> morphological resemblances between Tai and Chinese.  After all,
> neither of them have much morphology to resemble.

I'm not sure that that is quite fair.  It is plausible, at least, to say that
Chinese and Tai have exactly the same morpheme [0] in a large number of cases
where other languages have different morphemes.

>      In the case--which occasionally arises--where you do have
> strong morphological correspondences between languages, without
> corresponding lexical correspondences, the morphological evidence
> counts more strongly in establishing relationship.  But they have
> to be morphological *correspondences*, not just resemblances.  If
> two languages both have number agreement in the verb, and even both
> have a dual category, that still doesn't count for much--but if the
> number agreement morphemes appear to be cognate, that counts for a
> lot.

Then this is still what I would call
"lexical", content-based comparison, rather than morphological comparison.

>      In the case of Tai and Chinese there are no such correspondences.
> 
> >In other words, given that a large group of languages/dialects of
> >East/Southeast Asia contains striking mutual phonological, syntactic, and 
> >morphological similarities, are these similarities
> >
> >a) accidental;
> >b) borrowed from one another;
> >or c) signs of a family relationship ?
> >
> >Why is there, apparently, such a strong tendency for historical linguists to
> >assume that lexical similarites are signs of a genetic relationship, and that
> >mere "typological" similarities are something with no genetic relevance ?
> 
> Partly because many typological features appear to change very
> easily.  Look at the range of word orders found in modern Indo-
> European languages (SVO in western Europe, SOV in Indo-Iranian,
> VSO in Celtic, and you get the idea that word order is not very
> stable.  More importantly, it's not arbitrary enough.  With only
> six possible orderings of S, V, and O, and only two of them (SVO and
> SOV) really common, the odds of two languages having the same order 
> by chance aren't too bad.  Besides word order, Chinese and Tai are
> morphosyntactically similar in having features like classifiers and 
> no inflectional morphology.  But for any of these features you can find 
> hundreds of languages around the world that share it.  In contrast, 
> when you find that the Thai words for the numerals 3-10 look very like 
> the Chinese, that means something--there aren't hundreds, or dozens, of 
> unrelated languages around the world whose word for '3' is a CVC 
> monosyllable beginning with [s] and ending with [m].  A few matches
> like that can be attributed to chance, but if you have enough of
> them then you have enough arbitrary similarity that it needs a 
> historical explanation, either common inheritance or borrowing.

Right. But, likewise, in the case of Thai and Chinese, there are a whole lot
of phonological, syntactic and (I would say) morphological features that are
shared.  Why should that not need a historical explanation ?

That was my question.
> 
> Scott DeLancey			delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu
> Department of Linguistics
> University of Oregon
> Eugene, OR 97403, USA
> 


