Researchers Reconstruct Major Branches in the Tree of Language(santafe.edu)

41 pointsby infodocket5 anni fa11 comments

Researchers Reconstruct Major Branches in the Tree of Language

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/researchers-reconstruct-major-branches-tree-language

6 comments

binrec5 anni fa

> To tap into the core layers of language, Starostin’s team starts with an established list of core, universal concepts from the human experience. It includes meanings like “rock,” “fire,” “cloud,” "two,” “hand,” and “human,” amongst 110 total concepts.

In English, "rock" and "human" are loans and "cloud" is an innovative form.

> For Proto-Japonic, we introduce two distinctly different versions of the wordlist, since there are some significant unresolved problems in its reconstruction where adhering to one or the other solution influences the results of testing – namely, the reconstruction of Proto-Japonic by Sergei Starostin (1991), later adopted for the Altaic etymological dictionary (Starostin et al., 2003), posits an initial *d- for Proto-Japonic, whereas a more conservative approach prefers the phonetic interpretation of the same phoneme as *y- (Martin, 1987, gives no preference to either approach; both Vovin, 2005, and Robbeets, 2005, explicitly reject *d-; see Supplementary Material for details). Ultimately, we have to perform two sets of calculations because of these differences in interpretation of Proto-Japonic phonology.

There's no legitimate reason to follow Starostin here - that reconstruction is based on back-projection of an obviously secondary fortition specific to Yonaguni.

Miiko5 anni fa

Is the "tree" an adequate structure to describe relations between languages? Wouldn't directed acyclic graph (DAG) be better?

IANAL (I'm not a linguist), but my understanding that languages - especially of people living close - do interact and influence each other, and discounting that interaction cannot give the whole picture. That may explain why

> it failed to reproduce a previously published relationship between Korean and the other languages in the Altaic grouping.

Does it makes sense to anybody?

bradrn5 anni fa

These days the preferred model seems to be the wave model [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_model], which is exactly as you describe: changes diffuse out from a central area, and different places receive different changes. This is generally approximated as a tree in the common case where a bunch of changes diffuse out to the same place, then stop.

phreeza5 anni fa

Why would the graph even be acyclic?

devonkim5 anni fa

There’s some evidence that Tamil and Korean is related based upon genealogy as well which may be part of the reason for the failure to account for it in particular although the article didn’t make it clear exactly what the criteria for the relationships are for cognates in the summary. I’m not sure if scholars have delved much into the relationship because the genealogical evidence was only confirmed in the past so many years when it was considered a folk legend for many years.

bradrn5 anni fa

What evidence is this? I’d appreciate a source, given that I’ve never, ever, heard this theory before. Generally, theories about Korean connect it to either Japonic or Altaic, both of which are controversial; meanwhile theories about Dravidian languages generally try to connect it to Elamite or other languages of the area, which is even more controversial. Any close connection between Dravidian and Korean is definitely not suggested by mainstream historical linguistics. (Besides, it contradicts what we know of the history of the region.)

sydthrowaway5 anni fa

Thats interesting, but could it not just be cultural influence? Many English words have a Tamil origin.

Jun85 anni fa

The Altaic “macrofamily” mentioned here is deemed controversial as is the relation between Japanese and Korean. From a cursory research in this topic I think that many discussions (on either side of the debate) are at least partly motivated by national feelings and politics and it’s sometimes hard to discern where this ends and real science begins.

There’s a large body of writing in this topic, one easy starting point is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages. Unfortunately, some in-depth research good resources I have seen accessed in Turkish are not referenced here.

The comparison of Altaic languages with some in Europe, e.g. Finnish and Hungarian was based on some similarities:

  1. Being agglutinative
  2. Having vowel harmony 
  3. Lack of grammatical gender
  4. SOV word order

However, AFAIK, not much evidence could be found at the cognate level.

optimalsolver5 anni fa

A really interesting BBC documentary from the 90s about reconstructing early human languages:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7x7vLM_q50

bluukinuk5 anni fa

Some of the authors of the cited studies are associated with research on the purported Nostratic Language family, a highly speculative theory that is basically only held by a small school of russian linguists. Therefore, this should all be taken with a grain of salt. Macro families are in general highly disputed.

binrec5 anni fa

IMO "macrofamily" isn't a well-defined enough concept not to be disputed by definition. Sino-Tibetan and Afroasiatic are very large and very old, but not as controversial as Altaic; Austro-Tai and Dene-Yeniseian are classic "macrofamilies" in that they're positing old relations between different established language families, but they're increasingly accepted, at least as promising lines of research.

Lexical comparison isn't the standard for demonstrating language relatedness, though. Regular sound correspondences, morphological evidence, and commonalities in irregularities (e.g. English I/me ~ French je/moi or English good/better ~ German gut/besser) are ideal. Quantitative methods range from extremely preliminary to nonsense.

This might be unfair of me, but IMO research from the Greenberg school (the Starostins, Bengtson, Ruhlen, etc.) or the automatic phylogeny school (List, the ASJP, etc.) can pretty much be ignored.