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- From: delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott C DeLancey)
- Newsgroups: sci.lang
- Subject: Re: Correlation Lengths of Language Changes
- Date: 12 Jan 1993 22:21:21 GMT
- Organization: University of Oregon Network Services
- Lines: 55
- Message-ID: <1ivg91INNc92@pith.uoregon.edu>
- References: <Jan.8.21.14.52.1993.18293@pilot.njin.net> <C0pHKw.12z@spss.com> <Jan.12.02.44.16.1993.26312@pilot.njin.net>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: darkwing.uoregon.edu
-
- In article <Jan.12.02.44.16.1993.26312@pilot.njin.net> hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) writes:
- >
- >What is it? It has to do with being able to give some general
- >indication of the time scale on which certain phenomenon occur.
- >For example, searching my memory--(I think) some Indo-chinese
- >languages (Burmese, Cambodian ?) were found to be tonal and
- >dumped in the Chinese category. Then some other smart fellow
- >comes along and says; No, they share some features with Hindi (I
- >think.)
-
- Well, I'm not sure how productive most of this discussion has been or
- will be, but let's at least try to get the examples right. Chinese,
- the Tai languages (Thai and Lao and their relatives), Vietnamese, and
- the Hmong-Mien (or Miao-Yao) languages are typologically almost
- identical. They have the same phonological structure, tones, the
- same syntax, the same lack of morphology. They also have a fair amount
- of recognizably common vocabulary. When all this was first noticed it
- seemed obvious that they were part of the same family.
- Turns out they're not. The major clue was the observation
- that the vocabulary they have in common was all "culture items"--
- words for technological processes and devices, agricultural practices,
- etc. This is the kind of vocabulary that is often borrowed, along
- with the process or whatever that it names. "Basic" vocabulary, which
- is less often borrowed--i.e. words for body parts, universal aspects
- of the physical world, family relationships, etc.--shows no cognates
- across any of these languages. In fact these languages represent at
- least three different families--Chinese is Sino-Tibetan, Vietnamese
- is Austroasiatic, Tai possibly related to Austronesian, and people
- are still arguing about whether Hmong-Mien is Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Tai,
- or none of the above. (None of these, nor any other Southeast Asian
- language, has anything in common with Hindi).
-
- >What to do ? Well, based on all the intuition and knowledge that
- >years of study gave you (impersonal you) try to come up with
- >some plausible arguments as to which kind of phenomenon persists
- >over longer time periods and is more resistant to disturbance. This
- >is the relaxation/correlation time idea. If tonality is a
- >more persistent phenomena than word order or propensity to pick
- >up affixation, then it must have been originally more like Chinese.
- >If it's the other way around, then somehow it picked up tonality
- >from Chinese at a later date.
-
- Wrong. What you do is try and figure out whether the common vocabulary
- represents common inheritance or borrowing. We *know* that neither
- tone nor word order is stable enough to be of any use here at all.
- (And none of the languages in question has even the slightest
- "propensity to pick up affixation").
-
-
-
- --
- Scott DeLancey delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu
- Department of Linguistics
- University of Oregon
- Eugene, OR 97403, USA
-