Comments on: General questions on assessing language evolution

By: Welcome to the 34th edition of Four Stone Hearth « Our Cultural World

Welcome to the 34th edition of Four Stone Hearth « Our Cultural World — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 08:20:36 +0000

[...] Kambiz at Anthropology.net, ‘General questions on assessing language evolution’: [...]

By: Alex Greengaard

Alex Greengaard — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 20:36:59 +0000

This discussion presents an interesting paradigm which scientists encounter in virtually any study: how much can we limit and focus our data pool before the results skew themselves to the desired outcome? Linguists often point to the shortcomings of Greenburg’s (Not Greenhill’s) work in Macro-Historical Linguistics because he picks and chooses from data sets that have the desired result while omitting ones that contradict his theories. Shliemann went looking for Troy; when he found something, it was Troy.
The criticism of this study however may be unfounded as borrowed words would only appear as a form of punctuated equilibrium in the data. How much faster can a word take precident than one that comes with a little imperialism? The removal of possible false positives in this case appears to be just, especially considering the coorilation observed in the true cognates.
If you were aiming to criticize the methodology, perhaps you might take a stab at Glottochronology, as Lyle Campbell has in chapter 6 of Historical Linguistics.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 12:28:17 +0000

I wonder what exactly the criteria are which define which words make it on a “Swadesh List” and which not?

By: Simon Greenhill

Simon Greenhill — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 11:52:28 +0000

Kambiz, Interesting post, thanks! First of all, we've (Mark Pagel's lab, Ruth Mace's research group, as well as my lab under Russell Gray), have been exploring these methods on languages and cultures for, oh, about a decade now. We're very well aware of the problems caused by horizontal transmission of things between languages and cultures. However, in many cases it's not a major problem. In this study, we used data from word lists ("Swadesh lists") which contain 200 items of basic vocabulary. There are two reasons for this - first, this information is easy to get (I've collected over 500 on the site linked above). Second, and more importantly, these basic vocabulary items are thought to be more stable over time. For example, English is a mongrel of a language that has over 60% of its TOTAL lexicon borrowed from French or Romance languages. BUT, only around 6% of the English BASIC vocabulary is borrowed from French/Romance, whilst another ~10% comes from other languages. We also removed any identified loans before analysing the data. So - even in this really stable vocabulary, we see a lot of punctuated evolution. I would suspect, that we'd see even MORE punctualism in extended vocabulary, for the reasons you point to. Finally, as hinted by the paper by Q. that you cite above, we've done quite a lot of simulation work with horizontal transmission - I'm about to submit two more detailed papers on this. My results show that phylogenetic methods aren't actually that messed up by horizontal transmission. If it's NOT systematic, then it's just noise. If it's systematic (i.e. lots of vocab from one language shifting into another) then it's more problematic, BUT can be identified and dealt with. You may be interested in this paper which we just finished which covers this debate in more detail. Cheers, Simon