Origins of the Japanese Language.

For those who haven’t yet savoured the best of Moscow-Leningrad rivalry, и на английском языке, here they are: The end of the Altaic controversy, reply.

Thomas Pellard has published a paper (in English, download link at the right) that convinces me, for what that’s worth, that the evidence for *e and *o from Ryukyuan lines up with the evidence for *e and *o from correspondences between Western Old Japanese, Eastern Old Japanese and a bunch of hitherto ignored (!!!) extant Japanese dialects and therefore necessitates reconstructing *e and *o for Proto-Japonic (in addition to the uncontroversial *a *i *u *ə). The Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages dismissed the hypothesis of Proto-Japonic *e & *o, saying the supposed evidence doesn’t line up – but it came out in 2003, and Pellard’s paper dates from 2008, so perhaps Vovin is a little too harsh here.

Yes.

Unfortunately minus273 (0 kelvin?)’s link refuses to open on this computer (I just get a blank screen). Would it be a breach of copyright restrictions to post the text of pp. 121-122?

Moscow-Leningrad rivalry

*lightbulb moment* That’s what this is!

Vovin’s (devastating) assault on the theory

The reply, called “In defense of the Comparative Method, or the end of the Vovin controversy”, is devastating, too. Total destruction all around!

I just get a blank screen

The second link, if that’s the one you mean, leads directly to a large pdf that is better downloaded (right-click, Save As) than displayed in the browser.

Not sure who is in overall charge of this Oxford project but whoever it is sufficiently non-committal to let this piece by Vosin coexist with a piece on “Altaic” by Starostin: http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-35?rskey=U1tzwW&result=2

I appreciate this article’s summary of the evidence for Japonic in the Korean peninsula. I hadn’t known how solid to think of this as being, partly because I associate it with Beckwith and Beckwith is so Beckwithy. I was aware of some sort of controversy around his Koguryŏ: The Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives, but Vovin explains that it’s a controversy over whether the language should be called Koguryŏ, not whether it was there and was Japonic. Per Vovin, the consensus seems to be that 2,000 years ago, the Korean peninsula was entirely Japonic-speaking, with the linguistic ancestors of the Koreans north of there in Manchuria, only later invading and completely replacing the language, just like the Magyars did in Hungary.

Since apparently Beckwith’s Koguryŏ language is limited to the Hangang basin, maybe we should just call it Hangang rather than Koguryŏ or “pseudo-Koguryŏ”.

David M: About your linked post:

In my opinion, the writer (like many others) misses a crucial element, that of comparative morphology. The search for lexical-phonological correspondences can only be done safely with languages which stand a good chance of being related, not just through a vast amount of similar vocabulary, but first of all through similar morphological structures. For instance, over the centuries a number of European travellers to India had noticed the evident similarities between some Indian words (e.g. numbers, kin terms) and those of some European languages (especially Latin and its descendants), but the idea of a genetic relationship between all those languages eventually rested on the very similar verb structures of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. Before much work was done on reconstructing a Proto-Indo-European vocabulary of hundreds of lexical items (something still going on), many linguists were busy contributing to comparative grammars of various language families (Germanic, Celtic, etc). It has long been observed that a study of Modern English focusing on vocabulary would place the language in the Romance family, while the structure of its oldest verbs (now called “irregular”) places it squarely among the Germanic languages. In Campbell’s work on American Indian languages, his chapter on “the methods” is mostly devoted to errors committed by others, which would easily have been avoided with careful attention to morphology. It is true that “anything can be borrowed”, but some things are a lot more likely to be borrowed by others, and morphological elements are much less borrowable than single lexical items. Considering English again, the language has borrowed (= adopted) large numbers of French and Latin words, along with many others from a variety of languages, without adopting the structures and alterations that those words were subject to in their original languages (the noun plurals maintained in words like “bacteria” or other specialized borrowed vocabulary have not been generalized to native English words, for instance).

Some people think that “morphology” is another word for “typology”. It is not. Typology deals with generalizations, many of which can apply independently to vastly different languages (e.g. “has grammatical gender”, “uses prefixation more than suffixation”, and such) but morphology deals with what creates and modifies the words of a language. Morphological study is bound to consider actual words, which have both a form (or several forms) and a meaning, so that it unites the phonology and the lexicon. It is therefore an indispensable preliminary to the search for “lexical-phonological correspondences” which should precede any attempt at proto-language reconstruction.

Sorry if I repeat myself, I have written very similar paragraphs before!

j: Thanks for your reply.

About English as a Romance language, this has actually been proposed! but of course not seriously accepted.

You are right to say that English can be shown to be Germanic simply from a Swadesh list-type compilation, and this is true also for French relative to other Romance languages, but in each case the families (Germanic, Romance) are quite obvious, not just in their basic vocabulary but also in their morphosyntactic structure (complex verb forms, noun genders and agreement, and more). Such families are obvious even to untrained observers, but Indo-European is not, and has needed much more work to get accepted by scholars (and some details of reconstruction are still hotly debated).

@SFReader: Around 2000, I heard a talk by Martin Nowak, the first head of theoretical biology at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. (He joked that Oppenheimer had originated the idea for a theoretical biology program there when he was director, and it only took until 1998 to get it up and running.) He talked about his mathematical model for the evolution of language, and he specifically pointed out that language was learned from the surrounding population, not inherited, and models ought to reflect that. Then, however, he exhibited a model that was maddeningly crude in that regard; although he described the algorithm in atypical terms, it did not actually differ mathematically from the kinds of algorithm used to describe the passage of genetically inherited traits.

What I learned from that was that it’s straightforward to see that language evolution does not proceed by the same mechanisms and probably should not be described with the same tools as organismal evolution; but actually implementing that difference in a meaningful way is surprisingly difficult.

Irish and English have very different word order, so we can’t say that. Clearly in Irish case, they learned foreign language and then stopped using native language without much mixing in the process.

Case of Gaulish and Latin is different, they had same word order and pretty similar grammar. Gauls could continue speaking their language just supplanting Latin words for Gaulish ones and tweaking grammar here and there to adjust to Latin norms.

There is that strange term “convergence”. Never understood what it really meant in language evolution context, but perhaps Gaulish and Latin did “converge” to form Vulgar Latin ancestor of French. Admittedly, Gaulish did most of the converging, being language of the conquered and all that, but Latin changed a lot too.

And at that point, the language people actually spoke would have been characterized today as a mixed language, contact language or maybe a pidgin.

That’s not how language death happens today. Instead, all over the world, bilinguals keep their two languages almost perfectly apart and speak only one of them to their children. How closely related the languages (or dialects) are has very little bearing on that.

Even Viennese mesolect is such a case. It formed a generation ago when parents half-consciously tried to create a colloquial register for a standard language that previously didn’t have one (anywhere in Austria), and then spoke that to their children.

Organisms don’t “borrow” so much from each other (lateral = horizontal gene transfer) as languages do. But they converge a lot more than languages do (convergence in the biological sense: evolving the same features as adaptations to the same selection pressures, basically environments). The outcome is the same. The algorithms used for phylogenetics in biology don’t and can’t distinguish convergence from lateral gene transfer, and they don’t need to; I can’t see why they would need to do that in linguistics.

On the importance of morphology…

Sure, sometimes you’re in luck. Sometimes you come across whole systems of inflection where cognate-looking affixes (or ablaut grades) have cognate-looking functions. It is extremely unlikely that such systems – the affixes and the functions; not every language has a “masculine accusative singular” in the first place – would be borrowed wholesale. This is what makes Afroasiatic “just plain obvious” even though it’s got to be about twice as old as IE (whose age has often been proclaimed as some kind of absolute limit of the Comparative Method, for thoroughly illogical reasons) and even though the reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic hasn’t actually come very far (there are two etymological dictionaries, but they disagree a lot – see link in the link –, and in one of them you can see the way Arabic dictionaries are organized, i.e. the authors went through an Arabic dictionary word by word and looked for cognates for each entry).

The reason PAA reconstruction hasn’t progressed more lies in the fact that many extant languages remain poorly known to science. Consequently, there’s no Proto-Chadic reconstruction yet, only a recently achieved Proto-Central-Chadic one, and it’s not even quite clear what belongs to Cushitic and what doesn’t.

But how to compare different examples of such systems remains an open question. Fortescue’s Uralo-Siberian comes to mind. Without etymologies or clear attempts to establish regular sound laws, he compared Proto-Uralic and Proto-Eskimo morphology and found they match up pretty nicely if you shuffle the zeroes around, i.e. if you assume that (in one branch or another) certain suffixes were reinterpreted as marking previously zero-marked categories, leaving the ones they previously indicated now zero-marked. In the end, nobody knows how to evaluate the probabilities of such shifts.

Likewise, the Athabaskan languages all have pretty much the same polysynthetic verb template, and the Yeniseian languages (as far as known) all have the same other such template. How do we compare the two? How do such systems change? Is there something that determines, or influences, the “word” order in je te ne le que other than externalization of inflection? Work on this complex of questions seems to be just beginning.

And sometimes you’re out of luck altogether. There are lots of isolating languages in the world.

Importantly, languages don’t need to be isolating to make morphological comparisons difficult. For example, the Moscow School thinks that Proto-Altaic was a Japanese-type language, where noun morphology consists of a bunch of free-floating clitics: they’re there, they’re sometimes cognate with clitics or content words elsewhere, but they don’t form a definable system, and different ones are grammaticalized to different extents. (Also, their shortness and irregular reductions make accidental matches more likely; this holds for definable systems as well, but in the absence of a system it’s harder to use meanings for cognacy judgments.) Now, perhaps this reconstruction is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the Moscow School simply hasn’t looked hard enough. But what if not?

Sometimes, languages look like as if their last common ancestor had a neat system of inflectional morphology, but it didn’t. Hungarian and the Finnic languages have very large case systems, where moreover many of the cases have the same or similar functions. But these systems aren’t cognate: in 11th-century Hungarian, the ancestors of many of today’s case endings were free-standing postpositions (which didn’t, for example, participate in vowel harmony). Proto-Uralic is nowadays thought to have had just a few cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, IIRC), plus various postpositions and adverbs that have become case endings in various branches, creating cases that previously didn’t exist.

Indo-European is more similar to the Uralic case than people used to think. Several cases are more or less trivial to reconstruct, but the system has a fuzzy fringe; reconstruction leads to case-like endings that attached to some nouns but not others, for example.

In sum, if you have morphology available, use it; if you think you don’t, look again*; but in most cases morphology on its own isn’t as helpful as many people have proclaimed. As in biology, I recommend a total-evidence approach.

* Sino-Tibetan appears to be such a case. Today this really large family contains languages of every morphological type. Some of the inflectional/polysynthetic morphology that some branches have is transparently recent, and it used to be widely thought that the family has a basal dichotomy into Sinitic (largely isolating) and Tibeto-Burman (which has, among others, isolating subbranches like Lolo-Burmese and branches with sparse morphology like Tibetan), so people used to think Proto-Sino-Tibetan was more or less isolating and pretty much gave up on morphological comparison. However, the position of Sinitic has become very shaky; and in the last few years Guillaume Jacques & team have been showing that some of the polysynthetic morphology of the Kiranti languages in Nepal looks cognate to some of the polysynthetic morphology of the Rgyalrong languages on the other side of the Tibetan plateau. Perhaps PST was polysynthetic, then, and we should expect traces of PST morphology in all ST branches.

Yeah, of course.

(…This is not sarcasm.)

If we take the strict definition, of L1 transmission from parent to child

That’s the child’s L1, not necessarily the parent’s.

its about the community not the individual; people inherit their L1 from peer group not parents

Vovin mentions a Korean lexeme OK *YEri > MK :yey ‘Japanese’ (given as an example of lenition of /r/). Anyone know something about this? I guess it’s not shocking that Old Korean had a root for Japanese. One wonders if the same exonym was ever applied to Japonic speakers in the peninsula, or if there was an additional root with that meaning. Does :yey have any known etymological relationship to other Koreanic vocabulary? Does it have any reflexes in modern Korean? And what does the : signify?

I am pretty sure that YE in OK *YEri is Sino-Korean reading of 倭 “Wa” – old Chinese name for Japan (which supposedly meant “dwarf”)

I always imagine Yale as having a Committee for Ungainly Romanizations.

Yale Cantonese romanisation is quite nice, if I’m recalling correctly.

@Piotr Gąsiorowski: Whether kids learn language primarily from adults or peers is not by any means universal. It depends on who is around to talk to a child at a given point. With my eldest, there was a very clear point at which she went from learning mostly from her parents to learning from other kids. It was obvious, since she started learning new words with a different accent!

Mocked a monk, no less.

…Wow. That argument. I feel lost in the sheer philosophy.

One says do not trust any conclusion that you cannot reliably reproduce no matter who drew it first, and even if that criterion is fulfilled, do not trust but test, or look for ways of testing that haven’t been imagined yet.

That way lies madness, though.

I do not recall the specific details of that particular argument anymore (someone told it to me once, many years ago), but TL/DR – how would you know (or, indeed, test) that World War II actually happened (for reasonable values of “actually”), if you weren’t there to see it?
(If you happen to be over 70 years old and were there to see it, consider the same question about World War I or the Napoleonic Wars.)

this is why the methods of history are scientific but the conclusions are not. the statement “england and germany were at war” is inherently a conclusion, not a fact, because it is not reducible to a collection of statements about individuals.

supposedly incorrupt corpses of catholic saints. st. bernadette of lourdes (d. 1879) is a masterpiece of the embalmer’s art, unless indeed she is a wax model. the others are plainly either embalmed or (in earlier days) mummified. also many of the pictures are not closeups.

Huh, I grew up Catholic and didn’t even know that.

Perhaps you were also speaking in prose all your life without knowing it.

Perhaps you were also speaking in prose all your life without knowing it.

I don’t see how that compares? I’m just saying there’s a lot of Catholic tradition (and dogma) that isn’t taught to everyone.

I don’t see how that compares?

If you reread your sentence you essentially said that you grew up a Catholic without knowing that you were a Catholic. 😉

Back to the history of Japanese, there is supposed to be some admixture of Polynesian (or perhaps Taiwan aboriginal languages, which belong to the same large family). Does anyone have more to say (or recommend) about it?

history of Japanese, there is supposed to be some admixture of Polynesian

Wasn’t Austronesian substrate theory debunked long time ago?

Recently I’ve encountered another version of it which goes like this:

A claim was made in Chinese chronicles that people of Wa (old name for Japan) were descendants of immigrants from ancient Chinese state of Wu (located on lower Yangtze). The state of Wu was based on conquest of the indigenous Dong Yi peoples who were Austronesian according to some theories.

So these partially sinicized Austronesians went to Japan and gave the Austronesian substrate to Japan.

Sounds very far-fetched, I know. But certainly better than supposed colonization of Japan by Taiwanese aboriginals.

SFR: supposed colonization of Japan by Taiwanese aboriginals.

I did not mean to suppose such a thing. Among all the islands and peninsulae in the Northwest Pacific there are many places that can be reached by boat, intentionally or not, so voyages between those lands probably occurred many times.

Sakiyama Osamu published a book this year called The Formation of the Japanese Language: Linguistic Genealogy and Language Mixture (日本語「形成」論：日本語史における系統と混合) in which he argues that Japanese is a mixture of Austronesian and Tungusic. I haven’t read the book yet, but Sakiyama isn’t a crank; he co-edited The Vanishing Languages of the Pacific Rim for OUP. I think the mainstream position on Austronesian admixture is that it’s an intriguing idea but the evidence adduced so far isn’t sufficient to convince.

Kumar’s paper is unfortunately hampered by bad Japanese etymology. Skipping straight to her table:

– I have never heard of an OJ word /nai/ meaning “court lady”; this would be quite an unusual OJ word because its second mora does not begin with a consonant (perhaps it might be something to do with Sino-Japanese 内 /nai/ “inside”? definitely not OJ in that case though)
– /warawa/ (in OJ actually /warapa/) originally meant a young child; “court dancer” is a much later and very much secondary (metaphorical) development
– /sapa/ does not mean “rice field,” it means “wetlands.”
And so on.

Never mind, I found the reference and table of contents on the internet. The book does circle the Pacific.

I have learned from a brief reading of the article that I should not like to be on the opposing end of Vovin’s strong convictions, regardless of respective scholarly merits.

David M.: can’t topicalization and nominalization have something to do with each other?

It would seem like an obvious possibilty for reanalysis. I can imagine it happening with fixing or unfixing of the word order. Or both may develop from an agent (“nominative”) marker. Or from a marker of definiteness.

(He said, introspectively. It would be stronger if I could back it up with actual examples from somewhere in the world. Hm…)

Then, in North Germanic, it jumped back to the nouns and became the definite article.

Huh? I haven’t heard that before. The explanation I know is merger with the deictic pronoun in a, uh, topicalized sentence. Maðr, hinn … “Man, he …”

This is actually the process that made me think of the possible paths for reanalysis above. The deictic could be called a marker for the topical noun. Topicality of a noun is pragmatically close to definiteness, when knowledge of the topical noun is taken for for granted, and the marker gets reanalyzed as a definite article. But I can easily imagine the function as a topic marker to be extended as well.

Per the OED, -ing was initially an umlaut variant of -ung used with verbs in -ian such as causatives; later, -ung levelled to -ing for whatever reason.

While one can imagine a nominalizer becoming a topic marker, such very reasonable semantic leaps are at the heart of every single bad long-range hypothesis. Once you have a good handle on a language relationship, you can start exploring semantic changes. Until then, it’s surprisingly easy to connect a pair of unrelated etymons using perfectly innocent semantic laxity.

Y, Trond: I agree with both of you, but there are different kinds of grammatical morphemes. The ones that seem to have pragmatic meaning, especially if short and occurring at different places in the sentence, are easy to borrow and also easy to misunderstand, so that the occurrence of similar such morphemes in different languages is not necessarily an indication of those morphemes being cognate within the systems of the languages in question: one language may have borrowed it from the other, or both may have borrowed it from yet another language.

In several Amerindian languages in Spanish-dominant countries there are a number of morphemes obviously borrowed from Spanish which indicate articulations in the sentence and also depend on the speaker’s intent, opinion judgment, etc, such as variants of porque ‘why, because’ which had no exact native equivalents (not that those languages had no way of expressing the same sentence meanings, but perhaps in less obvious ways). So the same Spanish words can occur in languages which are not related at all, and their meanings are not always exactly the original Spanish ones.

On the other hand, similar grammatical morphemes that occur closer to the stem of a noun or verb and are less dependent on the speaker’s personal intent, judgment, such as plural indicators, etc are more likely to be cognate.

It’s not that a nominalizer couldn’t possibly have evolved into a topic marker, it’s that there doesn’t appear to be any reason to believe it did other than the two extremely common phonemes it contains. “PIE *-n- evolved into a lot of different things, and who’s to say it mightn’t have become a topic marker if topic-comment had been a thing in PIE at the time?” just isn’t very persuasive.

If you already believe that Japanese and Korean are related (or you don’t know but consider a relationship the null hypothesis because of geography or whatever), then sure, this example can be accommodated in your theory. But if you’re content to assume that the two languages are unrelated until someone convinces you otherwise, then the two *pa=s probably won’t impress you much as evidence in that direction.

It’s not that a nominalizer couldn’t possibly have evolved into a topic marker

That’s how Vovin’s article presents it, though. It reads as if the very idea is preposterous.

convinces you otherwise […] probably won’t impress you much

Who cares about my subjective emotions? This *pa is one piece of evidence out of dozens that may or may not add up to robust support for any particular hypothesis. In my dataset for phylogenetics of early limbed vertebrates, I can show you plenty of features that impress me personally and yet don’t add up to a strong signal.

There is no threshold between “proven” and “unproven”, as Vovin’s article strongly implies. Count the assumptions requires by each hypothesis, apply Ockham’s razor, bootstrap or jackknife the result if you like, and then proportion the strength of your conviction to the strength of the evidence. 😐

are related

The null hypothesis should be that all known natural languages are related. The question is instead what the closest relative of Japonic is, and what the closest relative of Korean is. For that, you need to have at least four branches in your investigation – there’s only one mathematically possible unrooted tree that connects two (or even three) points.

(It has been repeatedly pointed out that, as genetics shows, there have never been few enough people to constitute a single language community under hunter-gatherer conditions. But this only shows that the last common ancestor of all known languages can’t have been a modern-style language. Perhaps it was more like this?)

The null hypothesis should be that all known natural languages are related.

Surely this is not the mainstream view among linguists.

Reading their critique of Greenberg, for example, one gets a distinct impression that they believe America was colonized in 2000 separate waves of colonization with each wave speaking their own language completely unrelated to others.

America was settled 15 thousand years ago, so Amerind would not be much older than the supposedly “plain obvious” Afro-Asiatic.

I sense double standards here.

Proto-Indo-European is 5000-6000 years old. America was settled 15000 years ago.

Dividing 15000 by 5000 means that in America there were three layers of language families comparable to Indo-European in age.

After finding American analogues of proto-Indo-European (spoken 5,000 years ago), we need to reconstruct American analog of Nostratic (spoken 10,000 years ago) and then American analog of the ancestor of Nostratic (spoken 15,000 years ago).

That’s ought to be enough to cover all Amerind languages no matter how divergent they are from each other now.

Are there any specific linguistic features which really distinguish them from other Amerind languages or was the decision to separate them made on historical or racial grounds?

AFAIK, Sapir was good at the former and at avoiding the latter.

The MCRA of humans was a modern-style human,

Yes…

indeed only a few thousand years ago if current ideas are right.

No, a few tens of thousands, around 100,000, with a bit of admixture from earlier-diverging lineages.

But I take your point to be that we have always been in a (pre-)modern language condition.

I’m not sure what you mean.

I haven’t done the math, but I think if we count all our ancestors, the most recent is only a few thousand or tens of thousands of years ago. If we *only* count the maternal-most ancestor in each past generation [so we only count 1 parent, 1 grandparent, 1 great-grandparent, etc.], we still reach Mitochondrial Eve in a few hundred thouand years. If we go back to the dispersal of Homo, we have to go back a few million years. I think H. erectus reached Java at least 1.8 million years ago.

There’s evidence of human habitation in the western continents well before Clovis. Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Monte Verde, Pedra Furada, etc.

But linguists don’t give up on classifying Eurasian languages, because of the time depths of 1.8 million years for settlement and 40 thousand years for the Upper Paleolithic. Major families spread in the last several thousand years. So why should they give up on classifying American languages?

None that I’m aware of.

SFReader seemed to imply that it doesn’t make sense to reconstruct language families in the Americas because they were colonized 15,000 years ago. (or 20,000)

And that would probably be too far.

But the language families in a region don’t have to be anywhere near as old as human colonization of that region. For example, Austronesian isn’t 1,800,000 years old. So if Amerind is a single family, it doesn’t have to be 20,000 years old, or 13,000 years old arriving with Clovis. It could use a good explanation for more recent spread, especially since different parts of the Americas have different agricultural systems.

David M.:

Has Rohde 2003 been discredited? Admittedly, it’s based on simulations, but the argument seems realistic to me. It’s essentially like the “Europeans all descend from Charlemagne” argument I’ve pushed on this blog, but makes rather minimal assumptions about migration leading to a MRCA (via all paths) of about 5kyBP and an identical ancestors point of about 8kyBP. It grants that there may be a small number of truly uncontacted peoples that aren’t within the MRCA. Note that the all-paths MRCA should be expected a priori to be much more recent than the mtMRCA or the yMRCA, which trace ancestry through only one possible path each, MoMoMoMo… and FaFaFaFa….

In the same way that the human all-paths MRCA was part of a population, so the MRCA of current languages was probably part of a population of languages without surviving descendants. So there’s no reason to think there was anything unusual about it (what you might call the linguistic cosmological principle).

Now if we go back from the language MRCA to the very first languages spoken, those had to be spoken by people whose ancestors did not speak, and as such, they might indeed be typologically very unusual, a sort of Ediacarian of languages. But even so, there would be enough of the speakers that they couldn’t all be speaking exactly the same thing.

My understanding is that even if Afro-Asiatic is accepted in broad terms, there’s still a lot to sort out about the criteria for membership.

I agree with Theil n.d. (but after 2006) that the evidence for Omotic < AA is unconvincing.

Brett: No, I don’t think so. The anthropic principle is that the universe is the way it is because if it weren’t so, we wouldn’t be here to observe it. What I am talking about is a kind of uniformitarianism, and says that now is a typical time (and so is language-MRCA time) and here is a typical place.

The most egregious case of this in African linguistics that I’ve come across is the perfectly serious suggestion that because the neighbouring Songhay and Mande languages show a good many similarities (they do), this is good evidence that Niger-Congo (of which Mande is, at the most optimistic, the most divergent branch) is related to Nilo-Saharan (of which Songhay, if it belongs at all, is certainly no core member.) Where to begin?

Nile valley is tiny, how many languages could be there to start with?

Yes, of course, transitive inferrence of relationship is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. And there are also the risks of failing to count a weak link as sufficiently weak somewhere along the way, or in thinking that the order of inference equals order of descent, or in ignoring key evidence that fails to be found in a “middle” link. Regardless it has been relied on quite a bit in putting together the world’s language families in the first place. No one approaches a potential family of 100 languages by running 4950 individual pairwise relatedness studies. Usually not even by picking one definitive member and running 99 studies comparing everything to that.

Indo-Europeanists may be more familiar with this when it involves more recent language varieties: we can safely ignore Modern Swedish or Modern Sinhalese or Modern Sardinian in IE comparison, if we already have the lemmas in hand that they descend from Old Norse, Old Indian and Latin.

—

On the topic of “the real question” re: if Korean and Japanese are related, the question of if they are closely related can be reduced to the issue of validity of cognates — if we assume that evidence of relatedness decreases in a stable fashion time. I’m not sure if that holds, though. It’s possible for common Korean-Japanese material to be actually e.g. earlier Altaic stock that has just gotten replaced by foreign influences in the steppe branches (and “Altaic” can be here read as either a family or as an earlier convergence zone, too).

“Monogenesis, therefore no natural language can be entirely unrelated to any other.”

As a hypothetical statement that is obviously true: if all languages living and extinct have a single ancestor (monogenesis), then no language can be entirely unrelated to any other. However, all living languages can be related without monogenesis necessarily following: there may be extinct languages that are utterly unrelated to any extant language. So there are two different questions of common origin here, and it’s important to sort them out mentally rather than falling into the trap of “MRCA language = first language”:

1) Some living languages are unrelated to the rest (not just not provably related, but actually unrelated).

2) All living languages are related, but some extinct languages are not related to them.

3) All languages living and dead have a common ancestor.

I think a more useful null hypothesis in cases like this is “There is no discernible genetic relationship between Language A and Language B.” Whether that’s because they actually are unrelated, or because the relationship is so far back that no shared traces of the common ancestor remain, is irrelevant.

Seconded – and it really should always be the null hypothesis, excluding cases of (near) mutual comprehensibility (e.g. Russian and Ukrainian), and/or known common descent (e.g. Spanish and Italian).
Fortunately, there is usually a large amount of remaining evidence if the languages actually are relatively closely related (which is how Hittite and Tocharian were found to be Indo-European).

(On a complete tangent: I wonder if it would be possible to reconstruct a “Proto-German” or “Proto-Italian” language from modern dialects – and if so, then what would it look like?
Bonus point: same thing for “Proto-English”. I wonder if there’s enough remaining internal evidence to reconstruct the Great Vowel Shift…)

For what it’s worth, I’m also in the camp of “all modern* non-constructed** spoken*** human**** languages likely share a common ancestor within the last 100,000 years or so, but outright monogenesis is extremely unlikely”.
(In particular, if there ever were any Neanderthal languages, it is almost certain than none of them left descendants today.)

*) that is, the ones that were still extant at any time in the last four millennia or so
**) come to think of it, it’s theoretically possible – though fairly unlikely – that some modern languages actually derive from a Damin-style constructed language, in which case they would not technically belong to the same universal lineage
***) the history of sign languages is confusing, and at least one of them is known to have developed by itself
****) i.e. Homo sapiens – that is, excluding both animal languages and the unlikely case that any members of other Homo species survived to the “modern” period

To distill further: what one is trying to show is that two languages are relatable.

Showing that two languages are related is often impossible, for lack of evidence.

On the other hand, since New Guinea has a particularly high Denisovan admixture, for all I know there’s some unrecognizable trace in some Papuan languages, of languages spoken a long time ago by Denisovans.

That’s how Vovin’s article presents it, though. It reads as if the very idea is preposterous. … There is no threshold between “proven” and “unproven”, as Vovin’s article strongly implies.

This is just a tone argument. I agree that Vovin can tend towards the polemic, but so what? It doesn’t invalidate his critique of the evidence.

That’s not a tone argument. I’m pointing out what looks like a basic misunderstanding of science theory. I don’t think Vovin sacrificed precision to polemic tone, seeing as he mistakes as a phylogenetic classification (later in the article) when de Boer occasionally writes “Gairin dialects” instead of “dialects with a Gairin-type tone system”.

And yes, all of this is irrelevant to his critique of the evidence. That’s not what I was talking about in that paragraph. 😐

This is less a null hypothesis than the elucidation of an axiom: “Monogenesis, therefore no natural language can be entirely unrelated to any other.”

That’s not an axiom, it’s a hypothesis… 🙂

I think a more useful null hypothesis in cases like this is

Null hypotheses are usually boring, unsatisfactory, useless.

That’s a question, but it’s not the question in this case, which is “How good is the evidence that these words and morphemes are actually cognate?” That is, not just “How likely is it that Japanese and Korean related?” but “How likely is it that they are related in this way?”

That’s an easier question that should be answered first, sure; but it seems to me that the article jumps from the second to the first question, trying to use the second to answer the first.

On a complete tangent: I wonder if it would be possible to reconstruct a “Proto-German” or “Proto-Italian” language from modern dialects – and if so, then what would it look like?
Bonus point: same thing for “Proto-English”. I wonder if there’s enough remaining internal evidence to reconstruct the Great Vowel Shift…

That would be interesting!

poskol’ku arkhantropy, obladaya uzkim pozvonochnym kanalom, ne mogli proiznosit’ pomnogu slogov za odnu repliku

Am I understanding this right? Because of a narrow vertebral canal they couldn’t pronounce many syllables in short order? What does the width of the spinal cord have to do with…?

What does the width of the spinal cord have to do with…?

Svetlana Burlak believes that due to narrow vertebral canal hominids couldn’t control their breathing to the extent needed for uttering several syllables in a row, so they had to manage with one syllable per word.

I am not knowledgeable enough on hominid anatomy to judge how crazy it is.

Chinese

I am sure she would say that the Chinese acquired this feature from native peoples of central or southern China who in turn acquired it from Paleolithic inhabitants of the area who were probably descendants of Denisovans and Asian hominids (she doesn’t specify who they were exactly, but I take it to mean various sub-species of Homo Erectus who survived in East Asia for a long time after they went extinct elsewhere)

The idea that a narrow vertebral canal means you can’t control your breathing accurately strikes me as having no conceivable justification in the real world of biology. It’s utterly incoherent. (Well up there with the splendid deduction that women can’t be as clever as men because their brains are smaller.)

What evidence is there that Denisovans had narrow vertebral canals, anyway? Seems rather a lot to deduce from a finger bone and some DNA.

Svetlana Burlak believes that due to narrow vertebral canal hominids couldn’t control their breathing to the extent needed for uttering several syllables in a row, so they had to manage with one syllable per word.

Even assuming the premises are correct, shouldn’t the metric be syllables per breath rather than syllables per word? I don’t mean to brag about how wide my vertebral canal is, but I can usually manage several words’ worth of syllables before I have to breathe in again.

What evidence is there that Denisovans had narrow vertebral canals, anyway?

I let that one slide because on the whole they’re more closely related to the Neandertalers than to us, so if the latter had narrow vertebral canals (which I don’t know), it’s not improbable that the former did, too.

I’m now inevitably reminded of JBR’s Pleistocenese, which had briefly been mentioned before in this thread (December 23, 6:39 am).

Looks like JBR and Svetlana Burlak, working from vaguely similar data about hominid anatomy, ended up with (vaguely) similar conclusions about what their theoretical language might have been like – even if they attributed it to different hominid species…

Archanthropus? What does she mean by that? Isn’t the “Archanthropus europaeus” skull from the Petralona Cave assigned to Homo heidelbergensis by current consensus?

According to Meyer’s (2016) review of the fossil evidence to date (The spinal chord in hominin evolution), the vertebral canal and the thoracic spinal cord size in H. erectus were approximately the same as in modern humans. If so, all the speculation cited above is rendered invalid.

I think she uses Russian term архантроп to mean Homo Erectus and its varieties.

I think she uses Russian term архантроп to mean Homo Erectus and its varieties.

Ah, I see. Apemen/Urmenschen. Anyway, all of them seem to have had human-size spinal cords even before they developed human-size brains.

Some of the names in this list haven’t been used in decades, others are in use today.

Fundamental issues:

1) Few people explicitly use any particular species concept. Well, there are some 150 species concepts out there, and they often lead to different results (e.g., two different ones give you 101 or 249 endemic bird species in Mexico, and the area with the greatest number of endemic species is on opposite sides of the country). They don’t really have anything in common except the word “species”. Instead of asking “how should we name these kinds of entities”, taxonomists have been asking “which one of these kinds should be given the rank of species, so that all the other kinds remain forever unnameable”.

2) Some species concepts are hard to apply. The good old Biological Species Concept – actually two concepts: populations belong to the same species if they can have fertile offspring with each other, or if they do so in the wild – requires a lot of data, which is hardly ever available for fossils. And when it becomes available, the surprises begin, e.g. Neandertal and Denisova ancestry in humans alive today.

3) At least people have been trying to define “species”. For “genus”, even that hasn’t happened (well, it has, but nobody cares).

In short, “seem to belong within better-known species” and “may be a valid species, but not a new genus” are only testable – are only scientific questions – once you specify a lot of things that Linnaeus thought were too obvious to mention.

The Chronospecies Concept, BTW, divides a supposedly unbranching lineage into species at arbitrary dates in the past: once a species survives past such a date, it becomes the next species.

once a species survives past such a date, it becomes the next species

Well, Old English became Middle English became Modern English, and from Old Egyptian to Coptic is conventionally treated as six stages, with some overlap (“Old Coptic” is written in Demotic script but looks more like Coptic sans Greek loanwords).

Since I keep getting linkbacks from this thread: I suppose I might as well plug here some of my more speculative recent blogging on topics relevant to this thread, in case Hatters want to take shots at it (either here or there).

Nature seems to be really committed to historical-linguistic pseudoscience these days.

A pet peeve: people who present glottochronological time depths as “9181 BP (5595–12793 95% highest probability density (95% HPD))” really, really hurt my feelings.

What fun that the paper is in open access, but the News & Views article about it is not. The Max Planck Society (home to 15 of the authors including the first and the last) shelled out three or four kilobucks for open access, Peter Bellwood evidently did not, and nobody on the editorial board noticed that the resulting situation was ridiculous. Springer Nature is a for-profit corporation, and it shows.

The paper had at least five peer reviewers. That’s a lot. Of the four named ones, though, only one is a linguist, and he’s long been sympathetic to the Altaic* hypothesis.

Remember that the paper is in Nature and therefore not so much a paper as an extended abstract. The actual work is in the twenty-six Supplementary Data Files. I’ll try to read them soon (to the extent that I understand their subjects).

The scenario for the spread of languages and cultures from the center of domestication of broomcorn millet is not new; Robbeets has developed it in a series of detailed, lengthy papers & book chapters that are on her academia.edu page. What’s new is the genetics, and IIRC the phylogenetic analysis of archeological cultures. (Although I had no idea that was a thing, it has been at least since 2002, and it’s a wholly obvious idea when I think about it. Please do that more often!)

The divergence-date estimates are so wide as to be nearly useless, no matter if they were actually treated right. (In the infamous Gray & Atkinson 2012 paper, they were not, greatly increasing the branch lengths.)

…Oh, wait, they weren’t. From the Methods section: “We performed a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis with cognates encoded as binary data.” *headdesk* However, the use of a separate rate category for each meaning class, of an uncorrelated relaxed clock and a fossilized-birth-death model are good things that might even counter the binary blunder.

The genetics fits the scenario, sure. I can’t tell what else it would fit, though. The sample size is on the small side, and the paper came out a bit too early to take the recent paper on the settlement history of Japan – in three stages rather than two, as it turns out – into account. Even so, the detection of a rise and almost total fall of Jōmon-related ancestry in Korea was worth publishing all by itself.

Not having read the supp. data yet, I can’t comment on the linguistics, except to note that the state of the art of Altaic reconstruction now seems to be Supplementary Data 2. Judging from her earlier papers that I have read, Robbeets’s reconstruction of Proto-Altaic clearly represents progress over all earlier ones. What probably remains to be shown is that the five canonical branches are each other’s closest relatives to the exclusion of all other language families of vaguely northeastern Asia. If that’s not the case, that likely complicates the scenario.

* Robbeets is a great innovator when it comes to terminology: (Macro-)Altaic becomes “Transeurasian”, Micro-Altaic becomes “Altaic”, borrowing becomes “copying”. I do like the term “insubordination” for a way of turning infinite into finite verb forms, something that did not have a name before.

Vovin’s ten-year-old takedown of Trans-Eurasian is still valid, as far as I know

Meh.

It states that Robbeets follows the Moscow School in not expecting paradigmatic morphology to remain stable as such for seven (or nine) thousand years. Apparently, Vovin thought this was self-evidently absurd. But why? Why shouldn’t, just by coincidence, Proto-Altaic have been a Japanese-type language with just a few loosely bound clitics instead of IE-style case endings, and without person marking? Is historical linguistics of isolating languages ipso facto impossible?

Then it spends several slides on trying to demonstrating that one particular suffix Robbeets reconstructed is an error. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if Vovin said “and all the rest is just as bad” when he presented them; but in any case that’s not demonstrated in the slides.

At the end, a challenge is presented to the other participants in the meeting. Welp, again, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if it was met. But to require identical meanings for six cognates from 7000 or indeed 9000 years ago strikes me as a tall order.

“Significant figures, asshole!”

Oh yes. That’s a failure of peer review.

I mean, the precise values are important for reproducibility, but they should go in the supp. data, not in the extended abstract.

We might have discussed the genetics in this study before in a more narrow angle, when the Japanese genetics paper revised the timelines of the Yaoi migrations with equally few samples in hand, and the observation that Jomon like peoples used to inhabit Korea has become important.

other homeland detection methods such as linguistic palaeontology and the diversity hotspot principle

There is no such thing. There’s the algorithm, first used by Bouckaert, where you plug in coordinates and a tree and out comes a homeland, and go try to argue with a machine. Inferring homelands and geographical spreads in general is hard work, sometimes possible, sometimes not. What these “methods” come down to is (to simplify things very crudely) to take the average locations of daughter languages.

That Vovin article, yes, and it actually doesn’t talk so much about Robbeets as about earlier Altaic work. I’ll give my smell-test criteria for proposed long-range hypotheses for languages I know little about:
— Are the proposed sound correspondences mostly unconditioned? That doesn’t look like most confirmed deep families.
— Are the listed sound correspondences actually followed in the etymologies?
— Where formal mismatches occur, are there unexplained dangling strings? If so, you’ve “solved” one problem but opened another.
— How many of the etymologies require semantic latitude?
— How much of the 100-word list can be established with long words, with strict semantic correspondence, with no ad-hoc phonological correspondences?

Looking at supplements 1–3 to Robbeets and Bouckaert’s paper of 2018, I am not feeling it, at all.

The diversity hotspot principle, not so much.

I’m reading the peer review file now.

Reviewer 4:

“Also, the distribution of Proto-Turkic [in fig. 1b] seems very large for a protolanguage, especially its western extension.”

Reply:

“For the reconstruction of homelands, we integrated three different homeland detection methods, as explained in SI 4. In general, the validity and credibility of the locations increases by integrating the different methods. However, in the case of Proto-Turkic, integration leads to a rather large distribution due to the fact that Bayesian phylogeography and cultural reconstruction situate the homeland too much to the west. This is because the contemporary distribution of Turkic languages is not representative of the earlier distribution, as most descendants of West Old Turkic have been erased by descendants of East Old Turkic. Moreover, due to its early break-up from Altaic, Proto-Turkic covers a long period from the Middle Neolithic to the Early Iron Age. We should thus interpret the Proto-Turkic homeland on the map as a dynamic entity, gradually expanding from Southeast to Northwest from the Middle Neolithic to the Early Iron Age.
In order to direct the reader to this information, we added a reference in the caption of Fig. 1b. on line 103-104: ‘For detailed homeland detection, see SI 4.'”

“ What these “methods” come down to is (to simplify things very crudely) to take the average locations of daughter languages.”

I think yes.

the first looks fine, but it’s only Japonic and Korean

Ugh. ‘fire’: pJ *pɨ(r)i, pK *pɨl. Pretty good, isn’t it? But what’s with the parentheses in the pJ, and why is there no liquid in any of the Japonic etymons?

[…] thus reflects pJ *pɨi ‘fire’. Comparison with the final liquid in MK ·pul ‘fire’ indicates that the proto-Japonic diphtong is the result of liquid loss in an earlier pJ *pɨ(r)i ‘fire’. The *(r) is bracketed in the reconstruction because it is based on comparison with the proto-Korean form.

So, two three-segment words match only in the first segment. So you copy a segment from one word to the other and adjust a vowel, and they sure look a lot more alike.

They add that Vovin, in Koreo-Japonica (2009, p. 107) a review of an earlier proposal, accepts that etymology. So he does, but he does not justify it, and he’s too generous. In the end it’s one of a total of six (!) etymologies he accepts out of the whole list. Me, I say pK ·pul is more closely related to… English fire.

The original -l- appears in the Buli cognate bolim “fire”.

Not to mention ghibli.

(I was pleased about that one, I was.)

Would I insult you by stating the obvious, that Volta is transparently cognate with Wales?

(and Tamil.)

Why shouldn’t, just by coincidence, Proto-Altaic have been a Japanese-type language with just a few loosely bound clitics instead of IE-style case endings, and without person marking?

I was recently reading H. Winkler (1909), Der Uralaltaische Sprachstamm, das Finnische und das Japanische (AIUI the first major work to have argued for Japanese-as-Altaic; closer to my interests, also turns out to have several early novel arguments for Samoyedic-as-Uralic) and he indeed claims that the hallmark of Ural-Altaic is originally isolating grammar, and agglutination is overall a more recent grade of evolution. This includes claims somewhat to very striking to anyone familiar with current-day typological understanding of the putative members like “the Ural-Altaic verb is essentially a noun”.

An apparent descendant of this idea happens to be a horse flogged for long afterwards also in Uralic studies, where a classic genre of morphology paper has been “let’s speculate on this verbal suffix and this homophonous nominal suffix of completely different functions having originally been the one and the same”. Sure, preterite *-j comes from diminutive *-j, the past is further away and hence metaphorically looks small, you see…

he indeed claims that the hallmark of Ural-Altaic is originally isolating grammar, and agglutination is overall a more recent grade of evolution

A similar dodge is used by those who believe in Greenberg-style Niger-Kordofanian.

Once you get outside Volta-Congo, the lexical evidence for this is (in reality) very weak, and the major argument in favour of G-S N-C being an actual thing has always been the typologically unusual system of multiple differing pairs of sg/pl noun class affixes (Greenberg himself explicitly used this as the justification for including some of the Kordofanian languages in his supergroup.)

Faced with groups like Mande and Dogon, which show no trace at all of ever having had such a system in the first place, the conclusion drawn is that those groups branched off before the noun class system developed. Eh voilà! Hypothesis saved!

[Ironically, I’m pretty sure that the argument that the class affixes derive from earlier clitic words is in fact quite valid: attempts to show that Proto-Niger-Congo had only class prefixes, and that “Gur” (say) has lost these and developed suffixes by some secondary process, are based on circular reasoning, profound ignorance of Gur languages, and the unfortunate effects of the all-pervasive illusion that because Proto-Bantu is relatively easily reconstructable and has a relatively deep time-depth, it must be pretty much identical with Proto-Niger-Congo.]

@ Trond E:

I am not a Big Data Mathematician but some of my best friends are; I don’t think you need to make any apologies, it seems to me that what you are saying is quite sensible.

One thing to remember about Bayesian methods is that, like Newton’s method, if you start with a hypothesis too far from reality and try to better it by iterated approximation, you may fall off the edge of the world, cf eg

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/01/cosma-shalizi-vs-the-fen-dwelling-bayesians.html

Trond Engen, what you describe doesn’t seem to me how Bayesian analysis works or at least how it is supposed to work (no personal experience). In Bayesian analysis you say “suppose languages are related according to this tree, then here is the probability to observe these words as related/unrelated” then you look up which words are related. If you already know that there are regular sound correspondences, you’ve already established that the languages are related and unless you are willing to assign probabilities to statements like “assuming that the languages are related (or unrelated) the probability to discover this regular sound correspondences is…” there is no help coming from Bayes. The codependencies that you’ve described are already built-in into the framework of “suppose this is the tree”.

I remain agnostic as to whether “Altaic”, as a language family, actually exists or not, but when it comes to Japanese, this dissertation makes a very powerful (and, to my mind, very convincing) case that it and Korean are indeed genetically related: interestingly, in light of the discussion upthread on “Ural-Altaic” having had an isolating structure, it is worth pointing out that in this thesis a fair number of Proto-Japanese-Korean bound morphemes are reconstructed (among the non-bound morphemes, I was quite impressed both with the reconstruction of a common Proto-Japanese-Korean numeral system -see the discussion which begins on page 437-and with the discussion of possible/likely Korean loanwords in Japanese -see the discussion starting on page 454).

So, fellow hatters, do you find it as convincing as I did?

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=osu1460644060

@Etienne:

That thesis does indeed look interesting, though I haven’t got very far with it yet. But Francis-Ratte makes the right sort of noises to inspire confidence …

However, on p42, he says:

I am unaware of any natural language that has /p, t, k/ and yet employs a voiced-voiceless contrast for only one of these primary stops.

This sort of statement is just asking for trouble …
Exactly this very feature is a striking characteristic of the Atakora Sprachbund where the Eastern Oti-Volta languages are spoken: there is an unequivocal p/b contrast, but inherited *d has fallen together with /l/ (or with /n/ before nasal vowels), and *g with /k/ (and *g͡b with /k͡p/, come to that,)

The voiced palatal stop *ɟ has become /j/, too, though I’m not sure if this is a common historical sound change (as Manessy supposed) or yet another areal manifestation of the local allergy to voiced stops; but the Western Oti-Volta language Boulba, which has wandered into the area and shared the other losses of voiced stops, has instead devoiced *ɟ to /c/.

The Atakora has devoiced *v and *z as well. The mystery, really, is why is hasn’t abolished /b/ too.

Coptic would be another example of only /b/, but no /d/ or /g/, but it looks as if Coptic /b/ was actually realised as a fricative.

So, two three-segment words match only in the first segment. So you copy a segment from one word to the other and adjust a vowel, and they sure look a lot more alike.

Yes, but the pJ vowel cluster does seem to require that a consonant dropped out there, and there’s independent evidence for this happening to *r in other words.

Where did you copy your quote from? Here’s what supp. data 2 says on its first two pages:

1. FIRE
pJ *pɨ(r)i ‘fire’: J hi (1.3b), OJ pi₂ ‘fire’, OJ po- ‘fire’ in OJ potaru ‘firefly’, OJ pokusi ‘bonfire’, OJ pokuso ‘tinder’, OJ potopor- ‘get heated’, OJ poter- ‘flush, be all aglow’ etc.; Yonamine (Okinawa) πii, Shuri (Okinawa) fii [hwii], Ishigaki (Yaeyama) pïï ([word tone] B), Hatoma (Yaeyama) pii, Yonaguni cii ([word tone] B) ‘fire’
pK *pɨl ‘fire’: K pul, MK ·pul ‘fire’ [Yale transcription, so u is unrounded!]
Frellesvig and Whitman (2008) have proposed to add two mid vowels (*e, *o) and a high central vowel (*ɨ) to the four vowels (*i, *a, *u, *ə), traditionally reconstructed for proto-Japonic. According to their analysis, apophony of OJ o and i₂ reflects a contraction whereby *ɨi > OJ i₂. The alternation between OJ po- and OJ pi₂ ‘fire’ thus reflects pJ *pɨi ‘fire’. Comparison with the final liquid in MK ·pul ‘fire’ indicates that the proto-Japonic diphtong is the result of liquid loss in an earlier pJ *pɨ(r)i ‘fire’. The word for ‘fire’ is also reflected in Ryukyuan languages.

Not mentioned here is that pJ *o and *e have since become mainstream, following the paper (Pellard 2013) linked in the fourth comment of this thread. However, in that same paper, pJ “fire” is reconstructed as *poi “instead of the traditional […] *pəi”. I don’t know if the *ɨ hypothesis has caught on; Pellard (2013) treated it very briefly on p. 92 as follows:

“On the other hand, Frellesvig and Whitman’s (2008a) *ɨ is reconstructed on the main basis of OJ-internal evidence, and there seems to be no supporting comparative evidence from Ryukyuan, EOJ or [the extant Japanese dialect of] Hachijō (Table 16). While this hypothesis is interesting, well-founded, and aims at explaining a few otherwise irregular vowel alternations, I feel there are still too few good examples. There is little merit in reconstructing an extra vowel in PJ over recognizing a small number of irregular forms.”

So there’s nothing actually wrong with it, is there. 🙂

English fire

Too easy. Between pJ and pK, the vowels are exactly the same; comparing vowels to IE is pretty much hopeless due to the total collapse of any prior vowel system in pIE; and pJ and pK don’t have any noticeable evidence of the pIE *[χʷ].

(pIE nom. sg. *[ˈpaχʷr̩], gen. sg. *[pχʷɛns])

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Brief comments on the rest of the wordlist. The missing numbers are not reconstructed:

3. TO GO

pJ *na- “go out, become”
pK *na- “go out”
pTg *naː- “go out”

Perfect, though the reconstruction of the pJ item required half a page of explanation on p. 2.

However, no evidence is provided that this “go out” verb was the basic word for “go”. With leave and quit, English shows that such words can be wholly unrelated to the basic word for “go”, and that they’re probably not immune enough to borrowing to go in or near slot 3 of the Leipzig-Jakarta list.

4. WATER

pK *mɨl
pTg *muː ~ *möː
pMo *mören “river”

Robbeets keeps all the traditional transcriptions, no matter how misleading. pTg *ö is not reflected as a front vowel in any attested language; it must have been -RTR */o/. Confusion that hasn’t so far been sorted out between that and -RTR */u/ is common within Tungusic, and several languages have merged these phonemes altogether. pMo *ö is likewise back or central -RTR /o/ in the attested languages; except when it’s back -RTR /u/: “As far as Mongolic is concerned, some modern forms suggest *müren, leaving uncertainty about he original first vowel, but the older varieties as well as the external comparisons support the reconstruction of *mören.”

Also important: “Similar to the etymologies under 53 ‘to give’, 79 ‘to blow’ and 80 ‘wood’, an open monosyllabic form with length in Tungusic corresponds to a disyllabic form with a liquid onset in the second syllable in the other Transeurasian languages. This is indicative of liquid loss in Tungusic.”

The vowel correspondence is listed as regular in table 3.12 (p. 77) and reconstructed there as pTEA -RTR *o.

That leaves all the segments accounted for, I think: a root *mor- or more likely *morə-, and the usual Mongolic noun suffix *-n.

5 MOUTH

Three different etyma. with no decision which of them was the basic word for “mouth” in pTA.

pJ *kutɨi “mouth, opening”
Old Koguryo *kʊtsi
pK *kut

This time, the pJ *ɨi cluster is not explained through liquid loss: “The suffix pJ *-i is a substantivizer following nouns (e.g. OJ aka ‘red’ → ake₂ ‘red object, red cloth’), cognate with the bound noun OJ i ‘fact (that); that (which)’ (Robbeets 2015: 341).” Well.

pTg *amga < *ama-g “mouth”
pMo *ama-n “mouth, opening”

“The Tungusic reconstruction *amga ‘mouth’ may ultimately derive from *ama-g, through the addition of a collective suffix pTg *-g (Benzing 1955a: 1016). This suffix is also present in pTg *de:re-g ‘face’ reflected in Ma. dere, Nanai dereg and Olcha dere ~ dereg ‘face’.” Fair enough.

The Mongolic -n is explicit this time: “In the Mongolic languages we find an unstable stem-final nasal element, morphophonologically alternating with zero, that expresses singularity in contrast with plural forms on -d. This stem-final -n was added to the simple stem, yielding pMo *ama-n. The Mongolic languages, e.g. MMo. amasar, WMo. amasar, Khal. amsar, Bur. amhar, Kalm. amsr, Dag. amsər etc., reflect a derived form pMo *ama-sar ‘opening, cavity, hole’.”

pJ *ipa- “tell”
pK *ip “mouth”

7. BLOOD

pJ *ti “blood; spirit, force”
pMo *čisu(n) “blood”
pTk *tɨːn “spirit, breath”

“The Mongolic forms reflect a petrified suffix -sun that occurs in numerous body part terms, e.g. WMo. gede-sün ‘bowel’ and suda-sun ‘arteria’ (Poppe 1973: 238-240).”

Fair enough.

8. BONE

pJ *pəne
pK see below
pTg *peniken “knee”

“The Middle Korean forms ·spye ~ spey ~ pspey ‘bone’ have complex initials, which are all secondarily generated through phonological or morphological developments in Korean. If the initial s- in ·spye ~ spey can be separated as a relic of a genitive s in compound structures, reinterpreted as the initial of the second noun (*pye ~ *pey) with ‘-bone’, then we can reconstruct pK *piCe or *peCi which contracted to the tonic open monosyllable in Middle Korean.

The Tungusic forms may incorporate an assimilation of the diminutive suffix pTg *-kA:n (Benzing 1955a: 1006-1007). This suffix is used with other body parts, e.g. Even ŋal ‘hand’ and ŋal-ka:n ‘(little) hand’.”

Why not. Keep in mind that Tungusic and Korean e are [ə] in the transcriptions used here.

9. 2 SG PRONOUN

Again two different ones and no decision.

pJ *na
pK *ne

“However, since OJ na is petrified in some expressions in reference to a first person singular (e.g. OJ na se ‘my older brother / fellow’), it is possible that it has grammaticalized from an original *na ‘person’, reflected in among others OJ womi₁na ‘woman’ and OJ oki₁na ‘old man’ (Robbeets 2005: 241). Therefore, I do not exclude that the correspondence with the Korean form may be coincidental.”

I also wouldn’t use this as evidence for a close relationship of J & K because 2sg pronouns with n- aren’t uncommon elsewhere in the general region.

Vowel correspondences 32, 33 and 34 in table 3.12 imply a conditioned split where *ə sometimes became *a in pJ, but no explanation is given.

pTg *si, obl. *sin-
pTk *sin “2sg”, *sir₂ “2pl”

Good.

Not mentioned is the pMo *či, which would fit the *ti of so many neighboring language families. As tempting as it is to derive *si from *ti, that has never been claimed to be regular.

11. COME

pJ *kə-
pTk *kel-

No comments given, no evidence of a vowel cluster in pJ; I wouldn’t be surprised if pTEA **kələ would contract to pJ *kə anyway, but this comparison is not very substantial.

12. BREAST

pJ *kɨkɨ-rə “heart”; note MJ kokoti “heart, feelings, mood” if that’s not a typo
Old Koguryo *kɨr ~ *kür “heart”
pTg *xökö-n “breast”
pMo *kökö-n “breast”
pTk *kökü-r₂ “breast”

“If the Japanese form for ‘heart’ indeed incorporates a petrified plurality marker pJ *-rə of the type found in among others OJ ko₁-ra ‘children’, woto₂me₁-ra ‘young girls’, ye-ra ‘branches’, kinu-wata-ra ‘silk clothes’ (Antonov 2007: 195, 197), then the plurality can be taken as indicative of a pre-Japanic semantic shift from ‘breasts’ to ‘heart’. Some of the Ryukyuan forms such as Yoron (Amami) kuuru are rather rare. These forms are used in expressions like ‘good-hearted’ or ‘bad-hearted’, while the Chinese anatomical borrowing sinzou ‘heart’ is used for the organ […]”

The pTk *-r₂ would be the cognate plurality marker, also seen in *sir₂ “2pl” (see above). The *-n would be the usual singulatives.

14. 1 SG PRONOUN

Presented as two etyma, with no speculation to connect their vowels.

pJ *wa, obl. *wan-, ?pl. war- “1st person”
pMo *ba, obl. *man- “1pl exclusive”

“Both OJ wa and ware are used for the first person singular in Old Japanese, but only ware is used for the plural. In contrast to modern Japanese (e.g. watakusi ‘I’ ~ watakusi-tati ‘we’) none of these pronouns can be followed by productive plural markers. This observation suggests that the suffix -re (*< -ra-(C)i) goes back to the plural suffix OJ -ra, mentioned under 12. BREAST. When the suffix -re lexicalized in a way that it was no longer identified with the plural, the petrified plural ware probably spread by analogy to the singular. The final nasal in the Ryukyuan forms is probably a reflex of an original oblique case suffix pJ *-n(u)-, which is also reflected in the East Old Japanese dative case wa-nu-ni.”

pTg *bi, obl. *min-
pMo *bi
pTk *bi, obl. *min-, pl. *bir₂

16. LOUSE

pMo *sirke
pTk *sirke “nit”

No comments offered. Given the trivial sound correspondences, a loan can’t be excluded, though “louse” isn’t borrowed often.

19. ARM/HAND

pJ *tai “upper limb, arm, hand”
pK *tali “lower limb, leg”

*tai is quietly assumed to come from **tari, which is fair enough.

pJ *sune “lower limb, leg”
pK *son “upper limb, arm, hand”

“The crossing-over of the semantic correspondence between upper limb and lower limb in both etymologies may be explained in the context of naming animal limbs.”

pMo *gar “hand, arm”
pTk *karï “arm”

“In Turkic, we can reconstruct pTk *kar ‘arm’ followed by a lexicalised possessive suffix *-ï. This possessive suffix frequently occurs with words for primary parts of the body (Róna-Tas & Berta 2011: 492-494).” Unadorned kar is actually cited for Old Turkic, if that’s not a typo, and the Chuvash and borrowed Hungarian forms are explicitly stated to lack final vowels as well.

“Cross-linguistically the borrowing from the word for ‘arm’ has been observed in a trade context, involving the
meaning ‘measure of length’ or in a martial context, involving the meaning ‘part of an army’. Interestingly, the Turkic and Mongolic forms share the primary meaning ‘arm’, but they have each developed a distinct secondary meaning, respectively in a trade and military context. This observation argues against a borrowing scenario.” That said, the Hungarian kar is said to just mean “arm”, even though the Chuvash forms mean “length of one forearm” and “span of both arms”.

22. EAR

pMo *kul- in various derivatives
pTk *kulxak

“The Turkic languages reflect a common suffix pTk *-xAk used in body part terms […].” Only one of the three Mongolic suffixes is accounted for.

Looked at it this way, it looks surprisingly weak – surprising because similar forms are much more widespread, notably Proto-Uralic *kuwlə “hear” and pIE *kʲlew- “hear” (the metathesis between these two may be regular).

24. FAR

pJ *mara “rare, from afar”
pK *melɨ- “be far”

Another one of those where pJ *a corresponds to *ə elsewhere, and another one of those found only in J & K.

15. DO/MAKE

pJ *-ka- “produce the sound or sensation labeled by the base ideophone”
pK *-ki- “produce the sound or sensation labeled by the base ideophone”
pTg *-kiː- ~ *giː- “produce the sound or sensation labeled by the base ideophone”
pMo *ki- “do, make; produce the sound or sensation labeled by the base ideophone”
pTk *kï(l?)- “do, make; produce the sound or sensation labeled by the base ideophone”

Leaves me wondering if that was really the basic verb for “do/make” rather than the basic suffix for forming deideophonic verbs.

“The aberrant vowel in Japonic can be explained by resonance with the wide-spread a-vocalism of suffixes in the Japanese verbal paradigm.” Fair enough, I guess.

“In Turkic and Mongolic, the verb ‘to do, make’ seems to be the source of grammaticalization for the iconic suffix. In Turkic, Yakut and Dolgan have a different root-final consonant, which could suggest that the original root is *kï- and that -l- and -n- are petrified suffixes. The problem with this explanation, however, is that the suffix -(X)l- derives passives and that -(X)n- derives medial verbs in Turkic. The verb kïl-, however, is typically causative. For a detailed explanation of this etymology, see Robbeets (2015: 239-245).” I’m not going to look that up soon. “X” means “closed vowel determined by frontness & roundness harmony” in Turkology, i.e. /i ɯ u y/.

26. HOUSE

pJ *ipi-(C)a “house, hut”, possibly containing pJ *ya, which also meant “house”
pK *cip “house”
pTg *jiːma- “go visiting”, interpreted as **jiːb-naː- with **jiːb “house” and the known *-naː- “go out”, on which see above

pJ had a ban on the sequence /ji/. “The low pitch of the Middle Korean form points to a disyllabic low-high origin, in which the second vowel may be a reduced vowel or the neutral vowel *i.”

The weakness of the interpretation of the pTg etymon is explicitly acknowledged; there are actually Tg “house” words juː, juːw, juːg today, but their “vowel quality may be influenced through contact with Mongolic forms” that come from *juːka.

27. STONE/ROCK

pTg *kadaːr “rock, cliff”, interpreted as containing the plural ending *r that remains productive today
pMo *kada “rock, cliff”

That seems to have meant a landscape feature, not to have been the basic word for a pebble. Within both Tg and Mo, some languages use reflexes of this for “mountain”.

The distribution is also a bit suspicious, especially if you add Proto-Uralic *kaďə ‘(rocky?) mountain’.

30. TOOTH

Three etyma:

pJ *pa
pK *pal, if MK nispal comes from *ni “(specific) tooth” + *-s “genitive” + *pal “tooth”; MK ·ni “tooth” is real.

I assume *-ara > *-aa would contract to *-a in pJ.

“Although Robbeets (2005: 400) included the Tungusic forms Olcha palị and Nanai paloa in this etymology, we have left them out here because of the poor distribution of the Tungusic form and the problematic reconstruction of the final vowel in pTg *palV ‘molar’.”

pMo *ari-ga “molar, canine, fang”
pTk *ar₂(-)ïg “molar, fang”

On the Mongolic side there’s said to be a “body part suffix” *-GA, “e.g. pMo *kil-ga ‘coarse hair’; see 31. HAIR”. On the Turkic side, “[c]ontrary to his previous idea, Doerfer (1984: 37-38) derived OT azïɣ in the same way as Turkish el ‘hand’ can be derived from OT elig ‘hand’, suggesting a body part suffix *-ig ~ *-ïg. If Doerfer’s analysis is correct, the original Turkic form should be pTk *ar₂(ï) ‘fang’, an exact match with the Mongolic root.”

Not attested in West Turkic, but borrowed from there into Mari.

pMo *sidün “tooth” if from *sil-sün with the “collective and body part suffix” seen in 7. BLOOD
pTk *sil₂ “tooth, sharp stick”

I’ll stop here (p. 14 of supp. data 2) for today, though more interesting comparisons come later in that list.

@dm:
Vovin on Francis-Ratte (whose name he misspells with an accent). Vovin says kind things on Whitman, whose dissertation Vovin’s Koreo-Japonica critiques.

I think we have our sources mixed up. I’m looking at the supplements to Robbeets & Bouckaert, 2018, Bayesian phylolinguistics reveals the internal structure of the Transeurasian family. Which are yours?

(more later on the details).

any natural language that has /p, t, k/ and yet employs a voiced-voiceless contrast for only one of these primary stops

Yeah sure those exist. Languages with /b d t k/ are not unreasonably rare at all (biggest being Arabic, though with various extra plosives; many others in e.g. South America, often with an additional unpaired /ɟ ~ dʒ/) so I don’t particularly even see reason to not expect the existence of /p t d k/ or /p b t k/. Pretty sure I’ve even seen a /p t k g/ somewhere in Oceania (with /g/ presumably being by re-fortition from *ɣ after the widespread “Oceanian chainshift” *p *k > *β *ɣ, *b *d *g > *p *ɾ *k). Rennellese has a similar /p t k ᵑg/ with the last from Proto-Polynesian *ŋ.

Finnish though is indeed not an example except with some amount of etymological lenses on; and if so, we might also mention Votic which does the same but with the voiced velar: *b *d > *β *ð > /v/ ∅ but *g > *ɣ and lastly *ɣ > /g/, probably due to the general introduction of voiced stops in Russian loanwords. (Unlike Finnish, no archaic *ɣ-retaining dialects are attested, but this e.g. palatalizes to /j/ and not the otherwise also existing /dʲ/.)

Does anyone else feel uneasy about Robbeets’ academic trajectory? In spite of how criticized her PhD and postdoc work was, she somehow managed to establish a solid career among archaeologists and historical-genetics scholars who will simply defer to her on linguistics judgements, without much contact with the rest of the linguistic field (except for the Moscow School). This lets her publish work in multidisciplinary fora without, all signs suggest, adequate peer review from the linguistics side.

It gets said that paradigm shift in a science advances one funeral at a time. However, in this case that could mean things getting worse instead of getting better, as Robbeets’ circle might have decades ahead of them, while e.g. Janhunen and Vovin are going to retire quite soon now and it is uncertain whether they will be be replaced.

It’s not just Nature, David. If that were all, it would be pretty easy to ignore. But Oxford UP recently published a huge handbook of the languages under the Transeurasian umbrella that, after a chapter contributed by Janhunen that was a mere token gesture, is pretty much entirely Robbeets (and the Moscow School). And Robbeets monographs or edited volumes have appeared from most of the big names in historical-linguistics publishing: De Gruyter, John Benjamins, Harrassowitz.

Lyle Campbell will save us all!

(born 1942 … oh …)

However, the tide seems to be turning in African comparative work, at least, with much less of the unthinking acceptance (overall) of the Greenbergian macrofamilies*, at least among specialists; and the überlumpers tend to be the old guard, not the young ‘uns. So long as African comparative linguistics doesn’t attract the attention of any Robbeetseses, we should be set for some actual real progress for a bit (especially as the good primary data just keep on coming.)

* Apart from AA, which is pukka, even if a lot of the actual work on it isn’t.

If that were all, it would be pretty easy to ignore. But Oxford UP recently published a huge handbook

In the natural sciences, Nature is flat-out impossible to ignore, but edited books are basically single-issue journals without an impact factor. If they’re good, they’ll still get cited, but that won’t help their authors much.

Edited books that try to cover a topic always seem to fail at it because there are always subtopics the editors can’t find any authors for. So it is with the Robbeets-led series, as you can see on her academia.edu page.

Vovin’s Oxford Handbook article I linked to… yeah. A good editor would have told Vovin to stick to the dry facts and knock off the invective. It’s entertaining, but there are other places for that.

P.S. I realize that the Vovin article I’d linked to is the one that Hat started off this whole thread with. Not the first time…

Moscow-Leningrad rivalry

As a Muscovite I was a bit perplexed by: “…entirely Robbeets (and the Moscow School)“, “archaeologists and historical-genetics scholars … without much contact with the rest of the linguistic field (except for the Moscow School)“. Now I see. Pietari.

The conclusion of the thread:

The right method would be to first reconstruct pK, *and then* see if it fits Transeurasian.

Then get to it, because most of it has never been done before.

Robbeets had to do it on the fly. There are age limits on most kinds of ERC grants.

Haspelmath in the same thread:

Well, at least this prominent publication will draw attention to the issues, and maybe it will lead to more funding and more insights in the longer run…

I do hope that happens.

I agree: I had my fingers crossed when it came to Omotic.

I don’t think even “Macro-Sudanic/Chari-Nile” bears very much scrutiny. It’s certainly on a level with Altaic as a proposal, not with Indo-European.

I know what you mean re Campbellism; however, premature leaping to conclusions is likely to hamper genuine progress as much as lead to early access to real results which can subsequently be “refined.” Indeed, the whole problem with Greenbergism is that it leads to interesting hypotheses which are then canonised as The Truth without anything approaching proper evaluation.

I think this happened (at one time) with “Gur”, the boundaries of which were drawn extraordinarily wide by Manessy: it seems to me that his criteria for inclusion amounted to little more than having class suffixes instead of prefixes and being in an area geographically close to other “Gur” languages. Lexical resemblances are there, to be sure: but you can actually find more cognates between WOV and Bantu than between WOV and Kulango (say); the lexical resemblances are genuine, but due to the fact that these languages are all ultimately part of Volta-Congo, and they are frankly valueless for establishing “Gur.” Though “Gur” languages surely all are ultimately related to one another, the confusion about the actual degrees of relationship among them can hardly be said to have benefited historical work. It has become clear since those days that there are “Adamawa” languages which are more closely related to Grusi than to Oti-Volta, which means that even even Manessy’s “Central” Gur/Voltaic was an illusion.
This seems to be accepted nowadays, I’m happy to say.

A more concrete example is Sambiéni’s formidable attempt to reconstruct Proto-Eastern-Oti-Volta (a work which I must say I admire and have found very useful as a source of data.)

The major problem with this is that Sambiéni assumes explicitly (in so many words) that Manessy was correct in his assessment that EOV was actually a historic node of Oti-Volta at all. This is by no means necessarily so: at the very least, EOV is vastly more internally diverse than WOV or Gurma; on the admittedly very imperfect metric of Swadesh lists, EOV is comparable in internal diversity to the nameless grouping of WOV along with Buli/Konni and Yom/Nawdm, and morphologically the languages are also very divergent, though Nateni/Ditammari/Mbelime seem to form a genuine subgroup, with Nateni and Ditammari especially sharing some unequivocal common innovations. Waama, in particular, is a clear outlier within EOV in phonology, lexicon and verb morphology. Moreover, the matter is greatly complicated by the fact that many of the shared developments of EOV are demonstrably areal (the evidence of Boulba, the only WOV language in the Atakora, is clear on this.)

What this means for Sambiéni’s endeavour is that, no matter how rigorously he tries to apply the comparative method, he is probably not actually reconstructing Proto-EOV at all, but a portion of what Proto-Oti-Volta itself would have looked like if it had been subject to the effects of the Atakora Sprachbund.

At this point I feel rather silly adverting to this, but:

it looks as if Coptic /b/ was actually realised as a fricative.

That looks to me like a liturgical pronunciation influenced by Greek. There are whole passages of Greek in the Coptic liturgy.

Well then.

And suddenly it dawns on me: sbk > soukhos.

As tempting as it is to derive *si from *ti, that has never been claimed to be regular.

sina

Estonian
Etymology 1
From Proto-Finnic *cinä, from Proto-Uralic *tinä.

Pronoun
sina (genitive sinu, partitive sind)

1. you (informal, sg)
_______
While you at it, what does M.R. have to say on 硬い/katai and katı?

@David Eddyshaw, I was going to ask you for something like that (examples).

Progress can be hindered/hampered, as we know from its uneven distribution over time and space (somewhat different from the disrtibution of learning). But I am suspicious about claims that a hypothesis or attention of a scholar (your words: So long as African comparative linguistics doesn’t attract the attention of any Robbeetseses,… ) is a source of hindrance.

Especially with Africa, because how many people are working on Russian (not even Slavic or IE) and how many people are doing Gur? Or Tumtum (I know, an exonym, I just thought about the tree:)). Honestly, I would hinder everything myself, if it would help to do documentation and conservation right. Grandchildren of speakers can analyse it on their own, 200 years later.

If Greenberg reduced the population of people who document langauges… But I do not think he did.

One reason why I sympathise to Blench (apart of his interest to archaeology) is that he loves to declassify.
Cf. “Declassifying Arunachal” and other papers here:
https://www.rogerblench.info/Language/NEI/Lingres/NEIlingres.htm
“In essence, this approach shifts the “null hypothesis” from the present de facto of Tibeto-Burman affiliation, unless demonstrated otherwise, to one of no affiliation, unless demonstrated.”

Same with branching: “In these two cases and more generally, high-level branching (essentially, the postulation of “within-family isolates”) should be practised until we have better evidence for the position of individual languages. If this results in an untidy “tree” which is hard to capture, so be it.” (Roger Blench and Mark W. Post, Rethinking Sino-Tibetan phylogeny from …, part 3, “….spiky trees”)

And also, of course, he puts things and his books too online, and not only on academia. ( “!!! Title too long for running head. Please supply short version !!! “, from the same paper).

As just now sniped by David E, yes: “Greenbergism” of course covers only a small but probably disproportionally influential part of the real Joseph Greenberg’s extensive research output (obviously ditto any possible sense of “Campbellism”, or for that matter some of the more specific uses of “Chomskyism”). I have full confidence that 50 years from now we might have people griping about “Blenchism” just as well, which could turn out to be defined e.g. not as articles on declassifying this or documenting that, but simply as the proliferation of data only available as “preprints for circulation only”… 🙂

Is historical linguistics of isolating languages ipso facto impossible?

Of course! They are all как известно descended from creoles.

OJ womi₁na ‘woman’

From which we plainly see that English has a heavy OJ superstrate.

I dunno, once again not the Greenberg version where also Omotic is appended.

To be fair, Greenberg didn’t have a concept of “Omotic”, only “Westernmost Cushitic”. Fleming proposed that Omotic was not Cushitic and Bender pretty much nailed that down, but now we have a hopeless mess of classification: is Omotic part of AA, or a separate family, or two or even four separate families? As always, more research needed.

I know what you mean re Campbellism; however, premature leaping to conclusions is likely to hamper genuine progress as much as lead to early access to real results which can subsequently be “refined.”

Certainly: nothing in excess. But if Greenberg had been a Campbellite rather than a Macdonaldite and confined himself to pointing out that the “Hamitic” languages were not a legitimate node, would one Eddyshaw have been so ready to say that Volta-Congo is a genetic group?

From which we plainly see that English has a heavy OJ superstrate.

Nah – we have finally identified the culprit for why English spelling is so hard: there’s been a fiendish plot to make English look more like transcribed OJ!!!!1!

(I’m sure Simpson is involved somehow. No, not Homer.)

Forcing myself to shut up when I don’t have time to read and write properly, I let this pass, but…

Etienne: I remain agnostic as to whether “Altaic”, as a language family, actually exists or not, but when it comes to Japanese, this dissertation makes a very powerful (and, to my mind, very convincing) case that it and Korean are indeed genetically related: interestingly, in light of the discussion upthread on “Ural-Altaic” having had an isolating structure, it is worth pointing out that in this thesis a fair number of Proto-Japanese-Korean bound morphemes are reconstructed (among the non-bound morphemes, I was quite impressed both with the reconstruction of a common Proto-Japanese-Korean numeral system -see the discussion which begins on page 437-and with the discussion of possible/likely Korean loanwords in Japanese -see the discussion starting on page 454).

So, fellow hatters, do you find it as convincing as I did?

That’s 500 pages of thesis, and I’m still only at page 80, just about to start the crucial chapter on morphology. It doesn’t answer your question, but I’ll say that I like it so far. The treatment of schwa-loss is strong to my eye. But I’m an utter etc.

One good thing about Koreo-Japonic historical linguistics in general is that what little I’ve read actually looks decent. This might mean that there’s real things to work with — which makes it even odder that there’s a decade between the significant papers.

David M.: Bayesian phylogenetics – of languages, organisms or archeological cultures – doesn’t ask “are these related at all”. It asks “given this data matrix, what tree is most likely to have produced it through evolution, and how well does it fit the data?” It doesn’t do things like cognacy judgments; those go into the making of the data matrix by hand.

I know. If you then use the results of those judgments to implicitly argue for relatedness, you have begged the question. That’s why I think the archaeological and genetic results of the study would have been better served without the linguistics. Of course, in this “triangulation” the different disciplines are meant to support eachother, so if what emerges is a coherent picture, old Occam wants us to believe it, even if one or more of the single-discipline outcomes is shaky on its own. But at the very least I’d like the ifs and buts to be stated clearly: “On the assumption that the Transeurasian languages are related, we do … If they are not, our model will overestimate ,,,”

JPystynen: It would be interesting to see if the same situation also holds with e.g. pairwise comparison with Indo-European or Yukaghir; or why not for baseline purposes, something like indeed Oti-Volta or Quechua or Klingon.

Yes! It’s where I meant to arrive at by the statistical rant. Wihout external comparanda, there’s no way to establish “chance”.

Skepticism especially about the supposedly common agricultural vocabulary.

A bit closer I do also wonder about PIE *twórḱos ‘pig’ (reflected in Avestan and so perhaps once existing also in easternmost Iranian).

The presentation of how they eliminate the supposed linguistic evidence, by means of a few Venn diagrams, is pretty neat. I hope it serves as a model for future similar studies.

So young! Towards the end Vovin rejected the Altaic language family, which I find interesting.

BTW, what has happened to SFReader?

I think he turned against Altaic quite a while ago, not really towards the end.

Oh yes, about 20 years ago. The two long works linked to above are instructive.

BTW, what has happened to SFReader?

I think this is his last comment so far.

blast from the past : cf Brett far upthread at December 17, 2017 at 12:58 am,

re https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Nowak