# Lexicon and grammar in historical comparative linguistics



## zpoludnia swiata

Split off from this thread

When comparing languages in terms of historical relatedness (an etymological action), you can only look at vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar have to be discarded. Why? 
For example, if you compared grammar of Latin, French, Spanish, and Gothic, you'd have to come to the conclusion that Latin was much closer to Gothic, and quite far from French or Spanish. The truth, however, is quite different. We all can see and know that Latin is much closer to French or Spanish (its daughter languages, as opposed to Gothic being a kind of cousin).
If you considered French phonetics or pronunciation, you'd have to come to the conclusion that it is about as different from Latin as Japanese or some other language. The phonetic systems of French and Latin are totally different.
The point is that grammar and phonetics can change very, very rapidly and cause connections to be almost completely lost.
English does have big, big Germanic components, especially in the roots of its most common words, yet at the same time the Romance component is also so big, and essential to the language that communicating without it would be impossible. In other words, it goes beyond just "borrowings" (one of the silliest terms in Historical Linguistics)--the Romance component is completely part of the language.
I suppose for various historiographical reasons English has been considered a Germanic Language, but it just as rightly could be considered to be a kind of creole, a melding of Germanic (both Anglo Saxon and Norse) elements with Romance.
One more thing is that in German, you can generally get by without using Romance borrowings, I'd say that there they are more like borrowings, but in English no. In English, you'd have to say _information_. In German, _Information_ could be replaced by _Auskunft_. 
Also, some of the English words of Latin/Romance origin have gone through sound changes, this is not typical of "borrowings" but rather of words integrally part of a language. Examples: chair (from catedra), "k" to "ch" sound change, as well as loss of internal syllables. taste, boy, peace, blue (Germanic but from French, if it had been Anglo-Saxon it would have become "blow"), delight (mistakenly spelled that way because of perceived connected with light), survey, vow, faith. I chose these because they are less "obviously" seen as typical words of a Romance origin.
One last note, Among the 100 most used words in English, Germanic words absolutely dominate, yet this doesn't say much, because just about all these words are function words (I, the, not, have, of, etc...) that carry very little communicative meaning in and of themselves. You really need the first 2,000 words for fairly basic communication, and in this case, the Romance component would rise significantly. I don't want to give a percentage, because I don't know, and don't think that's so very relevant. You can go to a corpus linguistics site to see them.


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## Athaulf

zpoludnia swiata said:


> When comparing languages in terms of historical relatedness (an etymological action), you can only look at vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar have to be discarded. Why?
> For example, if you compared grammar of Latin, French, Spanish, and Gothic, you'd have to come to the conclusion that Latin was much closer to Gothic, and quite far from French or Spanish. The truth, however, is quite different. We all can see and know that Latin is much closer to French or Spanish (its daughter languages, as opposed to Gothic being a kind of cousin).


 
That depends on how you measure "closeness". Superficially, yes, you could say that some things are more similar among certain distant languages than among some other closely related ones. But if you actualy try to explain the similarities between Latin and Gothic, you can form a coherent theory of these simlarities only by postulating a very, very distant common ancestor, whereas it's easy to see how Latin could have changed into something resembling Spanish, French, Italian, etc. in a much shorter time -- and is true for the grammar too. After all, in Italian you can still write a poem that would be more or less valid classical Latin, and this wouldn't be possible if many grammatical similarities hadn't been preserved alongside the vocabulary.



> If you considered French phonetics or pronunciation, you'd have to come to the conclusion that it is about as different from Latin as Japanese or some other language. The phonetic systems of French and Latin are totally different.
> The point is that grammar and phonetics can change very, very rapidly and cause connections to be almost completely lost.


There is much more to grammar than the case system.  None of the European IE languages have changed to the point where they would feature truly exotic grammatical features like, say, ergativity, lack of plural or tense, inclusive/exclusive we... Speakers of these languages often tend to see the differences clearly, but take most of the similarities for granted. 

As for phonetics, it indeed changes so rapidly that it's mostly useless for intuitive, informal comparisons between languages, but sound change laws are fairly regular and constitute and importan tool in historical linguistics. 



> English does have big, big Germanic components, especially in the roots of its most common words, yet at the same time the Romance component is also so big, and essential to the language that communicating without it would be impossible.


Well, f you don't step into abstract terminology, you could actually say quite a bit using only the Germanic vocabulary of English. Here is a quote from the BBC show to which Arrius gave a link above:_Each word I'm speaking now is from Old English, and I think it would be a long time before you thought of something not right about what I've been saying. I could go on for days, weeks, months, even years... You could leave, go home, have a rest, come back tonight -- and I'd still be here speaking Old English words. Old English is at the heart of everything we say and do._​Note how natural and uncontrived this text reads, despite being 100% Germanic. And now try to say something comparable using only Romance vocabulary -- even if you exclude the function words from consideration! At best, you'll end up with something resembling a parody of "educated" speech. 



> In other words, it goes beyond just "borrowings" (one of the silliest terms in Historical Linguistics)--the Romance component is completely part of the language.


I wouldn't agree. The English grammar has far, far more in common with many of its distant Germanic relatives, like for example the Scandinavian languages, than with any Romance language. Can you point out a single significant feature of English grammar that has been adopted from a Romance language? I frankly can't think of anything better than a few derivational suffixes, such as -_ize_ and -_able_, and these have entered most other European languages anyway. 



> I suppose for various historiographical reasons English has been considered a Germanic Language, but it just as rightly could be considered to be a kind of creole, a melding of Germanic (both Anglo Saxon and Norse) elements with Romance.


As far as I know, the theories about English being a creole are highly controversial, and most linguists view English as an uncontroversially Germanic language. In my opinion, the creolization theories make a lot of superficial sense, but they don't stand to a real scrutiny in the light of the known history of English.


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## Frank06

Hi,

Athaulf already reacted to this post in an adequate way. But I wanted to ake some minor notes:



zpoludnia swiata said:


> When comparing languages in terms of historical relatedness (an etymological action), you can only look at vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar have to be discarded.


It's exactly abandoning the idea that one only should look at the lexicon, which boosted historical-linguistic research two centuries ago.
I don't see a reason to go back to the kind of pre-scientific modus operandi you suggest.

[Probably a bit off topic, but it is exactly this kind of focus on the lexicon plus disregarding grammar that make the theories of Greenberg and Ruhlen so week. One of the major features of 99% of the self-proclaimed "historical linguists" you can find on the net (idiosyncratic and fringe would be better epithets) is exactly a monomaniac focus on the lexicon. "Comic book linguistics" is one of the better comments I read on this kind of, erm "method".]



zpoludnia swiata said:


> For example, if you compared grammar of Latin, French, Spanish, and Gothic, you'd have to come to the conclusion that Latin was much closer to Gothic, and quite far from French or Spanish.


Come again? 



> If you considered French phonetics or pronunciation, you'd have to come to the conclusion that it is about as different from Latin as Japanese or some other language. The phonetic systems of French and Latin are totally different. The point is that grammar and phonetics can change very, very rapidly and cause connections to be almost completely lost.


As I tried to explain in post *49*, it's quite senseless to look at two synchronic stages and disregard the diachrony, especially when talking about the (internal) history of a language. As Athaulf explained, there is something as sound laws. In addition to this link he posted, I want to refer to a basic explanation of the comparative method.



> English does have big, big Germanic components, especially in the roots of its most common words, yet at the same time the Romance component is also so big, and essential to the language that communicating without it would be impossible. In other words, it goes beyond just "borrowings" (one of the silliest terms in Historical Linguistics)--the Romance component is completely part of the language.


What do you mean by "borrowings" being "one of the silliest terms in Historical Linguistics"?? 



> I suppose for various historiographical reasons English has been considered a Germanic Language, but it just as rightly could be considered to be a kind of creole, a melding of Germanic (both Anglo Saxon and Norse) elements with Romance.


Again I refer to post *49*. 
The idea that English is a creole turned out to be rather unproductive and has been abandoned a long time ago. 
BTW, the term 'Anglo-Saxon' (denoting the language of the 5th-10th/11th century) has been replaced by 'Old English' almost half a century ago.



> Also, some of the English words of Latin/Romance origin have gone through sound changes, this is not typical of "borrowings" but rather of words integrally part of a language.


And yet those words kind of started as borrowings. It's quite typical (or at least possible) that borrowed words are adapted to the phonetical system and that they are modified according to the grammar of the borrowing language.



> Examples: chair (from catedra), "k" to "ch" sound change, as well as loss of internal syllables. taste, boy, peace, blue (Germanic but from French, if it had been Anglo-Saxon it would have become "blow")


A minor note: French 'blue' does have Germanic origins .



> One last note, Among the 100 most used words in English, Germanic words absolutely dominate, yet this doesn't say much, because just about all these words are function words (I, the, not, have, of, etc...) that carry very little communicative meaning in and of themselves.


Yet another reason NOT to look at lexical items in isolation, or only at lexical items, as you suggested in your first paragraph.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## modus.irrealis

Frank06 said:


> It's exactly abandoning the idea that one only should look at the lexicon, which boosted historical-linguistic research two centuries ago.


Huh? It was the exact opposite, with people realizing that typological similarities between languages, whether on the syntactical, morphological, or phonological level, are no indication of a genetic relationship, and that what matters is regular sound correspondences between words. Anything less than that and you can't be sure that languages are genetically related or whether their similarities are the result of some other mechanism like sprachbunds (as with the Altaic languages).


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## Frank06

Hi,


modus.irrealis said:


> Huh? It was the exact opposite, with people realizing that typological similarities between languages, whether on the syntactical, morphological, or phonological level, are no indication of a genetic relationship,


I start to think that there is a slight misunderstanding about what we mean by words, lexicon, etc.

Anyway, I was talking about what _triggered_ modern historical linguistics two centuries ago. Before that period (roughly the end of the 18th century) most 'linguists' dealt with the lexicon, with comparing words (apart from a few exceptions).

The first chapters of Szemerényi's _Introduction to Indo-European linguistics_ deal with the history of historical linguistics. It's almost as clarifying as Robins' _A short history of Linguistics _in this respect:


> In the languages mentioned [Greek, Persian, German, English] it is possible to establish similarities not only of vocabulary but also of grammar. [...] It is surprising that such simlilarities passed so long unnoticed[...]. The early medieval and early modern periods also simply ignored them.


 
One of the texts from the period I was referring too and which is often quoted as one of the (highly symbolic) starting points of modern historical linguistics talks about morphology and only morphology.


> The Sanscrit language [...] is of a wonderful *structure* [=morphology] [...] more exquisitely refined than either [Greek or Latin]; both in the *roots of verbs* (=vocabulary in Jones' writings) and in the *form of grammar *(=inflection in his texts), that could possibly have been produced by accident.


(Sir William Jones, 1786, p. 1788).



> and that what matters is regular sound correspondences between words.


I agree on the importance of regular sound changes. Which means that we have to look further than the lexicon. But by that standard we should exclude even Grimm from the list of historical linguists, since he allowed a lot of irregularities in his theories (some of which later solved by Verner). It's only the so-called neo-grammarians who stressed the importance of regular sound changes. But they come almost 80 years after Jones' speech.



> Anything less than that and you can't be sure that languages are genetically related or whether their similarities are the result of some other mechanism like sprachbunds (as with the Altaic languages).


I was talking about what _triggered_ modern historical linguistics in the late 18th century, which is, in short, the idea to look further than simply words, look at the words _and_ the grammar (which is indeed more than inflections and morphology and which includes phonetics, phonology and morphophonology etc.). I am not talking about a notion as Sprachbund (or areal relationships), which dates from roughly 40 years later, and which gained importance ever since.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## zpoludnia swiata

I agree that sound changes are usually regular and measurable in terms of language change. What I don't espouse is that just looking at the phonetic components of a language can determine a genetic-historical relationship.

One thing I want to mention is that large areas of grammar can change quite a bit to make a language "atypical" of its language family. To establish English as a Germanic language (or any group you want to claim it is a part of) you have to look at the lexicon, not the grammar. English has a number of salient grammatical features not shared by other Germanic languages: for example, even a certain component which is semi-ergative (it's me, Who did it?--him!: these are typical natural constructions of spoken English, and this kind of structure is not shared with other Germanic languages, not even with many European languages)--but that's beside the point, as it's not part of the lexicon. 
Intelligibility is also not necessarily a great indicator of relatedness. Most speakers of Spanish could not understand spoken French. In written form, yes. But, it is the spoken form that is the basis of language, and despite the fact that the two languages are related, this doesn't help a Spanish speaker much when it comes to understanding it. The same for German. I doubt that the average English speaker would have much of an idea about what was going on if he/she heard "Die Pflanzen haben seit mehreren Tagen kein Wasser ab gekrigt."--an example of just a mundane, average sort of sentance someone might say in a daily conversation. It might as well be Polish, or Arabic if you were considering how easily that was to be understood. 

When looking at shared grammatical or phonetic features, it may be more valid to consider "Sprachbund" or areal relationships. In fact, they are a sort of relationship, maybe as valid as the commonly accepted, and unquestioned historical genetic relationship. 
In the sense of the Sprachbund relationship, French pronunciation has more in common with German (standard and western dialects), than with Spanish or Latin (for that matter). Romanian has more in common in certain ways with Bulgarian than with Italian, as for the Sprachbund. In fact one could look for certain measurable characteristics of languages (types of vowels, vowel reduction type, palatalization, perifrastic verbal expressions, etc... whatever it is you want to focus on) and classify them by that. It may be just as important and valid when telling us something about the languages than just the traditional "this is a Germanic language, that's a Romance language, that's a Uralic language, etc..." Those language family, or sub-family classifications tell us something, but not everything, and are not always overly relevant (to some degree yes) for the learner.


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## modus.irrealis

Frank06 said:


> I strat to think that there is a slight misunderstanding about what we mean by words, lexicon, etc.


Quite possibly.



> Anyway, I was talking about what _triggered_ modern historical linguistics two centuries ago. Before that period (roughly the end of the 18th century) most 'linguists' dealt with the lexicon, with comparing words (apart from a few exceptions).


Whether you say "triggered" or "boosted" I still disagree because it was the emphasis on correspondences that set historical linguistics on a firm scientific basis. Before that there were just subjective impressions. And besides, the approach you're talking about also triggered all sorts of hypotheses that couldn't hold up to scientific investigation -- the Ural-Altaic hypothesis for example which was largely based on things like vowel harmony and agglutination. It still seems to me that the foundation for comparative linguistics as a science was lain when the idea of regular correspondences took hold. Can you give an example of what you mean when you say that people took into account grammar and things beyond the lexicon?



> The first chapters of Szemerényi's _Introduction to Indo-European linguistics_ deal with the history of historical linguistics. It's almost as clarifying as Robins' _A short history of Linguistics _in this respect:


I don't see what you're trying to say with this quote.

And anyway, sure you can reconstruct grammar but again you do that through sound correspondences. They are for example the reason you can link the Greek dative to both the Sanskrit dative and locative and thus it's a very reasonable to assume that Greek merged the two cases and the proto-language had both cases. But everything ultimately rests on the correspondences between words not between grammatical systems.



> One of the texts from the period I was referring too and which is often quoted as one of the (highly symbolic) starting points of modern historical linguistics talks about morphology and only morphology.
> .(Sir William Jones, 1786, p. 1788).


 It's quoted because his impression ended up being proven right by actual scientific investigation. Other, similar, impressions ended up being wrong.



> I agree on the importance of regular sound changes. Which means that we have to look further than the lexicon.


How so?



> But by that standard we should exclude even Grimm from the list of historical linguists, since he allowed a lot of irregularities in his theories (some of which later solved by Verner).


That doesn't follow -- there's no reason linguistics should be held to higher standards than other sciences and there's nothing wrong with partial answers.



> I was talking about what _triggered_ modern historical linguistics in the late 18th century, which is, in short, the idea to look further than simply words, look at the words _and_ the grammar (which is indeed more than inflections and morphology and which includes phonetics, phonology and morphophonology etc.). I am not talking about a notion as Sprachbund (or areal relationships), which dates from roughly 40 years later, and which gained importance ever since.


But then you mentioned Greenberg, and his method, whatever its problems are, is a new method.


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## Frank06

Hi,



zpoludnia swiata said:


> I agree that sound changes are usually regular and measurable in terms of language change. What I don't espouse is that just looking at the phonetic components of a language can determine a genetic-historical relationship.


Agreed. It takes more than just phonetics or just phonology or just morphology or _just_ the lexicon. One has to take all these things (and more) into account.
On the other hand...
In _Comparative linguistics, _the author Beekes discusses the paradigm of the verb 'to be' (a morphological issue) in Sanskrit and Latin and concludes "the similarities are so precise and exact that this alone is enough evidence to _proove_ that Latin and Sanskrit are genitically related". 



> One thing I want to mention is that large areas of grammar can change quite a bit to make a language "atypical" of its language family. To establish English as a Germanic language (or any group you want to claim it is a part of) you have to look at the lexicon, not the grammar. English has a number of salient grammatical features not shared by other Germanic languages: for example, even a certain component which is semi-ergative (it's me, Who did it?--him!: these are typical natural constructions of spoken English, and this kind of structure is not shared with other Germanic languages, not even with many European languages)--but that's beside the point, as it's not part of the lexicon.


One doesn't have to look at the features which are different in English v.av. the other Germanic languages, but at the features the Germanic languages have in common. Again, see mail 49.



> Intelligibility is also not necessarily a great indicator of relatedness. Most speakers of Spanish could not understand spoken French. In written form, yes. But, it is the spoken form that is the basis of language, and despite the fact that the two languages are related, this doesn't help a Spanish speaker much when it comes to understanding it. The same for German. I doubt that the average English speaker would have much of an idea about what was going on if he/she heard "Die Pflanzen haben seit mehreren Tagen kein Wasser ab gekrigt."--an example of just a mundane, average sort of sentance someone might say in a daily conversation. It might as well be Polish, or Arabic if you were considering how easily that was to be understood.


Agreed. If mutual intelligibility would be the basis of language relatedness, then I have to conclude that the Flemish Dutch coastal dialects are a language family on their own. 



> When looking at shared grammatical or phonetic features, it may be more valid to consider "Sprachbund" or areal relationships. In fact, they are a sort of relationship, maybe as valid as the commonly accepted, and unquestioned historical genetic relationship.
> In the sense of the Sprachbund relationship, French pronunciation has more in common with German (standard and western dialects), than with Spanish or Latin (for that matter). Romanian has more in common in certain ways with Bulgarian than with Italian, as for the Sprachbund. In fact one could look for certain measurable characteristics of languages (types of vowels, vowel reduction type, palatalization, perifrastic verbal expressions, etc... whatever it is you want to focus on) and classify them by that.


This is done (so-called typological clasification).


> It may be just as important and valid when telling us something about the languages than just the traditional "this is a Germanic language, that's a Romance language, that's a Uralic language, etc..." Those language family, or sub-family classifications tell us something, but not everything,


Agreed. But this is well known too. Persian is an Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Iranian, Western Iranian, Southwestern Iranian language. Impressive, but so what? It doesn't say a lot, but it gives an idea on where to quickly situate the language. This classification doesn't say a thing about the vast amounts of Arabic words in Persian (comparable with Latin/Romance/French in English). But nobody would even consider calling Persian a Semitic language. Which, by your very own standard, should be the case.


> and are not always overly relevant (to some degree yes) for the learner.


Agreed. But this is not an issue here.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Frank06

Hi,


modus.irrealis said:


> Whether you say "triggered" or "boosted" I still disagree because it was the emphasis on correspondences that set historical linguistics on a firm scientific basis.


Which implies that you consider the neogrammarians as the first 'real' historical linguists (Brugmann and Osthoff's pamfletarian text, the preface to _Morphologische Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiete der_
_indogermanischen Sprachen_ I, 1878)? 
But even these guys took into account grammar (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntaxis, ...). 
By the way, this is a good reader in 19th century linguistic texts...



> Before that there were just subjective impressions.


It would help if you could give us some names and a more precise period. 



> And besides, the approach you're talking about also triggered all sorts of hypotheses that couldn't hold up to scientific investigation -- the Ural-Altaic hypothesis for example which was largely based on things like vowel harmony and agglutination.


The basis for the Ural-Altaic hypothesis is based upon _typological features_. But I am not talking about typological classification at all.



> It still seems to me that the foundation for comparative linguistics as a science was lain when the idea of regular correspondences took hold. Can you give an example of what you mean when you say that people took into account grammar and things beyond the lexicon?


In a previous mail I mentioned the paradigm of the verb 'to be' in Latin and Sanskrit. I think that's a morphological issue.



> I don't see what you're trying to say with this quote.


"It is surprising that such [grammatical] simlilarities passed so long unnoticed[...]. The early medieval and early modern periods also simply ignored them."
Before the end of the 18th century 'linguists' only looked at the lexicon, only at words. It's when they also turned to the grammar, that the era of modern (historical) linguistics is considered to have started.



> And anyway, sure you can reconstruct grammar but again you do that through sound correspondences. They are for example the reason you can link the Greek dative to both the Sanskrit dative and locative and thus it's a very reasonable to assume that Greek merged the two cases and the proto-language had both cases. But everything ultimately rests on the correspondences between words not between grammatical systems.


I really think that I misunderstand your usage of "looking at words". Do you mean "looking at sounds"? By "correspondences of words" you mean "correspondences of sounds"? If so, then I don't think our opinions differ that much.


> But then you mentioned Greenberg, and his method, whatever its problems are, is a new method.


Greenberg (and his accolite Ruhlen) are criticized exactly because they mainly (solely) base themselves upon lexical items. It might be 'new', but what they do is basically going back to a method of working dating from the pre-Jones period. Of course they are criticised. 
It would be the same as a biologist going back to pre-Darwinian theories.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## modus.irrealis

Frank,

So are you just talking about comparing words as members of paradigms instead of as just individual words? Then sure, if, say, you can find correspondences throughout the nominal inflections of two languages, then that would be much stronger evidence that languages are related. But the heart of the matter still seems to be that words correspond to each other in terms of sound changes. To take another example, the German preterit corresponds to the Greek aorist and perfect, something which is established using sound changes -- the relationship is no shakier just because the forms have different grammatical functions (in terms of aspect and tense) in the two languages.

I think I misunderstood what you were saying.



Frank06 said:


> Which implies that you consider the neogrammarians as the first 'real' historical linguists (Brugmann and Osthoff's pamfletarian text, the preface to _Morphologische Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiete der_
> _indogermanischen Sprachen_ I, 1878)?


No. Why do you think so? That would be like saying that there were no 'real' mathematicians before many major ideas were clarified in the last two centuries. For me, it was the recognition of regular sound laws (whether they were exceptionless or not is a minor issue) that sets modern historical linguistics apart from earlier investigations into language, where it seems it was basically an anything-goes policy for giving etymologies and such. And you can find this idea of sound laws even in a work as early as the one by Sajnovics (English translation available here) which is from 1770, which is before Jones. Now I'm guessing my taking into account grammar you mean things like comparing suffixes as done in that book?



> Greenberg (and his accolite Ruhlen) are criticized exactly because they mainly (solely) base themselves upon lexical items. It might be 'new', but what they do is basically going back to a method of working dating from the pre-Jones period.


I don't see how. As I understand it, the idea is that languages that are closely related will have more similarities (and I don't see why it has to be limited to the lexicon in your sense, since why can't you compare the various persons/tenses, say, of verbs) than languages which are more distantly related or not related at all. In theory, this seems perfectly reasonable, but the problem is in practice, where you have to say what similarities are, when similarities are statistically significant and not due to chance, and make sure that you don't have garbage-in-garbage-out in terms of the data, or that you don't cherry-pick the data -- in my view, that's the chief advantage of the comparative method in that it makes cherry-picking very difficult. But the approach seems very different to previous approaches to historical linguistics.


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## zpoludnia swiata

I think in some ways the comparative method for studying language similarity (especially the type used by Greenberg) is quite right to focus on lexis. Something similar is happening in discourse analysis and what it means for the analysis of grammar in English in general--as it focuses on the grammar of spoken English. It largely shows the primacy of lexis over grammar in understanding what is going on in a given language.


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## Frank06

Hi,


zpoludnia swiata said:


> I think in some ways the comparative method for studying language similarity (especially the type used by Greenberg) is quite right to focus on lexis.


Then why is there so much critique by the linguistic community on Greenberg's and Ruhlen's methods?



> Something similar is happening in discourse analysis and what it means for the analysis of grammar in English in general--as it focuses on the grammar of spoken English.


1. We're talking about historical (comparative) linguistics, not about discourse analysis.

2. If you simply look at a list of titles of the publications written by people who are considered to be the founding fathers of modern historical linguistics (which indeed, as Modus Irrealis pointed out, didn't start with William Jones [thanks, M.I., for the great link to Sajnovics' text in English!!]), you get this:
* Bopp: On the *Conjugational System* of the Sanskrit Language
* Grimm: Germanic *Grammar*
* von Raumer: Linguistic-Historical Change and the Natural-Historical Definition of *Sounds*
* Schleicher: Introduction to A Compendium of the Comparative *Grammar* of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages
* Lottner: Exceptions to the First *Sound* Shift
* ...
These texts (and many others which can be found here) are considered to be pivotal texts just because they do not focus solely on the lexicon. 

Ignoring grammar in a historical comparison of languages is setting the clock +/- 250 years back. 
Just to be clear: Grammar includes phonetics, phonology, morphophonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics.



> It largely shows the primacy of lexis over grammar in understanding _what is going on in a given language_.


Which primacy? Ignoring the lexicon is as aburd and improductive as ignoring the grammatical aspects. There is no primacy in historical linguistics: one needs both. Or better even, it's absurd to present it as a dichotomy lexicon vs grammar.
By the way, historical linguistics discusses what "*went* (past tense) on in a given language". Whatever that means.
Please stay on topic.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## zpoludnia swiata

I'm not saying that grammar should be ignored, but when establishing an etymological, familial relationship among language (not a typological or sprachbund relationship), the manifestations of grammar should be viewed lexically, i.e. how it appears within the structure of words.
So what establishes these relationships is not the fact that there is or isn't  a certain way to express posession, continuous activity, or adverbs (just to cite examples) but rather how this is manifested.  In these cases: -_s/of phrases, to be -V+ing, -ly_.


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## Athaulf

Frank06 said:


> Then why is there so much critique by the linguistic community on Greenberg's and Ruhlen's methods?



My (completely amateurish ) impression is that the principal problem of these methods is not that they focus solely on lexicon, but rather that they do it in an _extremely_ sloppy way. Instead of relying on regular sound correspondences, they just present some vaguely similar sounding words from a bunch of different languages, with extremely strained similarities in meaning, and say -- _voila_! And when they try to argue that these similarities are greater than what could be expected from random chance, their math is so ridiculously wrong that they'd better not even have tried.  

I definitely don't know enough about linguistics to argue about the main topic of this thread, but this mass lexical comparison stuff seems like such an evident case of crackpot science to me that it shouldn't even be brought up in a serious discussion of real historical linguistics.


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## zpoludnia swiata

But, when trying to establish a historical familial relationship among or between language, what else are you going to consider if not lexis?  
The fact that research may be done sloppily or in a crackpot way is another issue all together.


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## Lugubert

zpoludnia swiata said:


> But, when trying to establish a historical familial relationship among or between language, what else are you going to consider if not lexis?
> The fact that research may be done sloppily or in a crackpot way is another issue all together.


My take is that isolated lexicon similarities tend to be useless for finding "genetic" realationships. Everybody borrows words from everywhere all the time. No problem. Greek _potamos_ looks almost like Amerind _Potomac_, both meaning 'river'. Persian _bad_ is English _bad_. Few would infer a genetic connection from that one word. On the other hand, if you find that inital 'p's in ancient Indian languages regularily correspond to intial 'f' in Germanic languages, you can be fairly certain that there is some kind of inherited reason for that find: Sanskrit padam 'foot', Latin pedem , Greek poda; Gothic fotus, English foot, German Fuss, Swedish fot etc. etc, which pattern corresponds to innumerable cases of p/f sets of words.

Verb inflection patterns or syntactic structures don't get borrowed at all that easily. So, when you find that the masculine singular present forms of hundreds of verbs have one ending in the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language (*PIE), and that Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic (OCS) and more have a corresponding ending that looks very much like the *PIE one for just about any verb, we tend to think that it's not just a matter of chance. (Sanskrit -ti, Hettite -zi, Greek -ti/-si, Latin -t/-it, Gothic -t/-iþ, OCS -tĭ/-eti, but sufficiently dissimilar to just about any non-IE language).

Then, there's the pattern of for example noun cases. Most European IE languages have radically reduced their inflection sets, but there are sooo many ways that we can trace the current two (English, Swedish etc. Nominative, Genitive) or the contemporary four (e.g. German Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative) or even Russian (N, G, D, Locative, Instrumental) back to our proposed *PIE, thought to have had 6 cases, having a Vocative as well.

It's all about consistent patterns working on the system as a whole.

So, as to the OP


			
				zpoludnia swiata said:
			
		

> When comparing languages in terms of historical relatedness (an etymological action), you can only look at vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar have to be discarded.


I'd say it's mainly quite and consistently the other way around. Forget vocabulary, look closely at pronunciation evolution, but dig into grammar and other systematic features.


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## Frank06

Hi,

This pdf file, "Indo-European Practice and Historical Methodology" may be of interest in the ongoing discussion. The authors of the article refer to Greenberg's and Ruhlen's "methods" and their justification for such "methods".

Just one quote:​


> (a)for the most part, neither the recognition of languages as IE nor their internal classification have been based primarily on superficial lexical resemblances; (b) where such methods were employed, they frequently led to erroneous results.


 


Groetjes,​ 


Frank​


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## Lugubert

For those who rely on lexical resemblances, I recommend this discussion on chance resemblances between languages.

Instead of posting long theses myself, let it be known that I almost perfectly agree with Frank's views.


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## Sepia

There is one aspect about just comparing words that no-one has mentioned:

If English is loosing its Germanic origin because a greater part of its vocabulary is derived from romance languages - what about Icelandic? They are trying to keep the language pure by making up new words for new things. 

Does that make modern Icelandic an artificial language?

Of course not. The character of a language is in its grammar. Even loan-words hare handled in accordance with the present structure of the language.


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