Glottochronology

From Free net encyclopedia

(Redirected from Lexicostatistics)

Today, Lexicostatistics is a subfield of Quantitative Linguistics. As the name says, it deals with statistical methods on lexical material of languages. Of lexicostatistics, Glottochronology is a method used to estimate the time of divergence of two or more related languages under the assumption of constant rates of change among said languages' basic vocabulary. This assumption, originally put forward by Morris Swadesh, was analogical carried over from the use of C14 dating for measuring the age of organic materials, in that a "lexical half-life" is estimated and used to extrapolate to the point in time at which the languages in question diverged from a common proto-language.

The method presumed that the core vocabulary of a language is replaced at a constant (or near constant) rate across all languages and cultures, and therefore could be used to measure the passage of time. The process made use of a list of lexical terms compiled by Morris Swadesh assumed to be resistant against borrowing (originally designed as a list of 200 items; however, the reduced 100 word list is much more common among modern day linguists). This core vocabulary was designed to encompass concepts common to every human language, eliminating concepts that vary by culture and time. Basically, glottochronology used the percentage of cognates (words that have a common origin) in "basic word lists". The larger the percentage of cognates, the more recently the two languages being compared are presumed to have separated. This assumption has been demonstrated as the basic error, because it neglects the dependence of this percentage of three further factors.

Glottochronology is frequently met with a large degree of scepticism or even completely rejected by mainstream linguists, who view it as having been falsified by many counterexamples. Many claim there is enough evidence to support the idea that languages change alternately very slowly and very quickly and that it varies from culture to culture. For instance, a language's literature may have a stabilizing effect on a literate culture's language (McWhorter page number needed).

Defenders of the method usually point out that while it is true that the phonology and morphology of certain language groups can be prone to ultra-rapid change, the same does not usually apply to the basic lexicon. Certain exceptions apart, it is a linguistic fact, for instance, that closely related dialects usually share about 90 percent common items on the Swadesh wordlist; closely related language branches (such as Slavic, Romance, Turkic, etc.) share about 70 to 80 percent; and more distantly related languages from families such as Indo-European share about 25 to 30 per cent.

Somewhere in between the original concept of Swadesh and the rejection of glottochronology in its entirety lies the idea that glottochronology as a formal method of linguistic analysis becomes valid with the help of several important modifications. In particular, an attempt to introduce such modifications was performed by the Russian linguist Sergei Starostin, who had proposed that systematic loanwords, borrowed from one language into another, are a disruptive factor and have to be eliminated from the calculations; that the rate of change is not actually constant, but depends on the time period during which the word has existed in the language (i. e. chances of lexeme X being replaced by lexeme Y increase in direct proportion to the time elapsed - the so called "aging of words"); and that individual items on the 100 wordlist have different stability rates (for instance, the word "I" generally has a much lower chance of being replaced than the word "yellow", etc.).

While the resulting formula, taking into account both the time dependence and the individual stability quotients, is somewhat more complicated from Swadesh's original one, it has also been shown to generally yield more credible results that at least cannot be easily falsified based on existing historical evidence. On the other hand, it shows that glottochronology can really only be used as a serious tool on language families the historical phonology of which has been meticulously elaborated (at least to the point of being able to clearly distinguish between cognates and loanwords).

[edit]

Bibliography

  • Arndt, Walter W. (1959). The performance of glottochronology in Germanic. Language, 35, 180-192.
  • Bergsland, Knut; & Vogt, Hans. (1962). On the validity of glottochronology. Current Anthropology, 3, 115-153.
  • Callaghan, Catherine A. (1991). Utian and the Swadesh list. In J. E. Redden (Ed.), Papers for the American Indian language conference, held at the University of California, Santa Cruz, July and August, 1991 (pp. 218-237). Occasional papers on linguistics (No. 16). Carbondale: Department of Linguistics, Southern Illinois University.
  • Gudschinsky, Sarah. (1956). The ABC's of lexicostatistics (glottochronology). Word, 12, 175-210.
  • Hockett, Charles F. (1958). A course in modern linguistics (Chap. 6). New York: Macmillan.
  • Hoijer, Harry. (1956). Lexicostatistics: A critique. Language, 32, 49-60.
  • Hymes, Dell H. (1960). Lexicostatistics so far. Current Anthropology, 1 (1), 3-44.
  • Lees, Robert. (1953). The basis of glottochronology. Language, 29 (2), 113-127.
  • McWhorter, John. (2001). The power of Babel. New York: Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-4473-2.
  • Sjoberg, Andree; & Sjoberg, Gideon. (1956). Problems in glottochronology. American Anthropologist, 58 (2), 296-308.
  • Starostin, Sergei. Methodology Of Long-Range Comparison. 2002. pdf
  • Swadesh, Morris. (1950). Salish internal relationships. International Journal of American Linguistics, 16, 157-167.
  • Swadesh, Morris. (1952). Lexicostatistic dating of prehistoric ethnic contacts. Proceedings American Philosophical Society, 96, 452-463.
  • Swadesh, Morris. (1955). Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistic dating. International Journal of American Linguistics, 21, 121-137.
  • Swadesh, Morris (1972). What is glottochronology? In M. Swadesh, The origin and diversification of languages (pp. 271–284). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
  • Tischler, Johann, 1973. Glottochronologie und Lexikostatistik [Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 11]; Innsbruck
  • Time Depth in Historical Linguistics (2000). Ed. by Colin Renfrew, April McMahon & Larry Trask. The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, England.
[edit]

External links

es:Glotocronología nl:Glottochronologie ru:Глоттохронология ja:言語年代学

Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/Glottochronology"