tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post2568793150125194468..comments2024-03-23T01:31:13.502+01:00Comments on Jabal al-Lughat: Arabic loanwords in "proto-Nilo-Saharan"Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-65647498652283980312010-01-31T04:22:41.873+01:002010-01-31T04:22:41.873+01:00Wichman (and apparently Bender's work that he ...Wichman (and apparently Bender's work that he quotes) use pairwise comparisons between each possible pair of languages, and finds similarity no better than chance. However this method loses any trends that would be visible when you look at a word across all languages simultaneously.<br /><br />Dene-Yeniseian is the current poster boy for the superiority of pairwise comparison to mass comparison, but Wichman finds the pairwise similarity between Na-Dene and Yeniseian to be less than the chance expectation! So pairwise raw comparison becomes worthless as we go back in time, while pairwise comparison taking into account reconstructed phonetic change can reach farther back. But this is not comparing mass comparison to anything; it's comparing two methods of pairwise comparison.<br /><br />Greenberg explicitly disavowed glottochronology - in response to criticism of a paper by Greenberg and Swadesh, he responded that the glottochronology part was Swadesh's work inserted over Greenberg's misgivings, and listed some of his criticisms of glottochronology.Joseph B.https://www.blogger.com/profile/10004912185717944815noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-12001579996622785642009-11-25T20:08:51.937+01:002009-11-25T20:08:51.937+01:00"Bender (1976) revisited the question with a ..."Bender (1976) revisited the question with a comparison of 24 Nilo-Saharan languages and one language from each of three other<br />families. With a criterion described as “the ‘look-alike’ principle modified by the results<br />of a painstaking search for regular phonological correspondences,” he found an average of 3.4% cognates between languages in different families and only 3.8% cognates between languages in different subgroups at the highest level within Nilo-Saharan." - http://email.eva.mpg.de/~wichmann/GlottoHeurUpload.pdfLameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-38506635606165966802009-11-08T10:59:44.880+01:002009-11-08T10:59:44.880+01:00Joseph B.: I did not attack Greenberg's charac...Joseph B.: I did not attack Greenberg's <i>character</i>. For example, I do not at all claim that his work was consciously fraudulent, or even that he cheated on his wife (if any). I only claim that he put forward a method suitable only for generating hypotheses (as David M. and indeed Edward Vajda point out) as a method of proving them, and that since in fact it is possible to frame any number of rational hypotheses consistent with a set of facts, his method <i>even as a hypothesis generator</i> is no better than experienced intuition and perhaps not as good.<br /><br />As our good host implies, someone will eventually have to come up with the combination of chutzpah and hard work required to establish a scientifically supportable classification of African languages. Until then, we will continue to languish in the wilds of ignorance.John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-68807638470339323562009-10-28T23:00:35.530+01:002009-10-28T23:00:35.530+01:00"BTW, does anything bar Haida from being the ..."BTW, does anything bar Haida from being the sister-group of Dené-Yeniseic?"<br /><br />Geography maybe? If Haida is a sister language, that means that the Haida started out from Siberia a lot earlier than the Na-Dene speakers did. Then maybe the Na-Dene speakers swamped all the Haida speakers on the mainland. <br /><br />It's kind of unlikely, but not impossible. In fact, that's basically the status of Welsh and Irish with regard to Germanic in Britain.Jimnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-1258540931861619192009-10-26T20:03:38.330+01:002009-10-26T20:03:38.330+01:00Oops, my last sentence based on misreading of your...Oops, my last sentence based on misreading of your last sentence. Anyway, Mikkola's conclusion seems in agreement with Blench and not to particularly contradict Greenberg.Joseph B.https://www.blogger.com/profile/10004912185717944815noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-23996664169437682802009-10-26T19:58:25.993+01:002009-10-26T19:58:25.993+01:00I was addressing John's complete dismissal and...I was addressing John's complete dismissal and character attack.<br /><br />Songhay was Greenberg's last addition to Nilo-Saharan so presumably the weakest. He certainly did not claim his classifications were set in stone or that moving one group would invalidate the whole family. Greenberg's Nilo-Saharan had six coordinate branches and did not specify a complete branching tree as Bender and Ehret's later work have. <br /><br />The alternatives for which extant language family has closest genetic relation to Songhay are limited. There's Niger-Congo (which is viewed as coordinate to Nilo-Saharan by some, or simply a subgroup according to Blench), there's Afroasiatic, and all other families are much more distant with nobody proposing a relation.<br /><br />I thought you had commented on Nicolai's Mande/Berber theory in the past, but can't find it. Mande is also the most divergent member of Niger-Congo. I can't find Mikkola's paper online; what does he think Songhay has more in common with Niger-Congo, and how much of that is Mande vs. the rest?Joseph B.https://www.blogger.com/profile/10004912185717944815noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-25987175336542392642009-10-25T00:45:43.626+02:002009-10-25T00:45:43.626+02:00I'm primarily criticising Ehret here - I recog...I'm primarily criticising Ehret here - I recognise the heuristic value of Greenberg's work. But since you mention it: the only Songhai data in the book you cite is from the comparison Maba <i>eri</i>, Songhai <i>kuri</i>, Daza <i>gere</i> "blood"; but the proto-Songhai form is *<i>kwidi</i>, with a d. The comparison is still conceivable (all three languages could independently have lenited the d, say), but I am always suspicious of comparisons that look less good when you reconstruct the proto-forms. Regular correspondences would make that more convincing, but they aren't available either (Ehret claims to have them, but go through his dictionary and judge its plausibility for yourself): for example, in <i>The Languages of Africa</i>, for "bird" ("kyiraw" < *kidaw) Greenberg compares Maba kebele(k) "wing", with an l rather than an r.<br /><br />He doesn't present any new arguments for Nilo-Saharan in this book that I can see, unless you count his discussion of moveable-k (which does look like an argument for treating some subset of Nilo-Saharan as valid.) He just says that it is "a grouping now universally accepted", and, looking at the scant and often misanalysed data he used to argue for it in the first place, it really should not be - and, in fact, it isn't. Songhay's membership seems to be especially questionable - in his statistical analysis, Mikkola (1999), though broadly supporting the notion of Nilo-Saharan, concluded that Niger-Congo has more in common with Nilo-Saharan than Songhay does!Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-13839008983174795902009-10-24T23:02:41.937+02:002009-10-24T23:02:41.937+02:00Trashing Greenberg seems to be a safe sport these ...Trashing Greenberg seems to be a safe sport these days, but before taking it at face value, read his last book <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=FEEHCRk_Y6gC" rel="nofollow">Genetic Linguistics</a> where he responds to the critics on method as well as specific cases including Haida and Nilo-Saharan.Joseph B.https://www.blogger.com/profile/10004912185717944815noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-15063193210358078202009-10-22T00:15:39.791+02:002009-10-22T00:15:39.791+02:00It's very simple: mass comparison is phenetics...It's very simple: mass comparison is phenetics rather than phylogenetics. It can give the right answer for phylogenetics, but it can at least as easily be misled by shared retentions, convergence/loans, and so on.<br /><br />It's great for <b>generating</b> phylogenetic hypotheses, I'd say, but it's completely incapable of <b>testing</b> them.<br /><br />BTW, does anything bar Haida from being the sister-group of Dené-Yeniseic?David Marjanovićnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-36292655505890176512009-10-19T23:09:46.113+02:002009-10-19T23:09:46.113+02:00Greenberg's works ought to be taken in the rig...Greenberg's works ought to be taken in the right spirit: as very speculative proposals, usually based on data that has since become obsolete, that sometimes point the way towards reality, but should never be taken as the last word on a subject. The trouble is that no one seems willing to put in the hard work of coming up with a better classification, knowing that much of the potential audience mistakenly assumes the problem has already been solved.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13177437.post-45814261579407489072009-10-19T06:12:37.364+02:002009-10-19T06:12:37.364+02:00Indeed it would be. Consider: what did Greenberg a...Indeed it would be. Consider: what did Greenberg actually do with his professional life? Let's look at the record, as Al Smith said.<br /><br />In the New World, Greenberg identified Eskimo-Aleut (duh), Na-Dene (duh, barring Haida which is now out of the picture since last year's Yeniseian breakthrough), and Other. In Africa, he identified Afroasiatic (mostly duh, though including Chadic and excluding other peripheral groups was probably right), Niger-Congo (okay, some serious work there, I guess -- I'm totally ignorant of that whole family outside Bantu), and Other. The rest of his work is worthless, and his mass-comparison methodology is @#$# and every historical linguist knows it.<br /><br />Time to let all of Greenberg's works perish and be forgotten.John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.com