Language Log

Don Ringe's guest post back on January 6, "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe", sparked a lively discussion, and Don responded with a series of other posts responding to questions and comments: "Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European", "More on IE wheels and horses", "Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence", "The linguistic history of horses, gods, and wheeled vehicles", "Some Wanderwörter in Indo-European languages".

Now, despite his claim that "after this I'm going to have to stop posting for a while", he's sent another essay:

Here is an interim post clearing up some outstanding questions; the last part turned into an in-depth discussion of the "thorn cluster" problem that will probably be published somewhere eventually.  I do mean to get back to the "IE homeland" problem, but that won't be possible till the summer.

Here's hoping that he gets drawn back in again earlier than that!

Last week, in honor of Darwin's birthday, we featured a guest post by Tecumseh Fitch: "Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited". A few days later, Derek Bickerton contributed a critical commentary.  Now Tecumseh has sent in a response to Derek — or, perhaps I should say, Prof. Fitch has contributed a response to Prof. Bickerton — which is presented below.

In response to W. Tecumseh Fitch's post "Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited"  (2/12/2009), Derek Bickerton sent the commentary presented below.

A guest post by W. Tecumseh Fitch, on the Occasion of Charles Darwin's 200th Birthday.

On the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, let's stop to ponder their contributions to the English lexicon. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Darwin is credited with the first known English use of 144 different words, including creationist, phylogeny, archaeopteryx, alfalfa, and rodeo. And his birthday-mate Lincoln? Only one: Michigander.

Read more about it in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus.

I've recently read David W. Anthony's book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, and I especially appreciated his clear explanation of the complex world of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology. There's a lot of new and relevant information, but you really do need a good guide — the facts and conjectures are complex enough, but the difficulty is multiplied many fold by the evolved disciplinary nomenclature, which is sometimes so baroque as to defy parody.

Published today: R. D. Gray, A. J. Drummond, and S. J. Greenhill, "Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement", Science 323(5913):479:483, 23 January 2009. The abstract:

Debates about human prehistory often center on the role that population expansions play in shaping biological and cultural diversity. Hypotheses on the origin of the Austronesian settlers of the Pacific are divided between a recent "pulse-pause" expansion from Taiwan and an older "slow-boat" diffusion from Wallacea. We used lexical data and Bayesian phylogenetic methods to construct a phylogeny of 400 languages. In agreement with the pulse-pause scenario, the language trees place the Austronesian origin in Taiwan approximately 5230 years ago and reveal a series of settlement pauses and expansion pulses linked to technological and social innovations. These results are robust to assumptions about the rooting and calibration of the trees and demonstrate the combined power of linguistic scholarship, database technologies, and computational phylogenetic methods for resolving questions about human prehistory.

An unusually clear explanation of the project, along with a great deal of background information, is available on the web here.

Don Ringe's guest post "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe" (1/6/2009) led to a series of additional posts in response to readers' questions: "Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European", "More on IE wheels and horses", "Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence", "The linguistic history of horses, gods, and wheeled vehicles". This morning brings another in the series.

As in Don's earlier posts, there's quite a bit of technical detail; but it seems that many readers are happy to follow Don through the historical undergrowth. Even if you find some of the terminology and typography puzzling, these posts may give you a  picture of how historical linguists think and reason.

And as before, because the typographical details are very important in this sort of discussion, and I'm not certain that I've rendered them correctly in html, a pdf of the post is here.

Arnold's post on linguistic(s) put me in mind of something I never got around to blogging last year. The hook was Richard Zoglin's appreciation of George Carlin in Time:

Most famously, Carlin talked about the "seven words you can never say on television," foisting the verboten few into his audience's face with the glee of a classroom cutup and the scrupulousness of a social linguist.

"Social linguist" — I had an image of Geoff Pullum at a cocktail party, with one hand in his blazer pocket and the other wrapped around a martini glass. But on reflection I figured the phrase was what the writer had made of hearing sociolinguist. In fact social linguist gets 700+ Google hits, most of them almost certainly the products of mishearings:

"Language is never about language," said social linguist Walt Wolfram. (Associated Press)

Barbara Kannapell, a social linguist based in Washington, said the shortage of sign-language interpreters is a national problem. (New York Times)

In a popular book of that name, social linguist Deborah Tannen has documented just how much our culture is dominated by an "adversarial frame of mind." Kenneth Plummer, Intimate Citizenship (U of Washington Press)

You'd have to say, then, that these are eggcorns in the technical sense. But does it really matter? I mean, "social linguist" could have been the standard term, right?

This started with Don Ringe's guest post "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe". He followed up with a more detailed account of "Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European", and an answer to some questions under the title "More on IE wheels and horses", and then this morning's post "Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence".

Readers have added a large number of interesting and provocative comments and questions (110 on the original post alone). As usual, responses are often too long to fit comfortably in the comment format, and our traditional practice has been  to respond in follow-up posts where interest and time permit.

Continuing that tradition, I've posted below Don's response to a comment by Etienne on Don's follow-up post on the history of the word for horse. Though the background is complex, this fragment of the conversation is quite coherent on its own.

There has been quite a bit of interest in a series of guest posts by Don Ringe on the early linguistic history of Europe. Yesterday, he sent along another installment, which I've posted below on his behalf, as well as an answer to a question from the comments on an earlier post, which I'll post separately.

This series is more technical than usual for Language Log, but enough readers have responded in a positive way that it's clearly a good idea to continue. Those who are not familiar with the methods of historical linguistics, or with the languages discussed, should still be able to get a sense of the structure of the argument, and the nature of the research process. (As before, a pdf version is here — if some forms or formatting look odd, check the pdf.)

Uri Tadmor has been kind enough to respond to some of the comments on yesterday's post "Borrowability", which described the Loanword Typology project at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Don Ringe's answer (" Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European") to the question that David Marjanović asked about Don's earlier post ("The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe") stimulated some further questions, included these from Robert:

What was the Anatolian word for wheel? Given its lack of mention above, I'd assume it isn't cognate with the Indo-European term. Is it thought to be a borrowing from some other language, or is its origin unknown? if it's a borrowing, that would presumably give a handle of when those languages moved into that area.

Are there any other unexplained e to i transitions in Greek? If a dozen other words were affected, with no apparent pattern, I'd guess that would change the relative likelihood of the possible reasons.

Were horses domesticated just once, or many times. While a word for horse can predate domestication, it would seem plausible that it was repeatedly borrowed along with other horse related terminolgy as domestication spread, even into different language families. Conversely, if horses were domesticated independently by two cultures, they're unlikely to have borrowed the word from each other, even if there's a strong resemblance.

I've posted Don's response below — as before, a backup .pdf form is here in case some characters or formating got screwed up.

[Guest post by Don Ringe]

Many thanks to David, Robert, and the other bloggers for the kind words! I’ll certainly keep sending Mark chunks to post. Here are some quick answers to Robert’s questions.