Cladistics, the tree model, and bacterial evolution.

[sirdanilot]

Here is my post from the previous thread:

There are various theories on how to classify contact languages (creoles, pidgins, languages with extensive lexical borrowing...). One is that the lexifier source language determines the classification, another is that substrate languages determine classification, and a third one postulated by Thomason and Kafuman 1988 is that these languages are 'agenetic' because they are derived from a limited grammatical knowledge of the lexifier language and are constructed rapidly in an 'a priori' way; they are not genetically linked to any language, but are 'creole' or 'agenetic'.

English can be confidently classified Germanic according through the first theory; though it has extensive Romance borrowing, most of its base lexicon and closed class words are Germanic.
English is probably stil Germanic according to the second theory, as it's not the case that a non-English speaking population started speaking English. At most, there would be a shift towards a more romance-inspired language, but then it would still be Germanic according to this theory.
The third theory is not applicable to English. It is not a creole language that was generated in a very short time span, it does not have 'typical creole features' such as unmarked phonology, isolating grammar etc. (though honestly many real creoles do not have these features either...). English is clearly not 'agenetic'.

Conclusion: English is a Germanic language, with heavy Romance borrowing and borrowed Romance derivational morphology, but syntactically very Germanic (and also morphologically mostly Germanic).

[Hallow XIII]

what has become of our universities that people like you are let in

[sirdanilot]

The big problem with this is that suddenly the ancestry lists of everything would explode and you could say with certainty maybe that if Proto-Human existed it is the definite ancestor. It doesn't serve any purpose, outside of those cases like Mbugu and Michif and whatnot, and also we *know* already that there was French influence in English. Putting "French" in the "ancestor language" field alongside Old English would be purely cosmetic and clutter everything up so what is the point.

You have to look at the base lexicon (open and closed class), not at the entire lexicon. If you look at the English base words (you could take the Swadesh list as an example, even though it's flawed it's at least something) they are mostly Germanic. If you look at English inflectional morphemes, they are germanic. If you look at English derivational morphemes, yes there are quite a few Romance ones, but the majority of them is still Germanic. And needless to say, morphology (analytic) and syntax are very Germanic. Phonology is a bit harder in this regard, as the phonology can be influenced by loan words with foreign phonemes, but it still fits quite nicely in Germanic.

English is in no way a Romance language, other than in its non-basic lexicon. But that is not a very weird thing at all, cross-linguistically.

[sirdanilot]

what has become of our universities that people like you are let in

Whew. Blown away by this argument. Can't argue with this !

I'll go sit crying in a corner now I guess. Until you post something with actual content that I can reply to, that is.

[Hallow XIII]

why would I, judgements of value are not meant to be arguments

consider this one retracted though, your previous post made you seem much more stupid than the other one so for the time being I will assume it is an isolated phenomenon

[sirdanilot]

It would help if you would actually say what post you deemed stupid, as I made three posts in this thread. Not that 'stupid' is a good counter argument either way. I take it to mean that you disagree with it, but that information alone still doesn't tell me a whole lot.

[Hallow XIII]

I was referring to the first post, which I was replying to before your chainposting surprised me, in which your tone was a bit irksome, not to mention that it resembled the usual THE TREE MODEL IS WRONG WRONG WRONG a little too much; you seem to at least have thought about things for more than thirty seconds though, at least.

Not that 'stupid' is a good counter argument either way.

It is not an argument at all, and it shouldn't be intended as one.

[sirdanilot]

Okay.

I am not saying the tree model is wrong, but I am of the opinion that it shouldn't be regarded as more important than other models, such as the wave model. Or, in a broader sense; genetic linguistics (historically passed down components of a language) shouldn't be regarded as more important than contact linguistics (components of a language that entered it through diffusion from another language). Contact-phenomena shouldn't be regarded as 'oddities', because honestly, they are as rare as contact phenomena, and monolinguality is rarer than multilinguality. Isolated languages with little contact-induced change until recently, such as Icelandic, are in the current paradigm treated as 'gems'; but in fact something like that should be regarded as an oddity, since most languages underwent way more contact than that. Not to say that Icelandic is not interesting to research; quite the contrary. But don't see Icelandic as a 'prototypical germanic language', or something like that.

When analyzing a new language family, contact should be considered as much as genetic aspects. For example, if you find a set of features that a group of langauges have in common, the default position shouldn't be 'these languages are genetically related', but 'these languages have something in common, now let's research if it's genetic or contact-induced'.

[Drydic]

Contact-phenomena shouldn't be regarded as 'oddities', because honestly, they are as rare as contact phenomena, and monolinguality is rarer than multilinguality.

Please tell me you meant something else and you don't contrast contact-phenomena and contact phenomena.

[sirdanilot]

Whoopsy daisy.

" Contact-phenomena shouldn't be regarded as 'oddities', because honestly, they are as rare as contact genetic phenomena, and monolinguality is rarer than multilinguality."

[Radagast revived]

At the level of abstraction where most linguists work, the tree model is generally a fine heuristic. But the problems begin to mount the closer you get to the actual locus of language, in the individual speakers linguistic habits and the linguistic interactions. This is because people don't speak languages, they speak idiolects pieced together from other peoples idiolects. And the idiolects they speak constantly change as a result of new linguistic interactions. At this level of concreteness the idea of language contact dissolves into nothingness, since all language acquisition and usage is "contact". What we call languages are really very large scale abstractions of thousands of interconnected idiolects, that can be understood as forming genealogies through time. Bilingual speakers for example don't distinguish between lexical items from different "languages" in their general repertoire untill they are taught to do so - i.e when a glotto-political ideology of what lexical items belong to which language is socialized into them. Linguists mostly do not operate at this micro level - although some recent work in historical linguistics (the so-called "speaker centered" theories of language change) does.

But as a lot of people have pointed out here every reasonable linguist realizes that linguistic phylogenies are abstractions. This makes the use of the tree model a lot more responsible in linguistics than it is for example in genetics where geneticists can construct trees with widely different structures depending on which genetic markers they happen to choose to sample, and where the geneticists often consider the resulting phylogenies to have objective truth value, or at least treat them as if they do. The reason this is not really a big problem in linguistics is because traditionally we use qualitative and not quantitative methods to classify by so that we can take into account the whole picture of language relations, and because we consider the meanings of linguistic changes and how they relate to general socio-cultural changes. The big problem with the recent surge in the use of quantitative methods for comparative linguistics and for making phylogenies is that they completely disregard this and force a tree structure onto the data often based on very simplistic and low quality data.