Long rangers

by liberal japonicus

I don't do a lot of linguistic-y talk here for a couple of reasons. The first is that it is way too easy for me to dive in the weeds and natter on about it. A second related point is that we all come to our language insights from different places and along different paths and it is too easy to dismiss someone's perspective it doesn't line up with yours. However, I thought that this popular article gave some interesting points about current work in the field of Indo-European linguistics, a field that I hadn't thought about for a while.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/a-new-look-at-our-linguistic-roots/

A graf from the article that I like is this:

“It’s something that, again, is surprising,” Olander says. “I think ‘surprising’ could be translated to ‘It probably means that their method is wrong.’”

If I were still attending linguistic talks, I would start using 'surprising' as a descriptor.

What the article doesn't touch on so much is the field of paleolinguistics. I assume that this is because generally, a lot of linguists consider those researching this topic a few fries short of a Happy meal, hence the mocking descriptor of 'long rangers', because they were really interested in long range comparisons. I believe that this started out as an insult but was picked up by those folks as a badge of honor. This Judith Kaplan post has this observation that explains why the article does this:

How human language originated (whether this had happened once or several times); how early language was structured and used; and how it diffused and diversified across the globe—these questions loomed large over the work of long-range comparative linguistics in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Through newspaper reports, public television programming, and interdisciplinary appropriations, they were formulated at the intersection of specialist and general concerns. Publicity was actively pursued by committed “long-rangers,” who found themselves marginalized in an academic world dominated by more circumspect goals.

Kaplan is a historian of science, and her site is worth a look if any of this interests you. More below the fold

At this point, I start writing like I know all this stuff, but much (most?) of it is stuff I've gotten from rereading and google searching. Some of it I knew before, other stuff I picked up, but it all goes in the blender and comes out like it's from me. Which it probably isn't.

Long range comparison was a pretty hot topic when I was in grad school. Joseph Greenberg's Language in the Americas had come out and a good explanation of the issues is here but the tldr is that Greenberg had published a similar book on the African languages a few decades earlier using the same techniques. The broad outlines of this ended up being largely correct. He then turned to Native American languages and published a similar book.

As the link points out, Greenberg's ideas were picked up by a lot of long rangers to the point where Greenberg was considered one of them, but I don't think he was, but the language that got thrown around was so purple that is was the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Merrit Ruhlen, the author of a book on language origins, was a student of Greenberg, though I never got the impression that Greenberg was fully behind many of the proposals by Ruhlen, though I may be wrong. But an excerpt from this review gives you a taste

I hoped that Ruhlen had benefited from criticisms of his work, but I was soon to be disappointed. His position apropos of Greenberg's work remains what it was seven years ago--it is depressingly clear that he has remembered much but has learned nothing, and while noting every criticism is impervious to what critics have said.

[...]

Neither Ruhlen nor Greenberg is an Americanist by training, and their data for Na-Dene and Amerind are quite unblemished by first-hand knowledge of the language...

Kaplan's research touches on some of this, but misses some other things that I think are interesting. DNA was in the air (the publication of The Bell Curve was 1994) and Language in the Americas landed at the same time as techniques into researching DNA were coming out. So it was natural that some DNA researchers began looking at proto-history tied this into the ideas of these long range comparisons. One researcher, Cavalli Sforza, was the name I remember, and he took a lot of the long ranger arguments and plugged them into his results and voila! we suddenly had irrefutable proof. Sort of. This article gets at the kind of claims that were made, Chomsky and Einstein are name-checked, and this conclusion is made

The major relevance of Cavalli Sforza’s legacy to historical linguistics lies precisely in his contributing a then neglected problem to the field,
and especially in anticipating methods and solutions well beyond what could be fully investigated through the linguistic tools available at the time

Them's fighting words! This paper is a interdisciplinary explanation of why Cavalli Sforza's work was, if nothing else, premature. A taste of that paper:

The phenogram presented by Cavalli-Sforza et al. ostensibly depicts relationships between lineages of human populations, using overall similarities derived from the quantification of selected genes. The probable prime replicators (individual genes) are used to assess the historical relationships of aggregates of the probable prime interactors (individual humans). The status assigned to the linguistic phyla is much more ambiguous. Cavalli-Sforza et al. present human populations and linguistic phyla as separate lists of entities that can be directly compared; our discussion of the correspondence of population clusters and linguistic phyla makes the same tacit assumption. However, in order to calculate a consistency index for their relationship, we treat the languages as dependent attributes of the populations, potentially capable of resolving their phylogenetic relationships.

There's a pattern here: an outsider comes in with information that is argued to shake up the field, people who were not in the mainstream grab on, using that information to argue for the relevancy of their ideas. Two different styles of discourse develop, one about fundamental changes and the other about fully regarding all the smaller details. A pie fight ensues.

This also gives rise to some other patterns. I found an archive of a maillist (and unfortunately lost it) that had many of those long rangers tossing out ideas. As Kaplan points out, there was a large group of Soviet linguists, known as the 'Moscow school", whose names pop up in the maillist. My own (I think) observation is that these Russian linguists were incredibly sharp but were rather limited in being able to interact outside of Russia. This led them down a bit of a rabbit hole. When I was in Hokkaido, 5 or so years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I met some Russian linguists who were doing areal reconstructions of Far East Asian languages. They had lots of interesting insights and data, but because almost their whole working life had been dealing with languages as abstractions, they were pretty far from the mainstream.

But about the maillist, you'll have to take my word for it since I can't find it, but I get the same sense as I might from a Dungeons and Dragons list. People are namechecked, jokes are exchanged, bonhomie ruled. I'm reminded of Isiah Berlin's reminscences about his career:

...we did think that no one outside the magic circle - in our case Oxford, Cambridge, Vienna - had much to teach us. This was vain and foolish and, I have no doubt' irritating to others. But I suspect that those who have never been under the spell of this kind of illusion, even for a short while, have not known true intellectual happiness.

In the years since Language in America, there has been interesting work in various kinds of reconstruction. These include things like reconstructing grammar, using frozen expressions and morphology to try and sketch out previous grammatical patterns. It also seems to be accepted now (though it was rejected when brought up by the long rangers) that there is core vocabulary that seems to undergo little change, but agreeing to precisely what that vocabulary set is can be difficult. Statistical analyses are turning up interesting and perhaps 'surprising' results, such as this one, though the surprising part may just be the difficulty in wrapping my own head around the idea.

However, these efforts at reconstruction require an open mind, and when battle lines are drawn, it becomes almost impossible to reasonably consider observations from the other side. Or to say that you consider them. In a previous linguistic dust-up, Paul Postal wrote this:

Suppose some proponent, like McCawley, of the unquestionably wrong and stupid Basic Semantics (BS) movement has, accidentally, hit on one or two ideas you need to use, say hypothetically, the notion that surface quantifiers are connected to logic-like representations by transformational movement operations sensitive to syntactic constraints, or something like that.

When adopting this idea, assuming that you wish to do so, it would be an obvious rhetorical error to cite any proponents of BS. Not only would this waste a lot of 'serious linguists' time if they were persuaded to actually read such misguided stuff, it might mislead less sophisticated thinkers than you into thinking something about BS was right.

So the correct procedure is to proclaim and get others to proclaim, over a long period, many times, that BS is totally wrong, misguided, unscientific, etc. Then, quietly, simply use whatever BS ideas you want without warning and without any tiring citational or attributional material. A well-known principle of scholarly law known as Right of Salvage guarantees that you cannot be held accountable for this.

Not really sure where this might go, but have at it.

Comments

[wj]

An introductory caveat: my formal education in linguistics consists of a couple of courses related to my Anthropology major. Half a century ago, i.e. far before paleo-linguistics took off. I've an ongoing interest in the subject, but I'm nothing resembling an expert.

DNA was in the air (the publication of The Bell Curve was 1994) and Language in the Americas landed at the same time as techniques into researching DNA were coming out. So it was natural that some DNA researchers began looking at proto-history tied this into the ideas of these long range comparisons.

It is worth noting that people move around. As they do, the language they use changes. Sometimes just added vocabulary from borrowing words (or phrases). Only consider how modern American English has changed in the last century and a half -- people here use words with no clue that they came from, for example, Yiddish, which they may never have even heard of. Sometimes wholesale blending happens -- English reflects both French and Anglo Saxon (Germanic) roots.** And, of course, people can simply adopt the language of their new location (albeit with some holdovers from their native tongue for the first generation or two).

DNA analogies can illuminate some of this. But it is all too easy to tie language to DNA, and read more into information about the movement of ancient populations than is warranted. As noted, I'm not an expert, but my sense is that the field suffers from some of this.

And the whole field of paleo-linguistics suffers from trying to understand a vast field with only little bits of data. Other fields have dealt with similar challenges -- tracing human evolution based of a very small number of (often incomplete) skeletal remains comes to mind. What the history of those fields reveals is just how wrong perfectly reasonable hypotheses can turn out to be, as additional data comes to light. And paleo-linguistics has far less chance of uncovering new data than physical anthropology does.

** Even if there is some skepticism regarding the trope that English "resulted from attempts by Norman men-at-arms to pick up Saxon bar girls."

[wj]

Neither Ruhlen nor Greenberg is an Americanist by training, and their data for Na-Dene and Amerind are quite unblemished by first-hand knowledge of the language...

Zing!

[liberal japonicus]

It is worth noting that people move around. As they do, the language they use changes.

This is why identifying core vocabulary might help. Meillet, a French linguist, said "Indo-Europeans spoke should come and listen to a Lithuanian peasant." (The choice of Lithuanian is not random, the language shares a lot of traits with Vedic Sanskrit).　

Unfortunately, when things get contested (as they have with long ranger speculation), it can often obscure the subtle reasoning involved with hypothesis making.

[wj]

Unfortunately, when things get contested (as they have with long ranger speculation), it can often obscure the subtle reasoning involved with hypothesis making.

A problem with almost every field. I have trouble understanding the reasoning that leads people to attack views they disagree with. And, often, the people who hold them. I understand the emotion driving it. I just don't see how they expect it to change minds.

It seem to me (and admittedly I fail to follow my own advice sometimes) that more minds get changed by asking: "I see this bit of data which doesn't seem to fit what you are saying. Can you help me out here? What am I missing?"

It won't work with people who simply reject facts which don't fit their existing views. But it can bring others to step back and look at the evidence without getting defensive. It may seem, to some, a bit Machiavellian. But asking for instruction, and seeming just a bit dense, can be quite effective sometimes.

[JanieM]

I have trouble understanding the reasoning that leads people to attack views they disagree with.

Drive-by comment because I'm getting ready for a trip.

In a lot of cases and situations it isn't "reasoning" at all, it's ego. "I know better than you." This attitude is epidemic among a certain class of (over-?)educated people. Mansplaining is only a subset, and the tip of the iceberg.

lj -- great post -- I will try to absorb it more thoroughly when I'm settled in my destination.

[nous]

Olander thinks it is far more likely that Celtic and Germanic branches coexisted closely for a long time and loaned one another words. An analysis based solely on shared word meanings shows them as more closely related than they actually are, he says.

That was my thought as well, just knowing the history of migration in Europe from the Migration Era through the Medieval.

This same bias towards linguistic data as opposed to historical context is something that I see a lot of in Neopagan and Pagan Reconstructionist circles. I remember when ADF was trying to make a generic Pan Indo-European druidic religious calendar. That really ran into problems when the various groups ran into mismatches between their linguistic-cultural choices and their geographical location. It's hard to square the pagan Greek calendar with the pagan Celtic calendar. And then you have the influence of the circumpolar cosmology on the Norse language and religious cosmology taking it in different directions from the Irish.

And then you get both the Irish and the Norse suddenly stuck back together and fused into the modern Irish by Christianity over the course of a few centuries in the Middle Ages.

I think you have to look at both where people come from and who they associate with, and think about the effect of climate and environment to get a solid idea of the context for change. I'm not discounting the computational models, but I think that the choices they make to winnow their datasets for clarity probably create serious biases in the results.

[liberal japonicus]

nous, really interesting. Had no idea about ADF
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81r_nDra%C3%ADocht_F%C3%A9in

I agree with the points you raise. You really only have 4 fixed dates (2 solstices, two equinoxes) so having a universal calendar that represents all pagan religions seems difficult. It seems to take a modern conception that events occur simultaneously, which is really a modern conceit.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

"It seems to take a modern conception that events occur simultaneously, which is really a modern conceit."

And, yet more modern, WRONG.

[nous]

All of the pagan reconstructionist groups seemed for a while to be looking for some sort of transcendent signifier on which to build their alternative community. A lot of them were drawn to linguistics because of JP Mallory and started trying to use structural mythology like Dumezil to create comparative systems that they could use to add flavor to a generic ritual calendar.

But if agriculture was the Indo-European secret sauce, then the language wasn't at the center - the climate and growing season was - and religion, ritual, and language would need to adapt around the context of how to make agriculture work in the place you moved to.

Small wonder that a lot of the IE cultures had some myth of cultural assimilation and intermarriage. You'd need the local populations' knowledge of the land to figure out how to adapt and survive.

Solstices and Equinox may make sense for many temperate climes, but in Greece the calendar becomes two growing seasons and an agricultural calendar that doesn't fit with the quarters. And in more northern climes, those quarters get altered to adjust to ever smaller growing seasons, and the Equinoxes lose prominence.

It's the disconnect between linguistics and translation. Pinning down words may help with mapping linguistic change across time, but understanding the world has more to do with why the language changes as we start to feel the need to add inflection and nuance in order to cope with a changing world.

[Hartmut]

And, yet more modern, WRONG.

Keep your liberal relativism out of this! ;-)

[Michael Cain]

Solstices and Equinox may make sense for many temperate climes, but in Greece the calendar becomes two growing seasons and an agricultural calendar that doesn't fit with the quarters. And in more northern climes, those quarters get altered to adjust to ever smaller growing seasons, and the Equinoxes lose prominence.

After I moved to Colorado, I noticed how the local climate features didn't really match up with the astronomical events. The water year starts in October when the mountain snow starts to accumulate. Snow accumulation is usually irregular with peaks in November and March that correspond to annual storm track pattern shifts. Snow melt typically peaks in May. The monsoon runs from mid-July to early September.

When I was a lad, we were taught that monsoons were seasonal wind reversals caused by differential heating/cooling rates of land masses. Interestingly, that's no longer taught. Monsoons are primarily caused by the annual north-south shifts in the Intertropical Convergence Zone.

[nous]

Colorado is a fun place for thinking about seasonal cycles and calendars. All the Wiccans I knew in Boulder were looking at the local plant life for signs of rebirth around Ostara and feeling pretty comfortable about it. Fewer than 20 miles away in Nederland, meanwhile, they were 4000 feet higher in elevation and those same signs were not going to show up until Beltane.

Not enough distance between, though, to create isolation and drift in language, just adaptations in religious practice.

[hairshirthedonist]

I mentioned previously that I'm going to be in Colorado at the beginning of May - one night in Denver and two nights at the Stanley Hotel in Estes. Clutch is performing both nights at the Stanley with after-parties for ticketed hotel guests.

I'm expecting the weather to seem strange for that time of year to someone coming from the Mid-Atlantic. And the air to be glorious.

Also hoping for a paganistic vibe during the Clutch events. ;^)

[GftNC]

Speaking of drift, or otherwise evolution of language, I found this pretty fascinating:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/03/endangered-greek-dialect-living-bridge-ancient-world-romeyka

An endangered form of Greek that is spoken by only a few thousand people in remote mountain villages of northern Turkey has been described as a “living bridge” to the ancient world, after researchers identified characteristics that have more in common with the language of Homer than with modern Greek.

***

As a result, Sitaridou has concluded that “Romeyka is a sister, rather than a daughter, of modern Greek”, a finding she says disrupts the claim that modern Greek is an “isolate” language, meaning it is unrelated to any other European language.

Modern Greek and Romeyka are not mutually intelligible, says the academic; she suggests that an apt comparison would be speakers of Portuguese and Italian, both of which derive from Vulgar Latin rather than from each other.

Though the history of the Greek presence in the Black Sea is not always easy to disentangle from legend, the Greek language expanded with the spread of Christianity. “Conversion to Islam across Asia Minor was usually accompanied by a linguistic shift to Turkish, but communities in the valleys retained Romeyka,” Sitaridou said.

[Michael Cain]

I'm expecting the weather to seem strange for that time of year to someone coming from the Mid-Atlantic.

You could just put the period after strange. This is Colorado. Where we have four seasons and aren't afraid to use any three of them in a single week. Where "What season are we having today?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask before getting dressed. Sunny and 70 today, the young mothers jogging through the neighborhood with their kids' strollers are showing quite a bit of skin; snow forecast for Saturday, they'll be back in heavy coats.

[CharlesWT]

"As a result, Sitaridou has concluded that “Romeyka is a sister, rather than a daughter, of modern Greek”, ..."

It's still all Greek to me.

[nous]

Well #@%&!

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/technology/tech-giants-harvest-data-artificial-intelligence.html

There is so much wrong with this model - both ethically and from an information literacy standpoint - that this feels like a Tower of Babel sort of folly.

[nous]

Gift link for those caught by the paywall:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/technology/tech-giants-harvest-data-artificial-intelligence.html?ugrp=c&unlocked_article_code=1.iU0.kaNk.qK-DRNAbg0Uw&smid=url-share

[liberal japonicus]

There is so much wrong with this model - both ethically and from an information literacy standpoint - that this feels like a Tower of Babel sort of folly.

I think of all those people who had some trope about how 'anything you put online is public' or 'if you put it in an email, you should expect everyone to see it someday' anytime someone was outed or such. Seems like a straight line from that to this.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Years...nay,*decades* ago, in the time of the early internet I wanted to practice using cgis to make images.

So, geeky type that I am, the cgi produced "fake starfields", with randomly distributed stars (no nebulae, that was too hard) with a range of colors and brightness. More for "ooh, pretty!" than accurate.

Got it working, promptly forgot about it.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and I find that someone had grabbed an image that was *obviously* from my cgi, and used it in a wedding invitation.

Good on them! Hope the result has been happy for all concerned.

If it's on the internet, it's there forever. Maybe.

[wj]

If it's on the internet, it's there forever. Maybe.

If you wish it would disappear, it never will. The EU's GDPR "right to forget" notwithstanding.

But if you urgently need to recover something, don't get your hopes up.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

I, for one, am *very* disappointed that the NSA isn't providing a "global backup service".

It's not like they don't already have the data! SHEESH!

[nous]

You want a real dystopian story, someone begins to go into the 'global archives' and replace all of the saved files with "ideologically corrected" versions and vanish the originals...

O-o
\ o /

[ral]

With searching comes loss
and the presence of absence:
“My Novel” not found.

[Rah]

There's a motto for the ages: "[S]imply use whatever BS ideas you want without warning and without any tiring citational or attributional material."