Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

I would like to take the time out of my homework to introduce my new feature. I got the idea of posting Blogthings after I saw some on my friend Debbie’s blog. Anyway, here is the inaugural Blogthing:

You Are a Smart American

You know a lot about US history, and you’re opinions are probably well informed.Congratulations on bucking stereotypes. Now go show some foreigners how smart Americans can be.

I was perusing the Onion today looking for entertainment. Here are some of the things I came up with:

· Dog Befriends Roomba.

· Top Causes of U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq.

· Iraqi Constitution.

· Child Disciplined for Wasting Yarn. I feel guilty for finding that funny.

· Northern Irish, Serbs, Hutus Granted Homeland in West Bank.

· Anyone who has ever bought a used textbook understands Highlighting in Used Copy of Plato’s Republic End on Page 17.

· There were a disproportionate number of these in my high school.

So, now that Emily has been accepted to vet school, Dan got the position of editor of his school’s newspaper, and Noah is engaged, the rest of the active membership of The Central Node needs to get cracking at achieving something awesome.

I saw 300 this weekend. The film was enjoyable enough. The photography was brilliant, and the battle scenes were other-worldly. However, I found myself partly laughing and partly crying at the backward depictions of the Spartans and the Persians. The Spartans were anything but enlightened lovers of freedom, and the Persians were not barbaric hordes. The Persians under Cyrus the Great, after all, made the first declaration of human rights in the world’s history (see the Charter of Cyrus). Nevertheless, I had fun watching it.

This evening I watched Steven Spielberg’s Munich. The movie, which was rather controversial in the US, spends little time talking about the Munich massacres of 1972, and more time discussing Operation Wrath of God and its aftermath. David Edelstein summed up the film perfectly:

The Israeli government and many conservative and pro-Israeli commentators have lambasted the film for naiveté, for implying that governments should never retaliate. But an expression of uncertainty and disgust is not the same as one of outright denunciation. What Munich does say — and what I find irrefutable — is that this shortsighted tit-for-tat can produce a kind of insanity, both individual and collective.

At the end of the film, I felt conflicted. Part of me felt more embittered, given my own anti-Zionist tendencies, while the other was compelled to empathize with Israel. The ability to make a viewer feel so conflicted a trait of an excellent filmmaker. I’ll leave you with my favorite line from the film, which happened after the teams first successful assassination:

“That old Pesach story. The angels are rejoicing because the Egyptians have just drowned in the Red Sea… and God said to the angels, ‘Why are you rejoicing? I just killed a multitude of my children.’…”

A couple of business matters. I would like to congratulate the following people for the following reasons: Emily for getting accepted to veterinary school, and Noah for getting engaged. I also want to promise that I will update more like I used to. I am over the hump of this semester, save for the papers I have to complete for the end of the semester. That sounds counter intuitive. Anyway, what’s important is that I am on spring break, I got a haircut, and despite how painful my left lateral tooth feels, the dentist says my teeth are in ship shape.

I’ve decided that the class I looked forward to most, the class I appear to be doing the best in, is the class I hate with all my soul: structure of Arabic. Three hours going through data set by data set isn’t very challenging or all that rewarding. Unfortunately, it is the one class I can never afford to miss. Once a week…I miss one class I miss an entire week of class. Also, the instructor doesn’t email our assignments until a) the night before class, or b) the morning before class. I have class non-stop on Tuesdays, so that isn’t very helpful.

The other day in historical linguistics w discussed grammaticalization with us. Grammaticalization is pretty ill defined, and like all things ill defined, it is controversial. A few definitions stand out from the rest.

Christian Lehman (1995[1982]:v): “[Grammaticalization is a process which turns lexemes into grammatical formatives…”

So, basically, it turns words like ‘will’ as a verb of wanting into a future tense marker.

Elizabeth Closs Traugot (1991: 2, 5): “Grammaticalization refers tho the dynamic unidirectional historical process whereby lexical items in the course of time accquire a new status as grammatical and morphosyntactic forms. “

So, now it’s a fancier process. Anyway, the next one is the best

Paul Hopper (1998:147-8): “Grammaticalization can be thought of as a salvation narrative. It is the tragedy of lexical items young and pure in heart but carrying with them the fatal flaw of original sin; their inexorable weakening as they encounter the corrupt world of Discourse; their fall into the Slough of Grammar; and their eventual redemption the cleansing waters of Pragmatics.”

Yeah, I don’t know what that means either.

I’m looking forward to summer. I can work on Hebrew, Syriac, and I decided that I want to learn some Anglo-Saxon. Why not, since I do plenty of useless stuff anyway. I also intend to do some more reading into historical linguistics and phonology on my own time. When is summer, anyway?

I should clarify that there was actually no organized movement against the comparative method called the Dialectologists. Really, I just like the idea of a showdown and I know a certain clergyman who will only read things with ‘versus’ in the title. You should pay attention to what I am saying, since it turns out that I do know what I am talking about, or at least I know enough of what I am talking about to nail my recent historical linguistics test and comparative method assignments.

Anyway, in the last installment of this discussion, I explained briefly what the comparative method is and laid out basic assumptions of it. I also brought up what is often called the Neogrammarian Manifesto, sound laws suffer no exceptions. I left off stating that *k > ∫ is recognized as a regular sound change (as well as a change we see commonly in other languages).

A challenge came from some scholars, many of whom happened to be dialectologists, who didn’t buy the position that sound change is regular and exceptionless. They also opposed the family tree model. They also had their own slogan, each word has its own history. The alternative to regularity hypothesis and the family tree model was the ‘wave theory.’

Stated simply, the wave model assumed that language change was the result of borrowing from languages and dialects. These changes spread outward, like waves, and become weaker the further away from the innovation’s origin. A word’s history could be the result of influence from any direction, so in theory each word could have a history different from any other word. When we take this approach, historical linguistics is reduced to a study of etymologies.

Proponents of the wave model cited an example from the French dialects of Normandy. Proto-romance *k > ∫ before front vowels and a in [standard] French. However, in parts of Normandy, a bunch of words retain the k. The words that did this were (taken from Campbell 2004:213):

chaine < catena 'chain'
chambre < camera 'room'
champ < campus 'field'
Chandeleur < Candelamas (church candle) < candela
chandelle < candela 'candel'
chanson < cantio(n-) 'song'
chanter < cantare 'to sing'
chat < cattu 'cat'

Opponents of the regularity hypothesis took this as a contradiction to the hypothesis. Words like ‘cat’ were more resistant to the *k > ∫ change, while prestigious words like those associated with the church more readily accepted the *k > ∫ change.

Here is the thing: we can’t recognize these words as exceptions to the regular *k > ∫ change if we don’t recognize the *k > ∫ sound change as regular. Still, these are indeed exceptions to the strict exceptionlessness of sound change. Clearly both are needed, and now I don’t know what else to say.

Questions? Comments? Concerns?

I’ve become very interested in competing models of linguistic change in history, most notably the Neogrammarians and, well, everyone else, most notably dialectologists. The Neogrammarians argued that sound change was regular, and held this view very dogmatically as noted in their slogan (’Sound laws suffer no exceptions‘). Hell, they even had their own manifesto. Dialectologists typically thought this was crap. Before I can explain further, there are a few assumptions of the comparative method (which I should also explain), which was based on the the noted slogan of the Neogrammarians, need to be discussed.

First, to explain the comparative method. In short, it is a method whereby two or more genetically related languages are analyzed side by side to recover it’s history and hypothetical ancestor language (called a proto-language). The steps in the process are:

1: Assemble cognate sets (and make sure that what you have assembled as cognates are indeed cognates). A good example is Italian[k]apra Spanish [k]abra Portuguese [k]abra French [∫]evre ‘goat’.

2: Assemble sound correspondences. Here, we’re interested in the initial sounds: k- : k- : k- : ∫-

3: Reconstruct proto-sound. Here you need to keep in mind a lot of principles, but now just take my word for it that we should reconstruct *k.

4: Determine status of overlapping data (irrelevant here).

5: Check for plausibility of reconstruction based on universals, phonological inventory, and typological expectations. There isn’t anything relevant to the example above, but it helps in other situations. For example, if a language has b d and g, it will damn near always have p t and k (though not necessarily the other way around).

Now the only way our reconstruction can be accurate is if a few assumptions are meant (though we can’t factually assume they are). In fact, Lyle Campbell (2004: 164) said “What textbooks typically call basic assumptions are really consequences of how we reconstruct and of our views of sound change.” The assumptions are:

1: The proto-language was uniform with no dialect variation. This of course is counterfactual, since every language has variation. It isn’t so much that that the method assumes this, but there is nothing built into the method to deal with this

2: Language splits are sudden. Like, SMASH! BOOM! POW! New languages!

3: After the split up of the proto-language, there is no contact between the two languages. Again, not so much of an assumption, but there is no machinery in the comparative method to deal with things like borrowing.

4: Sound change is regular. To use the example above, we see *k > ∫ in a lot of languages and occurs commonly throughout Romance. This is going to be the most important point in part 2 of this discussion.

Stay tuned, and until next time, watch this.