Suboptimist

Neogrammarians versus Dialectologists: the Ultimate Showdown.

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.