Historical Bio-Linguistics : A biostatistic approach to the study of linguistic phylogenies and the correlation of genetic, linguistic and geographical data (original) (raw)
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A number of recent papers have sought to apply to language data various phylogenetic ‘tree drawing’ techniques initially developed for uses outside linguistics. The reaction from many historical linguists, however, has typically been critical, if not outright hostile. This paper explores, and aims to explain, why it is that there has been such a long running failure to reach a consensus between linguists and specialists from other disciplines, notably genetics and archaeology. We consider linguists’ fundamental concerns as to how non linguists go about using language data; especially whether (and if so, how) one can meaningfully use such phylogenetic analyses on language data, interpret their results, and attempt to put dates on particular nodes in the trees. We look into certain aspects of the very nature of language that it is crucial to bear in mind in order to handle language data appropriately for these purposes, but which many linguists feel are not truly appreciated by non linguists. These aspects include: language’s inherent susceptibility to powerful external forces which vary tremendously through history; the nature of language data and what this means for how they can meaningfully be compared and measured; and the nature of language change and historical development, with important consequences for the interpretation of those data, not least for dating. It emerges, moreover, that these same characteristics of language change also challenge linguists’ own ‘established’ dating of Proto Indo European by the so called ‘linguistic palaeontology’, and how that question is in truth much more open than Indo Europeanist linguists generally admit.
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