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There are all sorts of comparative methods in all sorts of fields, aren't there? So, shouldn't this article live at comparative method in linguistics or something more specific? I really have no idea what's appropriate, actually, but this does seem to be too broad of a name. --LMS
Going by the following correspondence:
How might one find the proper Latin sound correspondence to for Daughter/Thygatra and Sister, or the proper Greek sound correspondence for Brother/Frater and Sister? This turns out to be a much more involved process than I thought. For a long while, I assumed "teiktra" (Latinized to "teictra") as the Greek equivalent to "daughter" (mainly by analogy to correspondences between "dryas" and "tree", for example, having made an obvious blunder, and between "night" and "noct-", the latter of which I had for some reason misremembered as having originally been a Latin borrowing from Greek).
Anyway, I know these talk pages aren't for personal tutoring, but I was hoping to better understand the dynamic between these three languages and their phonological histories. --Thorstejnn 09:54, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
There was a missing form --- the Hawaiian for "enter". I supplied that word, ulu, which means "enter" as in "inspire", i.e., "enter one's soul". See Pukui and Elbert's Hawaiian Dictionary (1986:368-369, 436). I also made the font appearance consistent (IPA) for all Polynesian forms in the table. Then removed the unnecessary italics which created a bad visual effect in the table. It will look better yet if it switches the x and y axes, providing vertical visual comparison of the cognate forms. Agent X 23:30, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
Oh yeah, the Hawaiian /ʔe-/ number prefix is not necessary, and was only a distraction in the table. See Elbert and Pukui's Hawaiian Grammar (1979:158) "kahi, lua, kolu". Agent X 23:39, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
Hello. Would it be helpful to add colloquial Samaon to the table in which t becomes k, and n become velar nasal? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.214.1.54 (talk) 21:37, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
Right, this is already an excelent article, so: well done to everybody who's contributed so far. However, my bid to get it the Featured Article status it deserves has come unstuck over inline citations. These are particularly needed for the examples of the method being applied to various languages. I'm prepared to try to provide these for the IE examples, but I don't have access to the resourced to to find references for Algonquin languages, Polynesian languages, Finnish, Pirahã, Dravidian languages or the Uto-Aztecan tree. Can anybody out there help? sjcollier 21:24, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
One book I do have with me, actually, is R. M. W. Dixon's The Rise and Fall of Languages, which is basically about cases where the comparative method doesn't apply. So I'll add a section in the "Criticism" part about his Punctuated-Equilibrium theory--I think it's worthy of a section, since linguists have actually paid a lot of attention to it, and Dixon is extremely well-respected in the field. I know a bit about the history of the method (just the basics: Sir William Jones and the Neogrammarians, basically; a fuller mention of Greenberg and Swadesh and Mass Comparison and Glottochronology might be needed in such a section too), but not enough to feel comfortable actually putting what I think I remember onto Wikipedia. If I were at home, I could look in Fox, whom I seem to remember has some discussion of the history of the method. We might try checking the PIE article, the neogrammarian article (is there one?), and so on; there's probably a good deal of info and sources there. Take care, --Red Newt 00:25, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
For anybody who can help, the citations still needed concern:
sjcollier 00:55, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
You just beat me to it on the History section - I was just about to start writing something based on Szemerényi. Thanks for saving me the work! Looks like you've done a great job; I'll see if I can add anything. sjcollier 19:37, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm objecting to this article being promoted to featured status, but as my reasons will be somewhat long and somewhat technical, I'm bringing up them here rather than at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Comparative method.
In addition to these specific objections, I have a much vaguer one that probably cannot actually be fixed: the tone of the article is much more that of a textbook chapter than that of an encyclopedia article. I'm not sure how to fix that, or even how to be more specific about what gives me that impression, and I wouldn't object to FA status for this reason alone. But the fact remains that the reader is left with the impression of having been taught something rather than having learned something on his own, which is as close as I can come to defining the difference between a textbook chapter and an encyclopedia article. User:Angr 19:03, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
Hello all. I've been drafting a significant revision to the article to try to address a few of the problems highlighted by Angr and others. What I've got so far is on my subpage, User:Miskwito/Notes (ignore the two links and the horizontal rules at the very top). Some of the changes I've made there are:
In my opinion, anyway, it's a good start toward addressing many of the weaknesses of the article. It's still got a long way to go, though. And I'm not sure there's any real way to fix the sense of being "taught" Angr brought up--short of pretty much rewriting the entire article with new wording. I also haven't addressed his points 4 or 7 yet, nor the point about the example used to illustrate "analogy". Maybe tomorrow. Or something. Anyway, since these are some significant changes, I wanted to check with all interested parties that they're okay, and that everyone agrees for the most part with the changes. If you need to view all of the changes at once, here you go: . Comments? Ideas? Criticism? --Miskwito 02:33, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
When clicking on the link for 'punctuated equilibrium' on the page on R. M. W. Dixon I got redirected here, yet there is no mention of that hypothesis here (well, ok, on this talk page there is). Is this some remnant of the section 'Criticism' that apparently once has existed, and where, apparently, Dixon's hypothesis was mentioned? -Stephan Schulz 80.186.191.43 21:17, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
Dammit. I had a whole nice long thingy written here and one mistaken click later it was lost forever. Argh. So, this isn't as brilliant as the original version, but use your imaginations to picture how friggin' inspired my prose was:
I've been thinking lately about how we can improve the article further. One minor change that can be made is to get a better example of analogical change. The current example is useful because it demonstrates how individual words can undergo irregular changes due to the shape of some related word, but that's not exactly the same as analogical change brought about by paradigm shapes and structures and what have you. But I don't think we should get rid of what's there now. I can also go through the article and just make sure all the references are formatted correctly.
For the more significant change, I've been trying to decide how we might address Angr's concern about the prose style of the article (it reading more like a textbook than an encyclopedia article). In part, I think this is due to the use of "we" a lot, which shouldn't be terribly hard to fix. In part, though, I think it's due to the types of examples used and how those examples are presented: it's kind of like the article guides the reader through a process of learning how to use the method, which I guess isn't exactly the same as simply presenting the methods linguists use and saying "these are the methods." But I'm having trouble figuring out how we'd be able to change that while still retaining the current examples (which I think are useful and nice, for the most part; there's also the point about switching between different languages to illustrate each point, rather than, say, sticking with Polynesian languages, but I'm too lazy to worry about that now).
So, I think the questions are: (1) is there really a problem with the prose that needs to be fixed (or, if not a "problem", is there a way the prose can be improved)? (2) if yes, how do we improve the prose? As I said above, for starters, just getting rid of the "we"s might do a lot. If it still seems "textbooky", perhaps we'd want to get the League of Copyeditors involved? I'm not sure...
What do others think? Agree? Disagree? Other thoughts or ideas? --Miskwito 09:29, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
These sections should not be in this section as they can be used in connection with other than the comparative method. A better home would be Historical Linguistics. Adresia 20:17, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm going to give the reasons I reverted your recent edit here, Adresia, so we can discuss it on the talk page...and, you know, stuff:
So, those are my reasons. I'm interested in your responses, though, and in what others think. Take care, --Miskwito 23:35, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
Sorry Miskwito to have not responded to you earlier but I havent looked at this page for a while. I will briefly respond to each of your points :- 1. This merely added information as to the field in which there was another comparative method. This is taken up in the rewrite. 2. "Qualitative" does add information in that it shows that the method can not determine the degree of relatedness. 3. I'm content if the method's use in non-phonological areas is mentioned later. 4. In a summary of the method at least the tree model ought to be mentioned. 5. I agree that mass comparison is non-mainstream (and dead). By non-traditional I was thinking of cladistic methods introduced in the last decade by Ringe, MacMahon, Gray and Atkinson, etc. 6. I was not referring to 1950s lexicostatistics as a modern method but the ones introduced by the above people. They produce more than a general guess IMHO, producing similar tree to the traditinal method. 7. "Application" to me is when the method is used on (say) Australian languages. Defining the steps involved is an algorithm. 8. There could be other correspondances other than sounds. 9. It may not be necessary but is surely not misleading. 10. Cognacy judgements are only opinion and do vary fron expert to expert. See for example the revisions of Dyen's judgements. I think that this phrase should be reinstated. One of the questions is how many correspondances is enough. 11. Qualitative and quantitative are defined in any dictionary, and dont really require further explanation. Italo-Celtic can be looked up in Wiki if interested. Lexicostatistics uses cognacy judgements (when used properly) and does provide additional information and so complements the method. Adresia (talk) 14:15, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
The word palabra is an instance of metathesis, but it's not the only similar one: peligro is metathesized from periculum "peril". A similar-sounding word culebra "snake" is not metathesized; the Latin form is coluber. I propose the rule: r + stressed vowel + voiced stop + l -> l + stressed vowel + voiced stop + r. Can anyone provide other examples or counterexamples?
The change n->d couldn't have happened between Proto-Slavic and Russian, as it also occurs in Polish dziewięć, Bosnian devet, and even Latvian deviņi. It appears to be a Balto-Slavic innovation. phma 15:02, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
Is the whole emphasis of the initial definition of the comparative method given here not wrong?
Surely the comparative method is used to show how languages which are related have developed from a common ancestor, and alone is not proof that they are? Regular sound correspondences in lexical material, no matter how extensive, can be shown by borrowings; in extreme cases the entire lexicon of a language can be replaced. Genealogical linguistic relatedness is proved, not by lexical comparisons, but by the inheritance of shared paradigms and irregularities which are so unusual that they could only be accounted for by relatedness. Comparison is what happens after relatedness has been proved (or is so obvious to be beyond doubt). I think this distinction is an important one, given the prevailing tendency for tenuous linguistic relationships to be alleged on the basis of a bunch of lexical resemblances with apparently regular sound correspondences gathered by supposedly following the comparative method.
See Johanna Nichols (1996): "The Comparative Method as Heuristic" in Mark Durie and Malcolm Ross (eds.) "The Comparative Method Reviewed: Regularity and Irregularity in Language Change", Oxford University Press
Bofoc Tagar 12:56, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm gonna revert this anonymous addition:
Shown how? Is there a living language with such a phonology? —Tamfang (talk) 05:25, 17 October 2009 (UTC)
", with alternative lexicostatistical methods such as glottochronology generally considered to be unreliable as there are cases when lexicostatistics does not work at all. Potential problems with the comparative method have also arisen as a result of a number of advances in linguistic thought, in large part due to some of the "basic assumptions" of the comparative method. However, as Campbell (2004:146-7) observes, "What textbooks call the 'basic assumptions' of the comparative method might better be viewed as the consequences of how we reconstruct and of our views of sound change."
I do apologize but I had to take this out. I doesn't mean anything, basically. Not enough information is given to properly interpret the abstracts. For example, what cases are you talking about? We don't know, I'm sure, and you aren't telling us. And now we have some weasel words, "generally considered", but what does unreliable mean? How so? And what do you mean, lexicostatistics does not work? The next sentences are totally disordered and that quote by Campbell gives us zero assistance. This is zero-grade explanation; nothing is presented, nothing is explained. You think you are reading something but you can't figure out what. You know, I don't know of any other language that allows you to do that, to say something without saying anything. I'm going to start calling English the null language. If I want to be diplomatic I speak French but if I really want to say nothing I switch to English. That way you can't be criticised for something you said because you haven't said it.Dave (talk) 03:32, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
"Although the following article deals only with the role of the comparative method in demonstrating genetic relationship, it is important to realize that this is only one application of the comparative method, which has rightly been described as the central tool of historical linguistics. For example, André Martinet uses the comparative method in his influential Economie des changements phonétiques (2005[1955]) to study the evolution of sound systems over time and, via this, to develop generalizations about the nature of sound systems as synchronic entities."
First phrase is not true. The article does go beyond the evaluation of genetic relationships, and therefore required some reorganization. Then we have this business about Martinet, which purports to be a different use but is described as being one and the same with the goals listed just before the quotation from Schleicher. This article is what used to be called a name-dropper, it throws a lot of famous names around without any explanation of why. We can get the names from any of the literature, what we need is the threads of meaning, the summary of what is going on, why these names are being used. The style is that of the "little professor", a child trying to talk over his head about undeveloped ideas in quasi-grandiloquent style with frequent lapses into informal English, and saying nothing really but doing a lot of name-dropping. You have to tell us how these people fit into the thread. You keep telling us the thread is one thing and then going on to tell us it is something else. Writing is hard work, my friend. You can't sell us linguistics door-to-door. Did you have a summer job selling vacuum cleaners?Dave (talk) 09:14, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
The box says "Altaic languages", but only Turkish is mentioned. 1782 and 1786 are both mentioned for Jones. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.42.19.146 (talk) 09:22, 18 December 2009 (UTC) In the file, Mongol appears. It is not in the box in the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.42.19.146 (talk) 10:42, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
Lyle is an established author mentioned in the article. However, the article does not reference any of his published works. Instead we are told of an unpublished debunking passage located in preview form on Lyle's site. That isn't there now; the link is dead. Moreover, the putative forthcoming work is not on Google (maybe I missed it). It seems clear, if there really was such a passage Lyle does not want us to use it. However, there is more. All these claims made for Jones are false, he never said any such things and as far as I can see no one ever thought he did. If Lyle said all those things they certainly were misplaced. I doubt it. However, we can't now verify just what Lyle said. So, I'm taking out the better part of that passage. I will say, the linguists of that time all drew conclusions that later turned out to be manifestly wrong. Anyone reading Jones can see that. No one takes Jones or the others like him seriously as linguists. If we're trying to "debunk" Jones we have created a straw man to belabor. He happened to be the first known of the time to mention a group to which he did not even give name. No one has claimed he invented the proto-language. See Tree model. It is more important to get information right than to get something on WP. More work.Dave (talk) 11:08, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
I took this out:
"An insight often attributed to Jones is conceiving of the idea of a proto-language, and consequently of the type of "family tree" model of language development (one proto-language splitting into various daughter languages, some of those then splitting again into further languages), upon which the comparative method is based. However, Jones' role in the development of these ideas has recently been called into question. According to the comparative linguist Lyle Campbell, the widely quoted passage from Jones has been removed from its proper context, and a reading of his work reveals his ideas of linguistic development as less clear."
I don't know of anyone who attributes those things to Jones (see under Tree model. What role is that? How can you say the role has been called into question and not say what the role is? Moreover, we have already explained the family tree concept, why do it again? As I said above, Lyle has chosen to remove himself from you presentation. Just what are Jones' ideas of linguistic development? All he said was, Sanskrit and some others appeared to have common ancestor now not extant. What's wrong with that?Dave (talk) 12:00, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
Someone worked pretty hard on this article and there is much good material. It got a C, and now I'm making quite a few changes - not on the technical material, mind you, but on the writing. You should have had more English composition. But anyway I think I owe it to you to explain why I am making these writing changes, and this turns out to be some suggestions on your writing. I do see some consistency of style. As a linguist or student linguist you know all about social registers. An article such as this takes formal English, but the register keeps changing to informal or conversational English. Never do that, it attracts attention to yourself and inserts your presence into the material. The writing should be transparent; one does not see the writer or his style at all, only the material. Stick with one register, formal English, throughout. Second, a lot of this is patois. Patois is a device used by one ignoramus to impress another. Save it for your girlfriend. In patois one tries and fails to use the technical terms correctly and half the time it is mainly clear that the speaker has no idea what he talking about. It can sound impressive, however. Don't try to impress us, it means you have a low opinion of us, that we can accept slick talk in place of the real thing. Whenever I see the slick I stop reading. The third thing I noticed is that decisions on what to say next depend less on strict logical order than on the purple passages. You are trying to "write good." Don't. First have something good to say and then organize it well. You will find that you won't have much trouble saying it. Don't try to look smart or be entertaining. We don't read this material for entertainment, although I must say WP can be a pretty good laugh. And finally, you aren't using natural language. If you read the Egyptian Book of the Dead you will see a goodly number a repetitious formulae as though the author think if he does not say things in the correct formula someone will go to hell for it. Don't keep repeating the subject over and over in successive sentences; use pronouns. You don't have to summarize the whole article in every paragraph; you can assume the reader has read the previous. These are my comments, take them as you will. If you really want to know how to write linguistics start studying the writing of the introductory textbooks referenced so frequently in this article. Of course, they had the advantage of a team of editors. As far as I can see they are written really well. That's their job. No reply necessary. You can just start reworking some of the awful linguistics articles I have had to read, many of which you no doubt worked on.Dave (talk) 00:24, 20 December 2009 (UTC)
This article has a large number of references; however, not too large for the topic. There is no need on the other hand to swell the Bibliography beyond what is used. I put these unused items here. Many articles have "Additional reading" sections. I like those. Many of these refs are very specific rather than general. I'm not sure those belong there. If anyone wants to create an additional reading section with these I would not disagree with that. I did not do it myself because the refs need a lot of work to get them into WP formats, and some of them require tedious Internet lookups. If you want to do the work, go right ahead, I will not object. Note also if anyone puts more notes in and wants to use these items, they would go back in the references section, properly formatted.Dave (talk) 13:36, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
I just completed a major edit on this article, which I hope will remove some of the obstacles to improving its grade and make it more useful in the matrix of other articles. The article is middling long (not really long). Try as I might I found I could not reduce the size below 53 kB. My edits are mainly formatting and English-language. I followed the policy of not removing referenced information. I did insist on following the references so I removed some unreferenced paragraphs that were written badly or made no sense, as I have explained above. If anyone really wants to cut down, I would suggest some sections have too many examples. Maybe there are too many tree diagrams. You use YOUR judgement whether you want to add or subtract, merge or split. I got this to the point where I view it as satisfactory so I may not be back at least for a while. You can always reach me on my discussion page and I will discuss almost anything but I have to warn you I will not bicker. If you really have to change something, do it, and see what the reaction is. It's not my article, it's yours. Bye now.Dave (talk) 13:50, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
Speaking of bad style:
The first two sentences are clear enough (though I don't see why "not ... simultaneous"). The last sentence is a bit obscure but I got the point. What the heck do the other three sentences even mean? —Tamfang (talk) 16:35, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
And why remove the wave model link?! —Tamfang (talk) 16:56, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
The two external links are really to private sites. I don't think they are appropriate, but the previous editors had them, so I am going to leave them. I am insisting on cite web, however, according to WP policy. We aren't interested in editorial interpretation of the link. Cite web puts it in as it is, telling us who and what. Now the link to UT publishes material copyrighted I am sure by Kathleen Hubbard. I do not know at all if they have permission to publish it. It is a document on the classics department web site and that has been made public. What their use of it is and whether we can link to it I do not know. You legal persons now can decide. The other one is Professor Matthew Gordon's linguistic course aid. Is this an encyclopedic source? You decide. I presume he does not mind the whole world taking his course as he has made the site public. There is some interesting information in there, but, the thing is, its nature is didactic not encyclopedic. I believe both links are strictly transitory. In a few months, a year perhaps, someone will be having to remove the links as dead. Are they worth the trouble? You decide.Dave (talk) 00:57, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
Not all elements of the language have the same probative force when comparison suggests a historical connection. The strongest lexical evidence for any language family is shared morphological paradigms, especially highly irregular or suppletive paradigms with bound morphology, as Fortson (2004) points out (for example, I'm sure other works on historical linguistics do the same). Pronouns are also generally considered likely if not unassailable indication of genetic relatedness (but if there is no evidence for past contact and the languages are not spoken anywhere near to each other, and there is no independent indication that they ever were, or were in contact, except possibly in the remotest past, borrowing can be ruled out with high probability, which makes the case of Kusunda interesting indeed). Independent lexemes, on the other hand, do not constitute compelling proof for relatedness at all, even when the sound correspondences are regular (for example, Latin loanwords in Welsh do not prove that Welsh is a Romance language, even though regular sound correspondences can be established), or when the languages are spoken in a very extensive geographical area such as Eurasia (as Wanderwörter can travel very far distances). The article should somehow mention this important fact that not all evidence is equally good, but I can't tell where it would fit best. Anyone? Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:29, 24 December 2009 (UTC)
The language Piraha has been subject to a number of dubious claims of uniqueness by Daniel Everett. "Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment", Language, 85.2, 355-404. The claim that its pronouns are borrowed from Nheengatu is not transparent. Thomason and Everett argue their case based upon a complex phonemic analysis.
Our claim is that the basic Piraha pronouns are nearly identical to those of Nheengatu and Tenharim. Superficially, however, the Pirah~a pronounsdon't look much like the Tup i-Guaran i pronouns; so this proposal will not be convincing without some additional information about the phonology of Piraha that shows how the phonetic realizations of the Tup i-Guaran i forms align with the Pirah~a phonemic system. "Pronoun borrowing" Sarah G. Thomason & Daniel L. Everett University of Michigan & University of Manchester
The claim should be attributed rather than presented as fact.μηδείς (talk) 16:40, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
What is the point of having the pronoun table on the "comparative method" page? The resemblance of the Baltic-Finnic pronoun "sinä" and Turkic "sen" is obviously coincidental: the change of t -> s before "i" is a Baltic-Finnic innovation. All other Uralic languages have a "t" in that position (*tun, *tinä). Actually Finnish has the verbal 2nd person suffix "-t", and also the plural form "te" shows the original "t".
Compare also the following inflections (nominative sg - essive sg - essive pl):
vesi - vetenä - vesinä (water) käsi - kätenä - käsinä (hand) kuusi - kuutena - kuusina (six)
--Muhaha (talk) 13:39, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
So your point is that Uralic is actually closer to Indo-European?μηδείς (talk) 17:02, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
The chart adequately attributes the opinions held to the linguists who hold them, which is the only relevant matter - not anyone's OR POV, neither mine nor thine. It should occur to you that a pre-Altaic form in *tin- could easily account for the *sen- of Turkish, especially in light of the the *chi- of Mongolian. If anything, the chart could be expanded to include the mine/thine pronouns of PIE and the nyi/chi pronouns of Nivkh.μηδείς (talk) 18:49, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, it would have been better with the proto forms, and you are right about the pronouns as well. The problem is that this table is done with an image file, not editable wikipedia markup. It still has value since it does illustrate the beliefs of the long range comparativists like Poppe who are mentioned in the subcaption. μηδείς (talk) 19:40, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
Furthermore, the Finnish and Estonian 3rd person pronouns (sg+pl) in the table aren't cognates. The Finnish counterparts to them are "tämä" ('this', dialectically also 'he') and "nämät" (dialectical, 'these'). Kernaazti (talk) 10:09, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
The history section of the Indo-European studies article gives a different impression of the origin of historical linguistics than this article does, mostly pushing the method much further back in time. Even in that article, there is no mention of Yehuda Ibn Quraysh, who sometime in the 9th or 10th century thourhg comparison of the phonology and morphology of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic recognized that Semitic languages had a common origin and "are subject to the same linguistic laws". This reference states that the Indo-European studies in the 1640s by Van Boxhorn and Elichmann were "significantly more accurate" (and more comprehensive) than those 140 years later by William Jones, "who erroneously believed that Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese were part of Indo-European while Hindi was not, which suggests that his method was seriously flawed." The reference also mentions that 67 years before Jones, William Wotton had already attempted to reconstruct an Indo-European proto-language.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding how narrow the concept of the "comparative method" is, in which case the difference of which with earlier methods could perhaps be made more explicit in the text. At the very least, the overcredited Jones' overexposed quote, which as far as I can tell told nothing new, can be removed from the origin section. Afasmit (talk) 00:22, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
In other words, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob retained God's tongue, not that Hebrew and Arabic evolved from some third tongue that was neither. This whole section needs to be reverted to the status quo ante. μηδείς (talk) 02:48, 16 April 2011 (UTC)"The reason for this similarity and the cause of this intermixture was their close neighboring in the land and their genealogical closeness, since Terah the father of Abraham was Syrian, and Laban was Syrian. Ishmael and Kedar were Arabized from the Time of Division, the time of the confounding [of tongues] at Babel, and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob (peace be upon them) retained the Holy Tongue from the original Adam."
It is stated that latin word for "tongue" is "dingua", but as far as I can tell, it should be "lingua". Even so, linguistic is not absolutely my field of expertise, so I wanted to signal the thing instead of changing it. Anyway, yes, your are linguistic not dinguistic, so I'll be quite surprise if that is right.
87.0.49.19 (talk) 22:22, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
Check footnote #34: "dingua is an Old Latin form of the word later attested as lingua." Ko'oy (talk) 21:36, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
Jones' work is highly cited and should be available, but Blench does not provide any reference for his claim that Jones believed that Chinese, Japanese and Egyptian "were" Indo-European. Given Jones' remarks about the detailed parallels between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and the fact that Jones didn't use the term Indo-European, it seems likely something else is going on here - perhaps a surmise on his part that the three tongues were related at some remove? In any case, we need a source in Jones for this, not an unsupported vague criticism in Blench. μηδείς (talk) 02:35, 16 April 2011 (UTC)
What? Blench's criticism is not at all "unsupported" or "vague". By all means, take a look at Jones' remarks in the Third Address to the Asiatick Society and you will see that the criticism is mostly accurate. For example, Jones explicitly says that Hindustani belongs to a different stock than Sanskrit (unlike Latin, Greek and Persian), and is only influenced by it.
Also, he clearly fails to differentiate between the history of "races" (i.e., ethnic groups) and languages (and even between the history of spoken language and scripts), and often conflates his bizarre speculations about the origins of "races" (i.e. that modern Indians are related to Egyptians, Chinese and even "Peruvians") with his linguistic speculation.
All in all, if you remove that single fortuitious quote on IE, most of Jones' ramblings would be considered nonsense today, and certainly inferior to the contributions of many of his contemporaries or predecessors. The fact that he is so often glorified and quoted has more to do with the fact that he held a prominent position and was a pioneer, than the quality of his work as a scholar. Again, by all means, go and read him, instead of relying on secondary, tertiary, etc. sources.
Finally, his claim of a no longer existent independent source was neither that decisive not definitively accepted, since several decades later Sanskrit itself was still claimed to be the IE proto-language, as Schleicher's quote in this very article makes clear. What we really have with Jones is an easily quotable paragraph from a famous scholar of a prestigious institution. Certainly, the fact that he was somehow the "father" of comparative linguistics is an attractive narrative, but hardly accurate.KelilanK (talk) 16:12, 16 April 2011 (UTC)
http://books.google.com.br/books?id=ZiYNAAAAYAAJ ----- pages 33 and 34 ("Third Discourse")contain references to Hindi ultimately having a "Tartarian" or "Chaldean" origin and being influenced by Sanskrit, as well as the famous "philologer" quote.
In pages 45-46, he seems to add "Chinese, Japanese", "Phoenicians" and "Peruvians" to the same "race" of speakers of "IE" languages.
In the Sixth discourse he concludes that Farsi is derived from "Chaldean" (and thus related to what we'd call Semitic languages) and unrelated to Avestan.
And see page 186 ("Ninth Discourse"): "that the first race of Persians and Indians, to whom we may add the Romans and Greeks, the Goths, and the old Egyptians or Ethiops, originally spoke the same language and professed the same poupular faith is capable, in my humble opinion, of incontestable proof". In this and adjacent pages, Jones again draws a distinction between the first and second Indians and Persians: Sanskrit and Avestan are what we now call IE, Farsi is Semitic, Hindi is either "Tartarian" or "Chaldean". Egyptian is also IE. And he again says, though with less confidence, that Chinese and Japanese might be related to the "Hindus" (apparently the "First" Hindus, i.e. Sanskrit), etc.KelilanK (talk) 20:48, 16 April 2011 (UTC)
The transition from "Origin" to "Application" in the text is too abrupt. How did the linguists of old really apply the method, by and large? And how has its application changed? The history part gives some clues, but very little.Xemoi (talk) 05:24, 12 December 2013 (UTC)
As pointed out by Bill Poser, the idea that the comparative method is mainly about comparing lexemes – regardless of how well they may conform to the claimed criteria of basic vocabulary – is a grave misunderstanding that seems impossible to root out, but it leads to all sorts of poor-quality research because it is usually overlooked that anything can be borrowed and even so-called basic vocabulary is prone to innovation, even if it isn't borrowed. The gold standard of the comparative method still remains the comparison of bound morphology and irregular paradigms in particular (not just general morphological type, of course; specific structural as well as material resemblances are needed), and truly rarely borrowed (usually functional) lexemes such as pronouns.
Basically, if you don't control for confounding factors such as borrowing and accident, you're doing it wrong. As Schrijver pointed out, the Latin borrowings in British Celtic are deeply embedded and present even in very basic vocabulary (both in British Celtic and in Old Irish I've often seen that what was long treated as ancient Indo-European heritage was eventually re-assessed as Latin borrowings, and likely archaic Germanic loans in Slavic and Baltic are often treated as cognates as well), and worse, there were even regular sound correspondences, giving them the appearance of true cognates. I suspect the same problem with other large-scale layers of borrowings such as Latin loans in Albanian, or Chinese loans in East Asian languages, which have misled scholars for decades and keep misleading Chinese scholars, who still treat Tai-Kadai languages as Sino-Tibetan. (Sure, Japanese has several layers of Chinese borrowings, but how do we know that the oldest layer of borrowings doesn't consist of real cognates? Ultimately only because Japanese morphology is so radically different.) What made Hübschmann recognise that Armenian wasn't Iranian had nothing to do with a lack of regular sound correspondences in the Iranian borrowings. The problem is compounded when the source of the borrowings is closely related. Another problem for long-range comparisons, especially in Eurasia, is the problem of Wanderwörter, which we know can travel truly surprising distances – there are widely accepted examples for that; for example, Persian nān "bread" (< Proto-Iranian *nagna-) has reached Tundra Nenets, Komi and Mansi.
So regular sound correspondence must be thrown out as an unfailing criterion too (of course, accepting that sound change is in principle regular, only disturbed by other factors such as analogy, still remains a vital precondition to any comparison, it just can't rule out borrowings entirely). Lexicon is just not reliable. As aptly pointed out in the article Trans–New Guinea languages (passage partly written by yours truly): The strongest lexical evidence for any language family is shared morphological paradigms, especially highly irregular or suppletive paradigms with bound morphology, because these are extremely resistant to borrowing. For example, if the only recorded German words were gut "good" and besser "better", that alone would be enough to demonstrate that in all probability German was related to English. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:36, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
See also "On the End of the Ritwan Controversy", where Poser makes the same point again: lexical evidence is never sufficient to prove genetic relatedness; even isolated morphological comparisons are not enough. As he says on p. 7: "The distinction that Goddard made is the distinction widely made by historical linguists between lexical equations that happen to involve grammatical morphemes and true 'embedded' morphological correspondence." What must be compared is systems, not isolated forms. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 23:30, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
Here on p. 8, Poser explains the true main reason for the significance of the establishment of systematic and regular sound correspondences: to rule out chance similarities – not to rule out borrowings! Moreover, the establishment of regular sound correspondences is the prerequisite for the reconstruction of proto-stages. It is, however, not in itself a magical fix against the borrowing problem; very often it does help to rule out borrowing, but not always and unfailingly. Clearly, this is not understood by many linguists. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 23:51, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
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The German - to - English Translation is very bad. The fact that it is still somewhat understandable is surely an indication of PIE roots for practically all the words :D?
I am a native German and (UK) English speaker, so should someone be kind enough to forward me the original text, I shall do my best to translate it with a minimum of idiom, but an emphasis on the sense of the words, rather than a literal transcription, which seems to have been the case here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.71.14.214 (talk) 17:15, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
For instance, I might infer the following: -
"In this work I have attempted to set forth the inferred original Indo-European language side by side with its extant derived languages. The advantages of this [approach] include making clear to students the results of the investigation in a consolidated form, thereby elucidating the nature of particular [particular individual?] Indo-European languages.
There is, I think, more to be gained by this, namely to demonstrate the baselessness of the assumption that the non-Indian Indo-European languages were derived from Old-Indian (Sanskrit)." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.71.14.214 (talk • contribs) 17:27, 11 December 2021 (UTC)
"The word, by regular sound changes from Proto-Slavic, should have been /nʲevʲatʲ/, but it is in fact /dʲevʲatʲ/." This is wrong; the /n/ had already changed to /d/ in Proto-Slavic and Proto-East Baltic, but remained /n/ in West Baltic. See *devętь. phma (talk) 08:22, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
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