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From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
Subject: Re: Why is Uralic not related to Altaic???
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Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 17:14:05 GMT
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[Followups trimmed to sci.lang]

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv@pi.net> wrote:

> You've got it backwards.  The dissimilarity [of the Uralic and
> Altaic language families] doesn't need to be
> demonstrated, it follows quite naturally from the fact that a Finn
> doesn't understand Negidal unless he studies the language.
> 
> Proving they _are_ related, _there_'s the problem.  And then you also
> have to proof that they are more related to _each other_ than either
> is to any other language family...

From a pure philosophy of science perspective, that's true.  The null
hypothesis about any pair (or multiplet) of languages is that they are
unrelated, and the comparative method can then be employed to show
relationship.  A null result means that either the languages are
unrelated,
or that the method is insufficiently powerful to reveal the relationship
that exists, presumably because it is too old.

However, there have been many relatedness hypotheses in the history
of historical linguistics that are now rejected.  Examples:

1.  Sanskrit is the ancestor of Latin and Greek (in favor of: Sanskrit,
	Latin, Greek are coeval descendants of Proto-Indo-European)

2.  Armenian is an Indo-Iranian language (in favor of: Armenian is the
	sole representative of a distinct branch of Indo-European)

3.  The Tai languages are part of Sino-Tibetan (in favor of: they
	belong to the Tai-Kadai family, unrelated to S-T)

4.  The Ural-Altaic hypothesis as above

Now surely these hypotheses were not rejected solely by allowing (or
encouraging!) the believers in them to die off.  Sociologically, there
must have been some sort of arguments that caused members of the field
to reject the hypotheses, with a structure like this:

	Hitherto we have believed that the X language was Y-itic,
	but because of A, and B, and C, we see that the well-known
	similarities D, E, and F are areal phenomena/coincidence/???
	rather than evidence of a parent-child relationship.

Now what are these points A, B, and C?  Any specific answers?

-- 
John Cowan						cowan@ccil.org
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban
