Dialect vs. language: Loose ends, 1

[muckefuck]

I'm not sure how much interest remains in my further ramblings of the insupportability of distinguishing "languages" from "dialects".[*] Much of what I was going to post in entries actually came out in replies during the ensuing discussion, but there were some bits I felt that I never adequate responded to. Chief among them is this question from lhn:

Though does the lack of existence of a bright line boundary make it entirely political? I understand that whether Catalan and Castilian are languages or dialects of Spanish or whatever may not be a scientific question. But would it be meaningfully possible to claim that English was a dialect of Mandarin or vice versa?

At the risk of sounding glib, I'll ask in return, "Meaningful to whom?"

I think one of the fundamental problems underlying the whole debate is a widespread lack of understanding of how linguists go about determining what varieties are related to other varieties and how. It's easy to mock those who go about claiming that "English is a Romance language" due to its extensive borrowings from French and Latin or that "Chinese is related to Japanese" because they share a writing system, but how many people who can correctly assert that "English is a Germanic language" have an idea what that really means rather than simply relying on the authority of the EB or their high-school English teacher?

The traditional classification is built on a phylogenetic metaphor of "language evolution": Languages give birth to "daughters" who together constitute "branches" in a larger "family" (which may in turn be grouped with others into a larger "superfamily" or "phylum"). Despite the fact that they are transmitted to "offspring" in a most Lamarckian fashion, borrowed vocabulary and other "acquired traits" can't change the fundamental "genetic affiliation" of these linguistic varieties. This is called the "Stammbaum model", from the German word for "family tree".

The trouble is, as you can see, languages don't actually have genes. They are human artefacts, much like clothing, and can be altered and discarded in the same way (although not nearly as casually). It was once thought that certain core features were so resistant to borrowing that they could be used as reliable indicators of ancestry, but broader study of the many tens of thousands of spoken varieties in the world has demonstrated that there is nothing which cannot be transmitted from one to another. The "wave model" is one attempt to account for these cross-cutting influences in a graphic, typological manner, but it's still applied primarily to varieties within the same "family", and thus represents more of an additional dimension to the Stammbaum model rather than a replacement for it.

Furthermore, linguists like R. M. W. Dixon, who has done extensive fieldwork among the Aboriginal languages of Australia, argue that Stammbaum model is the product of conditions prevalent in Europe and other areas which have seen the sudden invasion and diversification of a single "genetic stock". As such, it's inadequate for accounting for the types of relationships seen in areas of relative ethnolinguistic stability (like Australia) where changes diffuse constantly between neighbouring languages.

A classic example of the problems this creates for historical linguists is the relationship between Quechua and Aymara. The similarities are certainly striking--perhaps even too much so. As my friend zompist often points out, they're more what you'd expect from massive borrowing than from genetic relationship. But is the transmission from Quechua to Aymara or vice versa? In the absence of written records, it's impossible to say.

Furthermore, there's the possibility of there being both a deep genetic relationship and one based on a more recent exchange; after all, this is what is argued for the members of the proposed Altaic family, most of which have been in close contact for thousands of years. As a result, not just vocabulary has been borrowed, but even morphology, word order, and vowel harmony--features once thought so "stable" that they were definite evidence of genetic affiliation! The greater the time-depth, the harder it becomes to distinguish mutual influence from common descent.

In light of all this, outrageous claims about the affinity of superficially divergent varieties don't seem so obviously misguided after all. Who among us would be able, on our own, to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that, say, Norwegian and Romani are related but not Ottoman Turkish and Persian?

[*] For those who can't get enough of my mouthing off on the subject, be sure to see my contributions to a one-sided debate on the subject in the context of Ibero-Romance--surely a place where politics is very much at the fore.

Comments

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

To play on the "genetics" metaphor: Language may be married to politics, but is really really promiscuous with culture(s). Who knows whose the daughter-languages are?

[lhn.livejournal.com]

At the risk of sounding glib, I'll ask in return, "Meaningful to whom?"

To you. If someone posted "English is a dialect of Mandarin", assuming you didn't simply ignore him entirely, how would you respond?

Who among us would be able, on our own, to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that, say, Norwegian and Romani are related but not Ottoman Turkish and Persian?

Is it more or less than those who could demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that H. sapiens is more closely related to C. lupus than to T. rex? (Or that manatees and elephants are more closely related to one another than either is to us?) Anyone who's not an expert in a field pretty much has to rely (however skeptically) on the consensus of experts within that field to a large extent, even if they understand in some general way what's being claimed and what the tests are. (I certainly can't do a DNA test at home, and I'm not qualified to judge morphological similarities or fossil evidence.)

That said, I sometimes find that difficult borderline cases (those often being more interesting to examine in detail) can obscure the large number of cases where a difference is clear-cut. Leaving aside language, there's a long-running truism on rec.arts.sf.written that there's no clear border between fantasy and science fiction. And this is clearly true-- there are all sorts of stories which either include elements of both, or which fall on different sides of the line for different people. (E.g., to me Anne McCaffery's Pern books are clearly science fiction written with a deliberate fantasy feel: the first story was published in Campbell's Analog, it has a prologue describing the colonization of the planet via starship, the dragons were produced via biotech, their powers are explained in terms of fake science rather than magic, and so on. To others, they're clearly fantasy, because they involve fire-breathing dragons and lords and a medievalish society and powers that don't fit physics as we know it.) But there are also stories that are clearly science fiction (Ringworld, the Foundation trilogy, anything by Hal Clement) and stories that are clearly fantasy (The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, the Harry Potter books). The existence of a debatable zone and some fuzzy definitions doesn't, IMHO, make the distinction meaningless. (Though it probably makes less than useful the recurrent attempts to settle the matter once and for all, or to isolate clean, pure science fiction from icky fantasy.)

Likewise, the fact that the relationship between Aymara and Quechua is less than clear doesn't make the difference between English and French harder to fathom. (Or does it?) If someone wants to say that Lowland Scots is a different language from English, I may not be qualified to contradict him. But no one's going to convince me that Chicago English is a different language from Brooklyn English¹ because of a few pronunciation and vocabulary variations. Likewise the existence of code-switching and Spanglish is unlikely to convince me that English and Mexican Spanish aren't two different languages.

¹I know: which Chicago or Brooklyn English? But still.

This may just be confidence born out of ignorance. But it seems to me that someone should be able to give a reasonable answer most of the time for the non-borderline cases. If not linguists, then who?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The only way I can give a reasonable answer is by knowing what reasons are behind the person's asking for one.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

BTW, I know I've mentioned it here before, but I strongly encourage you (and everyone else) to read George Lakoff's Women, fire, and dangerous things. (If that's a name which is familiar to you mainly due to his political writings, rest assured that--as with Chomsky--his politics don't have much impact on his linguistics.) In that book, he concerns himself with exactly the kind of problem you're talking about: How does human categorisation work--particularly in those cases where distinctions are far from clear and simple? He actually concludes that the number of straightforward cases is even smaller than we think it is and the whole architecture of mathematical logic is fundamentally incompatible with the way that people naturally form and apply concepts.

To get back to what you originally asked: Any question of the form "Is X a dialect of Y" is essentially a political question, since it introduces hierarchy (and a host of associated assumptions) into the matter. For this reason, "Is Chinese related to English" is a fundamentally different sort of question and one far more amenable to linguistic analysis (although still subject to the aforementioned pitfalls).

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

He actually concludes that the number of straightforward cases is even smaller than we think it is and the whole architecture of mathematical logic is fundamentally incompatible with the way that people naturally form and apply concepts.

Oooh - someone who de-naturalises Aristotle's lost middle? Must read as soon as possible (ie October). Also: great title! This is a matter that I find myself embroiled in all the time, if only because my discipline (and, frankly, all the humanities that sometimes put on airs and call themselves social sciences) also made its models out of deeply unscientific borrowings from natural history. So far I've been relying on the odd short essay by Stephen Jay Gould to help me around this; I'd love to see something that tackles it head on.

The genetic metaphor strikes me (a layman) as extremely misleading, and probably tied to all sorts of ideas regarding the evolution and diffusion of culture, and 'out of Africa' arguments and all that Gordon Childe stuff (back to the ursprache again...). I'd've thought a friutful alternative approach might be to not ask: 'how are stable, isolated and formalized extant language A and language B related?' but instead to ask "how does this speaking group maintain a common language? Why is there uniformity and intelligibility across this population, and why does it break to another language in this place?" Clearly, politics and polities have a huge amount to do with that, but is anything else going on? Then those areas of relative ethnolinguistic stability (like Australia) where changes diffuse constantly between neighbouring languages would become really central to the debate...

BTW: my favourite example of evolutionism applied to human production is Bashford Dean's philogenetic trees of arms and armour: if I sat down and thought about it hard, I'd probably come up with some severe objections to it, but it makes intuitive sense to me (uh oh) that principles of selective evolution actually would come into play between sword-type, fighting style and armour worn. The fact that he was simultaneously a curator at the Met and at AMNH suggests the possibility of a glorious rational union between nature and culture... which just might be exactly the source of all the trouble.

[booksoverbombs.livejournal.com]

Since "dialect," as distinct from "language," isn't recognized within any widely familiar linguistic context, I agree that we're forced to appeal to political considerations. On one hand, we find within the languages collectively identified as Chinese about as much diversity as exists on the entire European continent. On the other, we discover fair intelligibility of Spanish by Portuguese speakers and practical transparency between Norwegian, Danish and Swedish. The political definitions of language and dialect do not clearly map onto any observed linguistic phenomena.

But neither the conventional use of the terms nor the inapplicability of Schleicher's model seems to prevent us from giving an operational definition of language (in the sense that two speech communities can be said to speak different languages) that hinges on mutual comprehension. There are a few problems, notably the lack of commutativity and transitivity, but I've always understood this to be the definition in place that allows us to say "Deitsch is a dialect of German," but not "Chinese is a dialect of English."