tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post9209387913534412867..comments2024-03-26T14:19:33.332-07:00Comments on Bench Grass: The Plantation of the Atlantic, XII: Evidence, Experts and the Source of the Susquehanna of thErik Lundhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-7775996366625642462011-11-18T08:46:46.884-08:002011-11-18T08:46:46.884-08:00Thanks for the critique. I'm not sure that Pla...Thanks for the critique. I'm not sure that Plains languages are important to my thesis at all, especially since I'm not sure what I'll be writing when I restart my manuscript next week. (Hittite might be another matter.) <br /><br />That being said, the towns that the Illini Confederacy built around French Missions in the 1680s are important. The Wikipedia article on Ojibway (me r scholar!) claims that it was already one of the main trade tongues of the region by 1703, but the language genesis events at Kaskaskia and Cahokia might have been awfully complicated. Ah, well. I have an expert that I can pursue now, so I should probably just look up Goddard.<br /><br />That said, I wish that I could be more confident of historical linguists' claims to be able to distinguish change in time from change due to accommodation within multilingual communities. I know that this is the standard, and frustrating demand made on specialists, but in my defence, I'm just wishing here.Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-90751350903121633432011-11-17T10:14:29.897-08:002011-11-17T10:14:29.897-08:00I do sympathise with your predicament, having been...I do sympathise with your predicament, having been trying to figure out enough Saharan history for my own historical-linguistic uses. But if you're going to talk about the field, more care is called for. A Sprachbund is a group of languages from different families showing common features resulting from mutual contact. A "trade pidgin rapidly coalescing into a Creole" is, by definition, not a Sprachbund: for one thing, it's a single language. And most trade languages are neither pidgins nor creoles.<br /><br />Minus the misused technical terms, I think what you're trying to suggest is that the language became Eastern Algonquian was adopted by a variety of tribes along the eastern seaboard, replacing their previous languages, due to north-south trade rather than migration. This hypothesis is compatible with Algic being real or unreal, because a trade language is almost always based mainly on a single existing non-trade languages (even Tok Pisin's vocabulary is something like 80% English), and because Eastern Algonquian is a valid subgroup of Algonquian. There's no reason to drag Sapir or Dixon into that issue; Yves Goddard would be a more useful starting point.<br /><br />However, if for some reason it's essential to your argument that Plains Algonquian is a recent result of the fur trade, then you're in bigger trouble - and you won't find support in Dixon there either. If every Algonquian element in Arapaho came from Cree within the past 400 years, then every Arapaho word ought to be either practically identical to Cree (modulo the requirements of Arapaho phonology) or completely distinct - never related through a long, decidedly un-obvious chain of regular correspondences, as they in fact are.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-38910322572607318172011-11-17T08:17:09.662-08:002011-11-17T08:17:09.662-08:00Well, clearly I don't want to do historical li...Well, clearly I <i>don't</i> want to do historical linguistics. I don't feel competent to even undertake it, and the arguments within the field leave me much more pessimistic than you about my gaining the ability to evaluate the evidence for myself. <br /><br />So I'd leave it very much alone if it weren't being adduced as historic evidence. This is similar to the issue with archaeology. Historians can't <i>not</i> use archaeology, but methodology, hence critique, seems to be beyond us. If the community spoke with one voice about the evidence, this would be fine, but where two authors disagree? Hard.<br /><br />So what about Algonquin? Its documented spread in historic times offers a straightforward explanation. It travelled west with the fur trade through the pays d'en haut. That said, one would then have to account for significant differences in the Plains Algonquian languages in terms of contact rather than diachronic change in order to discard the west-to-east migration. Contact with fur traders would nicely account for the Algic features of the California coast languages.<br /><br />Is that possible? It seems like common sense that it is, and the heroic discoverers of vast language families who think that they can discount such possibilities, seem, by way of contrast, demonstrably full of crap to me in general. <br /><br />So, as a consumer of the work of other fields, why, exactly, should I accept the authority of Sapir over the authority of Dixon? (At least, his deconstructive authority. It's way easier to be a skeptic, of course.)<br /><br />In the case of Eastern Algonquian, given the small number of speakers and the extreme fluidity of Eastern Woodlands Indian life, the case that it is a trade pidgin rapidly coalescing into a Creole seems defensible on the model of, say, Tok Pisin. That is, defensible depending on who speaks with more authority out of the whole "Creolisation" debate within historical linguistics. <br /><br />As a hapless consumer, I find myself more persuaded by the argument for the normality of Creole languages than by people who say that they have to look "artificial" and be readily distinguished in deep historic time after their genesis. As a scholar, though, I'm all too aware of the dangers of confirmatory bias. <br /><br />In sum: it scares and confuses me when you grownups fight.Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-72475964919333486212011-11-17T02:45:01.236-08:002011-11-17T02:45:01.236-08:00This is so far off-base it's hard to know wher...This is so far off-base it's hard to know where to start. The quick answer to "can this tongue-tied scholar assert that Algonqui[a]n and Iroquian represent emergent Sprachbunds organising long-range north-south trade/exchange routes that formed along the Eastern Seaboard during the peri-Contact period" is "absolutely not." If you want to see what a Sprachbund a millennium or two old looks like, look at the Balkans or Ethiopia or North Africa: unsurprisingly, the families/subfamilies involved are still quite easy to tell apart despite a good deal of convergence. The Indian Sprachbund is even older, and there too it's still trivially easy to distinguish Indic from Dravidian from Munda. Family spread and diversification has been observed more than once within historic times from a directly attested ancestor (Romance, Arabic, Mongolic, Neo-Aramaic, Sinitic...) whereas no one has ever observed direct evidence for any group of languages anywhere starting out unrelated and converging to the point where they could be mistaken for a linguistic family, let alone one as close-knit as Eastern Algonquian. But even if you accept Dixon's frankly rather inadequately supported model, his examples of potential convergence groups, like Pama-Nyungan and Niger-Congo, are supposed to have taken many more millennia to emerge, and their members are far less similar to one another than Eastern Algonquian languages are. More immediately, you seem to be gliding over the fact that transparently related Algonquian languages (never mind Algic) were spoken over a wide area west as well as east of Iroquoian; by "Algonquian" you seem to mean "Eastern Algonquian".<br /><br />If you want to do historical linguistics, don't just skim Campbell's (or Trask's) textbook; do the exercises and learn to evaluate the evidence for yourself. It's not that hard, and it's highly rewarding. On the other hand, if all you want is evidence for a north-south trade network - well, the distribution of Eastern Algonquian, a close-knit branch of Algonquian, is prima facie evidence that at some point people were traipsing up and down the East Coast more readily than they were travelling inland, without bringing in any further speculation.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com