Contact, borrowing and the limits of resemblance
node
The single largest confound in genealogical classification, and the reason similarity is evidence of nothing on its own. Languages in prolonged contact exchange words freely — English has taken thousands from French and Latin without ceasing to be Germanic — and prolonged contact also transfers structure: sounds, word order, grammatical categories. Where several unrelated languages share a region for long enough, they can converge into a linguistic area, or sprachbund, in which typological similarity is high and genealogical relatedness is nil; the Balkans and South Asia are the classic cases. The comparative method's defences against this are indirect but effective. Loanwords tend to enter after the relevant sound changes have finished, so they fail to show the expected correspondences. Basic vocabulary and bound morphology — irregular verb paradigms, pronoun sets, inflectional endings — are borrowed far less readily than nouns for goods and institutions, so agreement in irregularity is worth more than agreement in vocabulary. But the defence is statistical rather than absolute, and where contact is intense and ancient, it can be impossible to tell an inheritance from a very old loan.
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- Story
- The single largest confound in genealogical classification, and the reason similarity is evidence of nothing on its own. Languages in prolonged contact exchange words freely — English has taken thousands from French and Latin without ceasing to be Germanic — and prolonged contact also transfers structure: sounds, word order, grammatical categories. Where several unrelated languages share a region for long enough, they can converge into a linguistic area, or sprachbund, in which typological similarity is high and genealogical relatedness is nil; the Balkans and South Asia are the classic cases. The comparative method's defences against this are indirect but effective. Loanwords tend to enter after the relevant sound changes have finished, so they fail to show the expected correspondences. Basic vocabulary and bound morphology — irregular verb paradigms, pronoun sets, inflectional endings — are borrowed far less readily than nouns for goods and institutions, so agreement in irregularity is worth more than agreement in vocabulary. But the defence is statistical rather than absolute, and where contact is intense and ancient, it can be impossible to tell an inheritance from a very old loan.
- Knowledge
- Contact, borrowing and the limits of resemblance
- Connections
- The comparative method
- Language in the Americas, and its rejection
- Evidence
- Supports the general account in this pack of the comparative method, the regularity principle, contact and borrowing, glottochronology and its critics, and the definition of a language isolate. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No chapter or page is cited, because the book was not opened in this session; the citation identifies the work a curator should check the general account against. This is the source named in the Journey declaration.
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