Comments Welcome
George W. Grace
University of Hawaii

QUESTION: You were saying that answering the question of whether or not particular languages are continued isn't just a matter of determining specific facts. Can you explain what you meant by that?

ANSWER: I meant that in the final analysis the question of which languages are continuations of which has no strictly factual interpretation--that (as we've seen) the languages themselves are fictions in the sense that it's people who've defined the languages in the first place. To speak of languages' having continuity is to use entities such as living organisms as a metaphor. Individual organisms, of course, retain their identity even while undergoing change. No amount of normal change in any way affects their identity--their continuity--until they disintegrate following death(1). That isn't the case with languages.

QUESTION: But this brings us right back to the point I was making at the beginning of this entire discussion of the genetic hypothesis. If in the final analysis the question makes no sense, why doesn't that mean that the whole concept of genetic continuity should be abandoned?

ANSWER: To say that it makes no sense would be going too far. I'd want to say that it clearly does make sense for us to ask it because the genetic hypothesis has led to impressive accomplishments. But a more fundamental question that we also need to ask concerns the conditions under which we should make the assumption of genetic continuity in a particular case.

QUESTION: By which you mean the conditions under which our purposes are best served by our making the assumption?

ANSWER: Exactly.

QUESTION: And how should that question be answered?

ANSWER: Well, I assume our most general purpose to be the advancement of knowledge. I'd say that the key consideration is how our pursuit of knowledge will have been advanced or set back by the assumption of genetic continuity in the specific case.

QUESTION: And I suppose that in order to determine that we would need to decide what kinds of knowledge are at stake--what we want the implications of genetic relatedness to be?

ANSWER: yes.

QUESTION: Then the question would seem to be what else people should be entitled to infer if we announce that languages a and b are related--what else should follow from that claim.

ANSWER: Yes, I'd agree.

QUESTION: But entitled to infer about what? About the languages themselves? About something else?

ANSWER: That's part of the question. Are we claiming something about similarities between a and b?(2) Are we claiming something about the history of the people who speak them? About the history of their cultures?

QUESTION: What are some of the things that people might want us to be claiming?

ANSWER: Well for one thing, I've thought I understood some linguists to say that linguistic relationships were of no linguistic interest unless they opened the door to further linguistic research, which meant the application of the comparative method. I supposed that anyone of that persuasion would want us to be claiming that a and b represent a new field for such research.

QUESTION: Comparative a-b linguistics?

ANSWER: Yes. (Although with no implication that a and b will be the only languages sharing the relationship, of course).

QUESTION: The implication being that relationships where insufficient regular sound correspondences could be found wouldn't be of interest?

ANSWER: I think that's precisely what was meant: the relationships might exist, but they wouldn't be of any interest to linguists--in fact (I thought they were implying), for linguists to have anything to do with such questions at all was only asking for trouble.

QUESTION: Asking for trouble in what way?

ANSWER: Mainly in providing an excuse for people from other disciplines to get the idea that linguistics was concerned with questions that were relevant to their own work and consequently to stick their noses into our business, I think.

QUESTION: The "people from other disciplines" would be those who would want us to be claiming something about the people who speak the language or about their culture?

ANSWER: Yes, those in particular.

QUESTION: I'd like to discuss these people from other disciplines, but before we go to that, are there any other things that linguists might want us to be claiming?

ANSWER: Well, consider for a moment the linguists who think of a language in terms of its linguistic description and for whom syntax constitutes the core of the descriptive model.

QUESTION: What about them?

ANSWER: If you recall, when you originally proposed (in Grace 1998) lexification as criterial, what we were discussing was the case of languages which were said to have their "lexicon" (which we reinterpreted as lexification) from one source and their "grammar" (which we reinterpreted as content form) from another?

QUESTION: Right.

ANSWER: Well, put yourself in the position of one of those linguists that we've just described. Now imagine the following situation: We have extensive descriptive information on two languages--call them a and b--that were formerly spoken in a particular area. Now there is in the area at present a language x whose lexification argues that it's a continuation of a. However, you find that x's syntax reminds you much more of b than of a (and we might as well suppose that we have evidence of intensive "contact" between a and b). Wouldn't you find it hard to accept the claim that x was a continuation of a?

QUESTION: The development of x presumably having occurred in and been influenced by that contact situation?

ANSWER: Precisely. In a situation such that our choices are: (1) that x is a continuation of a with interference from b, (2) that it's a continuation of b with borrowing from a, or (3) that it's a mixed language, you've been arguing for (1), but others would find it hard to accept.

QUESTION: I can see that anyone who thinks of a language as equivalent to its linguistic description could have that reaction. But if we're convinced that thinking about language in terms of linguistic descriptions is misleading, we surely shouldn't allow ourselves to be misled in that way.

ANSWER: If it's not a matter of fact, it's not a matter of being misled. It's a matter of what we want our genetic interpretation to lead to. (Of course, it's even more fundamentally a matter of our still not being able to reconstruct in enough detail the precise evolution of [linguistic] affairs in the affected area).

QUESTION: And so we return again to the same question: what we want the meaning--that is, the implications--of our genetic interpretation to be.

ANSWER: Yes.

QUESTION: And we also have those "people from other disciplines" whom we were talking about before to consider. What exactly do they want a claim that a and b are related to tell them about the speakers and/or their culture?

ANSWER: Well, many scholars who're concerned with reconstructing culture history would like to be able to assume that when they're told that two languages are related--i.e., that they're different continuations of a single earlier language, they're also being told that the cultures of the people speaking those languages are continuations of a single earlier culture that belonged to the people who spoke that earlier language.

QUESTION: What does it mean to speak of one culture as being a continuation of a particular earlier culture? What kind of assumptions lies behind this? Doesn't this imply something like the same "organic" metaphor as to speak of languages as entities that retain their identities even though undergoing change?

ANSWER: Yes, I think it does. The conception of a culture as a system whose parts constitute a whole (and that for that reason would presumably have to maintain some measure of integrity) is found in what Dell Hymes has called the "Herderian(3) model" (see, for example, the reference in Hymes 1974: 123 to "the Herderian model of one language, one people, one culture, one community--the Hopi and their language, etc."). Proceeding from such a model, it's natural to imagine the language, culture, and even the population itself evolving as a unit(4).

QUESTION: If I understand you right, you're saying that our problem is to define genetic continuity between languages--i.e., define conditions under which the assertion of genetic continuity is warranted--in such a way that all of these different interests can be satisfied at the same time? A concept of genetic continuity that can be all things to all people, as it were?

ANSWER: That would be the ideal solution, but it's hardly a realistic expectation.

QUESTION: Then wouldn't the realistic solution be to focus on just one of these interests and make a serious attempt to define genetic continuity in a way that would satisfy that one interest at least? In fact, the same thing could subsequently be done independently for any or all of the others.

ANSWER: That's what I expect will eventually happen. That is, I hope that we'll eventually come to a much more complete understanding of the ways in which a linguistic (and/or cultural) situation can evolve over time and what kinds of traces such evolution leaves, and that this will lead to our efforts becoming better focused.

QUESTION: And how do you imagine that that understanding will affect our conception of genetic continuity?

ANSWER: Of course I don't have any very clear answer to that or I'd already have been talking about it. However, I'd expect that the main modifications will be in our conception of the objects that continue.

QUESTION: You'd better try to explain that. What do you mean by our conception of the "objects that continue"?

ANSWER: Maybe I can make it clearer if I start with the case of culture. Ethnologists talk about cultures and so do archaeologists, but it's not at all clear that their "cultures" are the same objects.

QUESTION: Can you illustrate?

ANSWER: Well for example, archaeologists may identify different levels in a particular site as continuing the same culture or, alternatively, as representing different cultures (and likewise with particular levels in different sites). But archaeologists are obliged to base their classifications solely on the remains of material culture, and it's not at all certain whether or not ethnographers would classify these cultures in the same way if they had been able to observe them in their entirety.(5)

QUESTION: And of course it's impossible to predict whether the languages spoken by the people at these sites were (i.e., would be determined by standard linguistic criteria to be) continuations of the same language or not.

ANSWER: Right.

QUESTION: But what does this have to do with "modifications of conceptions of objects"?

ANSWER: What I'm saying is that different people, or different research traditions, have different conceptions of the object.

QUESTION: So that when we eventually arrive at a sufficiently clear understanding of how cultures evolve, we might find cases where there's been continuity of culture in a place according to one conception of "culture", but not according to another?

ANSWER: Yes, we might wind up having to distinguish between culture₁ and culture₂ (and...culture_n).

QUESTION: But surely the concept of (a) language doesn't present as many difficulties as that of (a) culture?

ANSWER: No, I think it probably doesn't. However, we still don't have precise criteria for determining whether two people are speaking different languages or just different dialects of the same language.

Furthermore, there's more at issue than the question of where the boundary falls between one language and another. There's a question of the essential nature of the object whose continuity is to be determined (i.e., in this case, the "language").

QUESTION: Why is that an issue?

ANSWER: Because when we say that a particular language spoken today is a continuation of a particular earlier language, that is generally understood by our audience as meaning that there has been continuity of whatever it is that constitutes the language's essential nature.

QUESTION: And would you say that the essential nature of languages is in dispute?

ANSWER: I think it is in some measure. If you remember we spoke in Grace 1982 of two contrasting (idealized) conceptions of what a language is. According to one of these conceptions, a language is a "universal encoder"--a device that's so-designed as to be adequate to encode any thought (i.e., anything that can be thought).

QUESTION: The "anything-can-be-said-in-any-language" conception.

ANSWER: Exactly. Now, to the extent a person leans toward the universal encoder conception, s/he is likely to see the language as something whose essence is an abstract set of structural principles, with vocabulary constituting a set of appendages that can be added or subtracted as convenient.

QUESTION: And how does that differ from the other conception, in which the language is seen as a 'cultural-encoding"?

ANSWER: In the conception of a language as a "cultural-encoding", the vocabulary assumes a central role. The essence of the language is seen as a repertoire of ways of saying the things that are relevant to the culture.

QUESTION: The clichés we live by, as it were?

ANSWER: A little too neat, but still not too far off the mark. Anyway, the point is that this vocabulary isn't just a list of words but also includes many formulaic expressions and more or less complex constraints on the use of all of them. Whatever general structural rules exit would be conceived of more as a by-product of the process of vocabulary expansion than as the core of the system.

QUESTION: And you're saying that people whose conception of the nature of languages approximates more closely to the universal encoder view would have different expectations about the conditions a language would have to meet in order to qualify as a continuation of a particular earlier language than would those whose conception approximates the cultural-encoding view?

ANSWER: I'm sure they would; and do.

QUESTION: Well, where does all of this leave us?

ANSWER: I think it leaves us with the conclusion that there's much that we still don't understand about the processes of linguistic change.

QUESTION: And so, what implications does it have for the work that's currently being done in the framework of the genetic hypothesis?

ANSWER: Well, I wouldn't suggest to anyone who's doing such research that there are particular changes that s/he needs to make before going any further. On the contrary, much of this research is making significant contributions to our knowledge and understanding of the world and it's important that it be continued.

QUESTION: Then if we have no changes to suggest, what, if anything, have we accomplished?

ANSWER: Well, I hope we've made a little progress toward identifying--and maybe toward defining--some of the questions that will eventually need to be answered about the working assumptions of historical linguistics.

1. I specify "normal" change to allow for the possibility that some future medical interventions such as organ implants might result in changes that would raise questions about the continuation of particular individuals' identity. (Back up)

2. Somewhere I once saw it suggested that linguists should "define" a particular language family or subfamily by agreeing on specific features that were criterial for membership. But, of course, that isn't possible within the scope of the genetic hypothesis. There's no (non-universal) feature of any proto language that would be impossible to lose, or that's of such importance that any language that lost it should on that account cease to qualify as a descendant of that proto language. (Back up)

3. Referring to Johann Gottfried Herder, the influence of whose 1770 prize-winning essay on the origin of language (Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache for the Prussian Royal Academy) is still evident today. (Back up)

4. I wouldn't want to leave the impression that all anthropologists would subscribe to the Herderian model or to a "cladistic" view of culture history. For instances of quite different views, see Moore 1994 or Terrell et al 1997. (Back up)

5. Of course, I don't mean to suggest that all archaeologists, or all ethnologists, would agree among themselves. (Back up)

Grace, George W. 1982. The question of the nature of language. Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 3, Number 4. Printout. Also (1996) Internet WWW page at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~grace/eln4.html. (Back up)

Grace, George W. 1998. The genetic hypothesis: 2. The concept of language "mixing". Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 4, Number 11. Internet WWW page at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~grace/elniv11.html (Back up)

Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (Back up)

Moore, John H. 1994. Putting anthropology back together again: The ethnogenetic critique of cladistic theory. American Anthropologist 96: 925-48. (Back up)

Terrell, John Edward, Terry L. Hunt, and Chris Gosden. 1997. The dimensions of social life in the Pacific: Human diversity and the myth of the primitive isolate. Current Anthropology 38:155-95. (Back up)

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Put on the Web 1 September 1999
Minor corrections and updating on 14 June 2007