Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Nov 29, 2024 9:14 am
My first impression is that the interests of conlangers vs. actual linguists are completely at odds here
I don’t necessarily think this was so (and I probably made it sound more binary than it is). I think we’re both interested in the two goals of (a) investigating large-scale trends, and (b) creating a reference resource for individual languages/families. From there it’s a matter of working out how to prioritise those goals, and what level of rigour to use — which are relevant problems for conlangers as much as linguists.
For actual linguistics, and the process of finding large-scale trends, the cognate sets approach would certainly be most useful.
As a conlanger, I think using reconstructions and sound changes, no matter how speculative, is most useful and cognate sets would leave me stumped.
I may have explained it poorly. (My excuse is that I was writing at 2am.) The idea is that you take those cognate sets and decompose them into synchronic phoneme correspondences. Thus, take a set like this one from Austronesian:
mata /
moto /
matəh /
mtɔ /
maka ‘eye’
Our approach would be to rely on the reconstruction (here PAN *
mata), and write down the sound changes people have inferred from that: *a→o, *a→əh/_#, and so on. Alex’s approach would be to simply index the synchronic correspondences: thus you’d get something like m↔m, a↔o↔əh↔ɔ↔∅, t↔k. This gives you a lot less information, but preserves the most important data of which phonemes connect to each other. The advantages are, firstly, that it’s far easier to understand where the data comes from; and, secondly, that it’s much more generally applicable.
To be clear, I’m not necessarily in favour of this approach, at least not alone. I think a combined approach, with this plus reconstructed sound changes, could be very powerful. But this is something to debate.
Lērisama wrote: ↑Fri Nov 29, 2024 10:25 am
I don't think the cognate set method
is entirely empirical – the decision whether to consider a set cognate is also just the opinion of whoever wrote the paper. Admittedly it is often a trivial decision, but certainly not always¹, and it relies on the same correspondence patterns that reconstruction does (obviously) – the reconstruction is just a convenient way of writing it. I'd suggest both, including reconstructions and sound changes but also at least examples of the data that they are based on.
This is a very important point. I recall discussing something similar — that cognates are identified on the basis of their sound correspondences, so inferring the sound correspondences from the cognate sets runs a risk of circular reasoning. But is it better or worse than blindly trusting the judgement of the linguist who wrote down a sound change? I don’t know…