Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[foxcatdog]

What's a "biological" fish? Are we "biological" fish?

We are if one disallows paraphyletic taxa Which is a good reason not to be dogmatic in this regard.

I for one am amused by and enjoy being considered a fish.

Doesn't that mean cats would eat you?

[keenir]

We are if one disallows paraphyletic taxa Which is a good reason not to be dogmatic in this regard.

I for one am amused by and enjoy being considered a fish.

Doesn't that mean cats would eat you?

Cats are also fish. Which means they dare not eat any fish, lest, as Lilo once said, that would make them cannibals!

[Ares Land]

I'm mentioning that whales are fish the next chance I get.

[Raphael]

I'm mentioning that whales are fish the next chance I get.

Walfische!

[WeepingElf]

I think that trying to eliminate paraphyletic taxa makes more problems than sense, as there are so many useful groupings that exclude subgroups which have lost or changed some very basic characteristic traits. Let's see: Fish are paraphyletic wrt. tetrapods. Amphibians are paraphyletic wrt. reptiles etc. Reptiles are paraphyletic wrt. birds and mammals. All vertebrate classes except birds and mammals are paraphyletic!

Paraphyletic groups also occasionally occur in language classification, even if opposition against them is even fiercer than in biological taxonomy, and many linguists simply give up groups which turn out to be paraphyletic. An example is Hamitic, which turned out to be paraphyletic wrt. Semitic, and has thus fallen out of use; another is Continental Celtic. Recently, it has been proposed that Baltic was paraphyletic wrt. Slavic, as there don't appear to be many changes from Proto-Balto-Slavic to Proto-Baltic; and some Uralicists now opine that Ugric was paraphyletic wrt. Samoyedic. I have even once met a proposal that Uralic was paraphyletic wrt. Indo-European! (I don't remember, though, who made it, I think it was F. Kortlandt but I am not sure, and can't find it now.) [EDIT: I have found it again! It was indeed Kortlandt - it is found here.]

[WeepingElf]

An afterthought: Biologists accept paraphyletic taxa where the excluded lineage shows a significant number of evolutionary innovations, as is the case with the classes of vertebrates I cited in the previous post. There is so much that happened when fish turned into amphibians, amphibians into reptiles, reptiles into birds and mammals, that it is meaningful to draw lines there. This is called evolutionary taxonomy and accepted by the majority of biologists. Also, you just can't avoid paraphyletic taxa when it comes to classify common ancestors of two or more groups - whichever taxon you count the common ancestor in thereby becomes paraphyletic.

Such situations are less common in linguistics. There is nothing really dramatic that sets off Semitic from "Hamitic", which is why if the latter group is mentioned at all, it is put in quotes, if people don't simply say "non-Semitic Afroasiatic". Yet, it sometimes does occur in linguistics, as with the example of Continental vs. Insular Celtic - the Insular Celtic languages did undergo some pervasive structural changes, such as the emergence of VSO word order and initial mutations, that substantially altered their appearance against the more conservative Continental Celtic languages from which they evolved. (In fact, early Indo-Europeanists did not find it easy to show that these languages were Indo-European at all! But Franz Bopp managed to solve this riddle by showing that one of the "exotic" features of Insular Celtic, the initial mutations, preserved traces of lost endings of the preceding words which turned out to be cognates of the preserved endings in languages like Latin, Greek or Sanskrit.)

[Richard W]

I for one am amused by and enjoy being considered a fish.

Doesn't that mean cats would eat you?

But cats do eat people in the right circumstances. The circumstances are rarely right for domestic cats.

[Richard W]

An afterthought: Biologists accept paraphyletic taxa where the excluded lineage shows a significant number of evolutionary innovations, as is the case with the classes of vertebrates I cited in the previous post.

Can you give sources for this acceptance? It irritates me intensely when I find groupings dismissed in Wikipedia as paraphyletic even though it seems to be a useful term for excluding highly derived subgroups.

[linguistcat]

I for one am amused by and enjoy being considered a fish.

Doesn't that mean cats would eat you?

But cats do eat people in the right circumstances. The circumstances are rarely right for domestic cats.

Also, fish eat other fish all the time, even if we exclude the animals normally not considered fish so....

[Richard W]

An afterthought: Biologists accept paraphyletic taxa where the excluded lineage shows a significant number of evolutionary innovations, as is the case with the classes of vertebrates I cited in the previous post.

Can you give sources for this acceptance? It irritates me intensely when I find groupings dismissed in Wikipedia as paraphyletic even though they seems to be a useful terms for excluding highly derived subgroups.

[Richard W]

An afterthought: Biologists accept paraphyletic taxa where the excluded lineage shows a significant number of evolutionary innovations, as is the case with the classes of vertebrates I cited in the previous post.

Can you give sources for this acceptance? It irritates me intensely when I find groupings dismissed in Wikipedia as paraphyletic even though they seem to be a useful terms for excluding highly derived subgroups.

[bradrn]

An afterthought: Biologists accept paraphyletic taxa where the excluded lineage shows a significant number of evolutionary innovations, as is the case with the classes of vertebrates I cited in the previous post.

Can you give sources for this acceptance? It irritates me intensely when I find groupings dismissed in Wikipedia as paraphyletic even though it seems to be a useful term for excluding highly derived subgroups.

At least in botany it seems to be a big issue: although my main source has admittedly been Wikipedia, I’ve still seen quite a few papers discuss the issue of paraphyly, whether it should be acceptable or not, whether broad groups such as ferns or gymnosperms are paraphyletic or not, etc.

[WeepingElf]

An afterthought: Biologists accept paraphyletic taxa where the excluded lineage shows a significant number of evolutionary innovations, as is the case with the classes of vertebrates I cited in the previous post.

Can you give sources for this acceptance? It irritates me intensely when I find groupings dismissed in Wikipedia as paraphyletic even though it seems to be a useful term for excluding highly derived subgroups.

Oh sorry, I should have said, "Many biologists accept ...", indeed, many don't, and there seems to be an increasing tendency towards rejecting paraphyletic groupings. I am not a biologist, and don't know what is the current state of the art on this matter. There probably aren't many biologists who accept paraphyletic groupings like "fish" or "reptiles" as more than simply terms of convenience to denote a set of taxonomic groups that share a particular set of properties, without forming valid taxa in themselves.

Wikipedia of course is a place where controversial stuff like this quickly results to edit wars, so people tend to be cautious, and eventually settle on a neutral formulation that doesn't take sides. For instance, the article Reptile starts: "Reptiles, as most commonly defined are the animals in the class Reptilia, a paraphyletic grouping comprising all sauropsids except birds." That's a pretty neutral way of stating the facts: people call them that, but the group is paraphyletic, and it is up to the reader to accept it or not.

[Zju]

Amphibians are paraphyletic wrt. reptiles etc. Reptiles are paraphyletic wrt. birds and mammals.

I've been left with the impression that early tetrapod evolutionary history is still up to debate, especially the exact relationship between amphibians, reptiles and mammals. E.g. reptiles and mammals could be easily parallel offshoots from amphibians, and there are even statements that there have been multiple out-of-water evolutionary events by closely related species.
Do you happen to remember the source for those claims? I'm more than eager to have a look.

[Richard W]

Amphibians are paraphyletic wrt. reptiles etc. Reptiles are paraphyletic wrt. birds and mammals.

I've been left with the impression that early tetrapod evolutionary history is still up to debate, especially the exact relationship between amphibians, reptiles and mammals. E.g. reptiles and mammals could be easily parallel offshoots from amphibians, and there are even statements that there have been multiple out-of-water evolutionary events by closely related species.
Do you happen to remember the source for those claims? I'm more than eager to have a look.

Amniotes (reptiles, birds and mammals) look like a fairly clear cut group, but it's plausible that the development of the amnion was completed separately. Much the same could be said of the mammals - the change of jaw-hinge is the current diagnostic criterion, but there are several possibilities of independent completion of that change. I have a strong suspicions that the mammals as diagnosed thus are seriously paraphyletic - a monophyletic definition can be produced, but then one has great difficulty in classifying some Triassic and Jurassic taxa.

One spanner in the works is the suggestion that the caecilians developed from early amniotes, thus making the lissamphibians polyphyletic!

There seems to be enough in Wikipedia to work back to the original claims. Tadpoles and neoteny seem to be a major problem in working out early tetrapod phylogenies.

[Richard W]

Recently, it has been proposed that Baltic was paraphyletic wrt. Slavic, as there don't appear to be many changes from Proto-Balto-Slavic to Proto-Baltic;

Worse, there's a lot of feeling around that Slavic is actually West Baltic.

[WeepingElf]

Recently, it has been proposed that Baltic was paraphyletic wrt. Slavic, as there don't appear to be many changes from Proto-Balto-Slavic to Proto-Baltic;

Worse, there's a lot of feeling around that Slavic is actually West Baltic.

Do you mean that, despite its appearance, Old Prussian is more closely related to Slavic than to Lithuanian and Latvian?

[Richard W]

Do you mean that, despite its appearance, Old Prussian is more closely related to Slavic than to Lithuanian and Latvian?

That's the claim.

[abahot]

What are the reasons for thinking so?

[Moose-tache]

Here is a decent review of some of the problems with Proto-Baltic. Basically, Old Prussian is so conservative that it's very hard to pin it down decisively. It has some superficial similarities to East Baltic, such as the collapse of third person forms, and en masse there are more cognates between East and West Baltic. But at a diachronic level, there's no smoking gun to prove that Proto-Baltic was ever a thing. The most convincing argument I've found for Proto-Baltic so far is this paper, which posits two common sound changes for the two sub-branches, but both of them are things that would be pretty likely to occur in two branches independently (they both involve reduction of unstressed vowels).

As for Prussian being para-Slavic, I think that's at least as hard to prove as Proto-Baltic. It's easy to point to things in Prussian and say "that's in Slavic, too! And it's not in Latvian or Lithuanian," because Old Prussian is incredibly conservative, so there are bound to be loads of innovations in East Baltic that wipe out shared features of the other two sub-branches. Doing the reverse yields even more results, hence the superficial similarity of East and West Baltic.