Water, Water Everywhere: Back to Global Etymologies

The Eurasiatic interlude was longer than I had originally planned. It’s time to return to Proto-World and “global etymologies”. Few things are more instructive than a nicely dissected example, so I shall compare different approaches to analysing genetic relationships and illustrate them with real data.

No matter how severely we criticise the long-range reconstructions of Nostratic/Eurasiatic, they are proposed by scholars who respect the standard comparative method and appreciate its importance for separating signal from noise. According to the mainstream approach, it is not enough to observe that numerous pairs of words across two languages are similar in form and meaning. One ought to analyse the similarities carefully in order to decide whether they are more likely the consequence of common ancestry than of non-genetic factors such as horizontal diffusion (borrowing), functional convergence (onomatopoeia, etc.), or blind chance. Attempts to meet the accepted standards in inter-family comparison may fail, but at least there are people courageous enough to accept the challenge.

M. C. Escher, Rippled surface (1950)

But there is also a different approach, called multilateral comparison (a.k.a. mass comparison), according to which genetic relationships can be (and indeed have always been) established without assembling regular sound correspondences and reconstructions. To classify a set of languages (the larger the better) one only needs a collection of tabulated data (a list of basic vocabulary and grammatical morphemes for each language will suffice), a good eye for spotting patterns, and some general linguistic training (as opposed to the expert knowledge of some of the languages being compared). It doesn’t really matter if the evidence is partly corrupt or incomplete: as long as there’s plenty of it, its cumulative weight makes errors cancel out. Finding lexical matches across a large number of languages requires no analytic skills or painstaking detective work: enough evidence leaps out at you from the printed page as you eyeball it. Classificatory conclusions can be drawn simply from inspecting the data, with a confidence approaching certainty.

The best-known advocate of multilateral comparison was Joseph H. Greenberg (1915-2001), who used it famously to classify all the languages of Africa into four genetic stocks, and then to hypothesise that all the native languages of the New World with the exception of the Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene families formed one vast macrofamily, dubbed “Amerind”. He was also the original proponent of “Eurasiatic” – a hypothetical genetic grouping similar to the older concept of “Nostratic”, though not identical with it. Greenberg’s successors have boldly extended his methodology to the study of the world’s languages, not only grouping them into one global phylogeny, but also arriving at twenty-seven examples of “global etymologies” labelled with approximate reconstructions (Bengtson & Ruhlen 1998). This is quite surprising, since according to their own principles comparative reconstruction is a separate technical task, not required for a correct classification. Nevertheless, mass-comparatists often propose impressionistic reconstructions, and even compile etymological dictionaries where hundreds of such reconstructions are offered (cf. Greenberg & Ruhlen 2007). They may be marked with an asterisk just like the legal products of the comparative method – a practice bound to confuse a non-specialist by creating the impression that some actual reconstructive work has been done.

In the posts to follow I shall focus on Bengtson & Ruhlen’s Global Etymology #27, ʔAQ’WA ‘water’. I intend to show, first, how Indo-European words meaning ‘water’ are analysed with the help of the standard comparative method; then, how Nostratic linguists handle data extracted from several families (including IE) to reconstruct a putative common proto-word at the macrofamily level; and finally, how mass-comparatists identify a global etymology (and restore the form of the corresponding word).

References

Greenberg, Joseph H. & Merritt Ruhlen. 2007. An Amerind Etymological Dictionary.  Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [PDF]

Ruhlen, Merritt & John D. Bengtson. 1998. “Global etymologies”. In Merritt Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [PDF]

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