Manalee [AMZ: accent on the middle syllable] Shukla, Director of Programs at Avant, gave a presentation at 1 on Friday 7/31, to an audience of most of the residents at Avant, where I now live: “Traveler’s Quest: Discover India with Manalee” (about her home and family, and about the culture and traditions of the India she grew up in — in Bhopal, in Madhya Pradesh (‘central province’, smack in the middle of the country), before she embarked on a new American life, with two kids and a professional job).
I got some standing with the residents when Manalee introduced me as her special guest, saying I was a linguist who speaks many languages — not really true, but that was sweet of her — and adding that I wrote a PhD dissertation in Sanskrit (a slip: it was on Sanskrit, not in it, and it was about phonology, using Sanskrit data; also, that was 1965, 61 years ago, and I’ve mostly forgotten my Sanskrit — I don’t want to take credit for marvels that I’m entirely incapable of).
Obviously, MS and I were acquaintances, and I’ll tell the story of how we came to meet (but not in this posting). I also intend to tell you more about what she had to say, and show, about her India (but, again, not in this posting; there’s just too much here).
Instead, I’ll start with the glottonym Sanskrit (for a collection of language varieties, the oldest of which goes back to about 1500 years before the Christian era) and use it to riff on common descent with modification, a truly great idea of the 18th century that then became a core principle of Darwinian evolution.
The glottonym and its sources. Sanskrit is an anglicized spelling of the Sanskrit name:
saṃskṛta ‘composed, elaborated’
This is a compound, with two elements:
saṃ ‘together’ + skṛ alternative form of kṛ ‘make, do; perform, create’ (in the past participle form, with suffix –ta)
Now, the hairy part, the relationship of the Sanskrit element saṃ to the Latin preposition cum ‘with’ (as a prefix com-, with the variant con– in certain phonological contexts: cf. English compose and connect). Hard to believe this similarity (in both form and meaning) is an accident, but could it just be borrowing (in some ancient interchange between Italy and India)? Well, it turns out that Latin [k], or something phonologically close, corresponds to Sanskrit [s], or something phonologically close, in a whole intricate series of pairings; the correspondence looks systematic. How could that come about?
For that, I have a story, told in my 3/17/15 posting “On the PIE watch: headline news”
the beginning of [an NPR] story:
Linguists have traced the roots of English, Hindi, Greek and all Indo-European [IE] languages to a common ancestor tongue first spoken on the Russian steppes as much as 6,500 years ago
The headline seems to be claiming that the newsworthy event is the discovery of a single ancestor language for English and Hindi and adds the information that this language was spoken 6,500 years ago. But the reconstruction of this ancestor language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), is news from roughly 200 years ago. What’s current news is the claim that we now have solid evidence about where and when PIE was spoken; the first sentence of the story begins to re-frame the story, by treating the concept of the Indo-European languages as a given and highlighting the where and when.
The problem for the journalists here is that readers cannot be expected to be familiar with the concepts of the IE languages and of PIE (in the way that readers can be expected to be familiar with, say, the concept of DNA). One of the great intellectual achievements of linguistics has not made it far into public consciousness.
… There are actually three stories here, and PIE is the middle story.
The tale of PIE. People had long noticed similarities between languages, particularly beween their stocks of words, but these could be attributed to sound symbolism or, most obviously, to borrowing [AMZ: my favorite anecdote here: the Samoan word for ‘cat’ is pusi]. But once it had been appreciated that languages change in time (other than by borrowing), another possibility — descent from a common source — had to be 1taken seriously. (Still another possibility, accidental resemblance, was not fully appreciated for some time.) The problem was then to determine which similarities were attributable to common descent and, for the ones that were, what the shared ancestor was like.
In particular, in the 18th century, scholars looked at the languages of Europe and to the east (all the way to India), noting similarities that didn’t seem attributable to other causes, and they posited an Indo-European family of languages, with a common ancestor (which, in the words of Sir William Jones [in a 1786 address], “perhaps, no longer exists”).
We then see a substantial scholarly industry, devoted to questions like these:
(a) which languages are IE (an enormous number), and which not? (not: Basque, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, and [thousands] more)
(b) how to distinguish similarities due to common descent and those due to other causes?
(c) how to infer the features of the proto-language, in particular the pronunciation and meaning of words in the proto-language?
(d) how to distinguish subgroups of the languages, infer their features, and date their divergence from the others?
Answering such questions is a truly enormous task, requiring knowledge of large bodies of texts, ways of interpreting those texts, detailed information about the social and cultural contexts in which these languages were spoken, and more. At the center of this work is question (c), and the primary tool there is the method of comparative reconstruction, aka the comparative method (CM), according to which sets of cognates (those that have been argued to be related by common descent rather than from some other cause) are compared, with the object of inferring the most likely source for this array of words. [Sanskrit saṃ and Latin cum — remember them? — are cognates]
Models for the CM. The CM didn’t develop out of the air; instead, it uses forms of reasoning developed for other purposes, in the study of textual descent. The problem of textual descent is faced by philologists who are confronted with a set of variants of some text, generated by scribes who made copies of the text (this in the days before printing presses, photocopying, and other means of producing multiple copies) and so inadvertently introduced changes in the text; the problem then is inferring how the set of extant texts could have developed. Can one of them be argued to be the original, true, text? Or is the original not in the set of extant texts — that is, no longer exists (think of Sir William Jones) — and has to be inferred from the texts we have? In general, how to draw up a family tree for the texts, similar to the family trees that comparative linguists began drawing up in the 19th century?
Beyond linguistics. The striking successes of the CM in linguistics served as a model for other forms of scholarship where reasoning is needed to infer historical relationships and to posit earlier (currently unattested) states, in particular, in evolutionary biology. The CM in linguistics was an inspiration to Darwin — and so we get reconstructed organisms (not now extant), evolutionary family trees, and so on. [in a word: wow]
Now: comparative reconstruction is not at all what I do in linguistics, it’s way beyond any of the skills I have learned — but as an intellectual achievement, it’s mind-bogglingly significant, so I think that one of my responsibilities to the field of linguistics is to spread the word. Which is why I have reproduced, above, most of the content of my 2015 appreciation of a truly great idea of the 18th century. Hoping that it will give you a small shiver of delight.
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