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The notion of proving a relationship

المؤلف:  SPIKE GILDEA

المصدر:  RECONSTRUCTING GRAMMAR

الجزء والصفحة:  C5-P161

2026-08-23

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The notion of proving a relationship

Virtually all historical linguists share a common notion which may be stated in something like the following terms. One starts with a hypothesis of relationship between two or more languages or groups of languages. If groups of languages are involved these in turn are conceived of as a number of languages which already have been proven to be related, e.g. the Indo-European family. Taking as examples binary hypotheses (these are the most frequent in the literature) we may illustrate the three possibilities by actual examples. An instance in which we deal with two single languages is the Japanese-Korean hypothesis, of a single language with a group of languages, the Eskimo-Indo-European hypothesis and of one group with another group the Indo-European-Uralic hypothesis. As an attentive reader may already have noted, in formulating it this way, what we call a group or distinct language is often a relative matter. Virtually every language has internal dialect divisions and the point at which we talk of a group or family as distinct from a single language is to some extent arbitrary. Moreover, some of these hypotheses as usually stated take some single language as part of the hypothesis because it is more important or better known and disregard the group of which it is a member. Thus Uhlenbeck who championed the Eskimo-Indo European hypothesis treated Eskimo as though it were a single language using West Greenlandic, the best studied form, as representative of Eskimo as a whole. In fact, Eskimo contains at least two units, Inuit and Yuit which certainly deserve to be called separate languages. In addition, Eskimo is universally recognized as having Aleut as its nearest relative in a language family called Eskaleut. It is noteworthy in these typically binary hypotheses, that less important languages are generally disregarded. Thus, Aleut is almost never compared with anything else while the more prominent Eskimo is. So also for the purposes of Japanese-Korean comparison, the dialect group found in the Okinawa Islands and which certainly deserves the status of a separate language is generally disregard ed in comparisons of Japanese with other languages or language groups.