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S OR SOMEONE ELSE? /2002
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Prints on canvas: Portraits | | Medium: | print on canvas | | Size (inches): | 20 x 20 (image size) | | Size (mm): | 508 x 508 (image size) | | Catalog #: | PC_039 | | Description: | From an edition of 25.Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in magic ink on the reverse /Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.
Accidental Resemblance
How is genetic relationship determined:
How would you go about discovering the genetic relationship between languages and even constructing a family tree for them? The analogy of human genetics is instructive.
To determine human genetic relationship, we don’t go by looks, height, skin color or facial features, as these physical attributes can be due to three kinds of factors other than genetic relationship:
a. accidental resemblance
b. parallel development
c. environmental factors
Instead, we trace genealogy or use DNA evidence.
So it is with the determination of genetic relationship between languages. We should not be misled by similarities resulting from accidental resemblance. We should also discount similarities due to parallel development. Finally, we should not be fooled by similarities resulting from contacts between languages.
Accidental resemblance is always possible. Once a library assistant at the mid-western university where I attended graduate school told me that English and Chinese are related. “How so?” I asked. “Well, female horse is mare in English, horse is ma in Chinese; cheese is (nai3) lao4 in Chinese and milk products in English all have ‘lact-‘ in it!” He did not know a much nicer example. “Swallow” in English refers both to the bird and to the act of getting food down the throat. Yan4 in Chinese has the same two meanings!
Parallel development can lead to similarities in languages too.This is particularly true in grammar and sound, since these two aspects of language have to make use of the same limited resources.There are just so many parts of speech and ways of arranging them. Take the ordering between subject, object and verbs. Statistics tell us that the total number of permutations for three elements is eight. So let’s assume that there are eight different orderings of the three sentential components. Now how many languages are there? At least hundreds of them. So many languages have to have the same kind of word order patterns. English and Chinese both have SVO orders. The same is true with sounds. Our vocal apparatus can only produce so many different sounds; many languages will have to have the same inventory of sounds.
Contact between languages also can contribute to similarities between them. One typical occurrence in language contact is the borrowing of words. The vocabularies of Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese have many loanwords from Chinese. And yet all these three languages are genetically unrelated to Chinese. Japanese and Korean are Altaic languages and related to Mongolian and Turkish. Vietnamese is a Mon-Khmer language. Chinese however is a Sino-Tibetan language.
So what kinds of similarities are due to genetic relationship? What is the DNA in language? Since grammar and sound systems in language tend to resemble each other due to parallel development, we have to look at the vocabulary. But since the borrowing of vocabulary is also a source of similarities between languages, we have to make sure that we only look at words that not commonly borrowed. Now the words that are most commonly borrowed have to do with advanced technology or foreign objects or concepts. The kind of words we should rely on then should be basic, native vocabulary such as lower numbers and body parts. It is not common for the vocabulary of a language to be so impoverished as to borrow terms referring to lower numbers and body parts (there are exceptions, of course; Japanese has borrowed the Chinese lower numbers, even though it has its own native words for these numbers already).
-www-rohan.sdsu.edu
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