3 ms·

Historical linguistics is based on the analysis and comparison of written documents and existing languages (so-called "attested languages"). Past languages are

Historical linguistics is based on the analysis and comparison of written documents and existing languages (so-called "attested languages"). Past languages are infered either from different languages (comparative) or from a single language (internal). All of this is already very speculative and likely wrong most of the time, especially when internal, but at least you can discover some patterns. What you can't do with linguistics, is infer the existence of stories in the past just because they exist in the present. Language just does not have this kind of data stored. Let's say 4000 year's ago some guy told a fairy tale about a wolf and someone else wrote it on some kind of paper-like material. Then the people died and the paper got destroyed. At some point the entire culture of this guy disappeared, and only the basic language survived into a new culture. So how do you figure out today that a certain story existed back then? Short answer, you can't. We don't even know that the entire culture existed, let alone a story within that culture.

bazoom42 2y ago
Sure, we can’t know about stories which have been lost without a trace. But what does this have do with the research described in the article?
- michael9423 2y ago
  The authors claim to be able to show that "oral traditions probably originated long before the emergence of the literary record" and trace back a story to the Bronze Age. As I just explained, this is impossible to do with linguistics. Or, as the authors themselves write: "While Grimm believed that many folktales were likely to be thousands of years old, only a tiny minority can be traced back to before the emergence of the literary fairy tale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has led to intense debates about the presumed antiquity of traditional tales [16], with some researchers claiming that many canonical fairy tales may actually be relatively recent literary inventions [17,18]." Before the 16th century, everything is dark. Linguistics does not change this, it's wishful thinking. I don't see anything in the paper that changes this fact. They claim that two European tales "can be securely traced back to the emergence of the major western Indo-European subfamilies as distinct lineages between 2500 and 6000 years ago", just using linguistics. And this is what I question, because the authors do not provide any evidence for their claim.
fsckboy 2y ago
if (for the sake of argument) the words dog and wolf and fox have jointly evolved in an apparent way over time, phonetically and morphologically, from proto-indo-european to modern descendent languages, and so have some other words like grapes and manger and cry and villagers, and these modern cultures have similar but different shared stories about dogs in mangers, foxes and grapes, and crying wolf so the villagers will come, and the differences between the stories across cultures just so happens to be in concordance with the evolution of those words, I'd say that is evidence of a shared origin for the stories. I don't think you are showing much imagination about one would investigate such an idea.
- michael9423 2y ago
  The study is not about shared origins. Everyone knows that many stories have shared origins. To know this, one just has to analyze the historical texts and development of certain stories during the last hundreds of years. The Babylonian confusion was common sense for the last 1000-2000 years. The study is about claiming some specific stories are definitely 6000 years old just because some shady analysis based on nothing but thin air. Historical linguistics works with non-existent languages. Making assumptions about a non-existent language is one thing, but claiming to know both the time when those languages were spoken and the stories that were told is pure hybris (Lyle Campbell and Paul Heggarty refuse to believe in so-called glossochronology). The entire field of historical linguistics is pure speculation without any hard evidence. It is impossible to know languages that do not exist anymore or have no written sources. The Australian linguist Robert Dixon rightfully said that the proponents of far-reaching linguistic affinities undercut the level of what constitutes good science “to the point of nonsense”. He explains that languages can not be reconstructed.

bazoom42 2y ago

Sure, we can’t know about stories which have been lost without a trace. But what does this have do with the research described in the article?

michael9423 2y ago
The authors claim to be able to show that "oral traditions probably originated long before the emergence of the literary record" and trace back a story to the Bronze Age. As I just explained, this is impossible to do with linguistics. Or, as the authors themselves write: "While Grimm believed that many folktales were likely to be thousands of years old, only a tiny minority can be traced back to before the emergence of the literary fairy tale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has led to intense debates about the presumed antiquity of traditional tales [16], with some researchers claiming that many canonical fairy tales may actually be relatively recent literary inventions [17,18]." Before the 16th century, everything is dark. Linguistics does not change this, it's wishful thinking. I don't see anything in the paper that changes this fact. They claim that two European tales "can be securely traced back to the emergence of the major western Indo-European subfamilies as distinct lineages between 2500 and 6000 years ago", just using linguistics. And this is what I question, because the authors do not provide any evidence for their claim.

fsckboy 2y ago

if (for the sake of argument) the words dog and wolf and fox have jointly evolved in an apparent way over time, phonetically and morphologically, from proto-indo-european to modern descendent languages, and so have some other words like grapes and manger and cry and villagers, and these modern cultures have similar but different shared stories about dogs in mangers, foxes and grapes, and crying wolf so the villagers will come, and the differences between the stories across cultures just so happens to be in concordance with the evolution of those words, I'd say that is evidence of a shared origin for the stories. I don't think you are showing much imagination about one would investigate such an idea.

michael9423 2y ago
The study is not about shared origins. Everyone knows that many stories have shared origins. To know this, one just has to analyze the historical texts and development of certain stories during the last hundreds of years. The Babylonian confusion was common sense for the last 1000-2000 years. The study is about claiming some specific stories are definitely 6000 years old just because some shady analysis based on nothing but thin air. Historical linguistics works with non-existent languages. Making assumptions about a non-existent language is one thing, but claiming to know both the time when those languages were spoken and the stories that were told is pure hybris (Lyle Campbell and Paul Heggarty refuse to believe in so-called glossochronology). The entire field of historical linguistics is pure speculation without any hard evidence. It is impossible to know languages that do not exist anymore or have no written sources. The Australian linguist Robert Dixon rightfully said that the proponents of far-reaching linguistic affinities undercut the level of what constitutes good science “to the point of nonsense”. He explains that languages can not be reconstructed.