 It took me a while to realize as a kind of student that the way I saw things being done in in sign of Tibetan was not really quite how they were done in Indo-European and Then as a kind of companion piece to my 2019 book then I I put an article together that kind of discussed this this contrast in methodology between What we what what I was seeing happening in sign of Tibetan and what I I think is more normal in in how can say traditional historical linguistics And that and then I teamed up with an Indo-Europeanist to make sure I didn't make any serious mistakes That's Honest Felner who's at University of Vienna and the article was published and maybe One or two of you know about it, but it's it's fairly Detailed and I think gets kind of to the core of the way I think about methodology. So, you know with your Permission I I'm I've based that lecture around that article. So So hopefully it will even even if you've maybe seen the article it will still this very variant format will Will still Proves sufficiently interesting to you in any case. It's what I have to say. So so here goes So I'll discuss, you know, you may may come to realize it's a kind of preoccupation of mine first a little bit about the history of scholarship and then I'll be discussing this this idea that in In Chinese linguistics specifically is is called a word family But then in Tibet or Berman associated with the kind of theoretical writings of James Mattoff has been come has come to be called an a la fam Based on where fam is family and aloe is like in Alomorfer or or a la fawn But you can see a la fam and word family is basically meaning the same thing and Then I'll look through if you like different types of Relationships that I think have been covered by this term and then have a conclusion So as a starting observation Word families or alofams are Are discussed a lot in in sign of Tibetan linguistics, but not really in Indo-European for example or or other traditions of historical linguistics So let's look at where The term was coined this is a article by a Bernard Cogren About word families, so I'll just read it. He says it is not allowable to identify Chinese Mu with Tibetan mick so long as we have not first established the word family to which Mu belongs The kin to Mu is undoubtedly the word. I don't know the reading of this one, but probably also something like Mu Which means pupil of the eye and It is just as likely that this word is the one that corresponds directly to Tibetan mick and I think there's you know kind of how can I say it? There's a reasonable point here, which is that It's not always words with exactly the same meaning that correspond across related languages But I do find his formulation. It is not allowable a little bit strange because it's kind of a Moral position rather than a scientific methodological position. Okay, so That's all Cogren said although. He's definitely the person who who invented word families But Stuart Wolfenden who followed quickly after him Gives a more elaborate Discussion of what he sees as the kind of methodological program So here we go. He says In pursuing comparative studies of the vocabularies of sign or Tibetan languages We are today possessed of two methods of approach. The first of these and the older is That of setting up simple word equations from language to language the second That of comparison by word families only Taking the family as the smallest Operating unit the first method passes from language to language lifting single words from each Without delving down in any way into what we might call the soil beneath them so that We might in fact term such surface operations the horizontal method We have as it were plucked a flower without looking to see which bush we were looking Well at you say we took it The second method on the other hand seeks in the first place not to set up equations between single words and two or more languages but first of all to gather the word families of each separate language and only then after we have Gained a clearer view of the general background of the words composing them To to begin comparative work this method from the fact that we did dig down into the soil As it were from which the individual words have sprung we might if we wished call the vertical method We have then not only the flower, but the actual bush on which it is growing So a nice sort of gardening metaphor from Wolfenden and I should mention that the context is a he's criticizing Walter Simon Who who had an early paper on Tibetan and Chinese comparisons? So as it happens the proposals that Wolfenden goes on to to try to exhibit his methodology with in terms of saying like see if you did it this way You'd make a mistake and if you did it this way you do it right all of his proposals are are no longer Believe to be right so so let's say I think prima facia that maybe suggests that his his Methodological views are maybe not a hundred percent right, but of course any method can also lead to mistakes So we shouldn't kind of be too hard on him and he was writing a long time ago, but in case that's this sort of I think how how the the That's how Sino-Tibetan came to see itself as needing a different method than was being used in other fields and then Matasoff comes along on the Tibetan side and says When he's coining this term a la fam he says we need a word to refer refer to the relationship among the various members of the same word family I Think that the the the observation I would make at this point is we haven't seen anyone define What a word family is or how you can? Tell whether two words are members of the same word families. It seems to be a Kind of art and not a science, you know, and then about the the criticism that that I Don't know that hat that operating with word families is messy This is what Matasoff says he says we must assume that the proto language itself was a wash With alophamic variation both systematic and unsystematic. Why should a proto language be any more monolithically? Invariant than any living language that we can observe with our own eyes. No language is ever perfectly rag regular at Any stage of its history and this is a let's say a criticism that Is is often made towards sort of traditional historical linguistics I think in the first instance by people like Suhart in in the in the tradition of romance linguistics that that historical linguistics in the inter-European tradition is overly hair-splitting and and sees You know kind of insists on Cleaning up any mess that it identifies whereas in fact, we know languages in reality can be a little messy But as an extreme case in in this same article or or book actually from 1979 Matasoff himself reconstructs 21 different variant forms of the word for lung and and I Personally find that a little bit You know strange credulity like no language. I know has 21 similar words for lung But our cases like this precedented methodologically What I will now look at is is the closest thing to word families in Inter-European linguistics, which are which are called doublets and there's something that Matasoff himself draws comparison In terms of he says, you know, my alophams are like the inter-Europeanist doublets So let's look at doublets So I this is what I just said that that that Matasoff says doublets in inter-European are what we mean by word families in in Asia and a reviewer of our paper Can made a similar point that that Matasoff has also made from time to time that in the inter-European We have things like oblau grades and root affixations and and if if inter-European nests can get away with that kind of You know association of different forms of a word despite having different oblau grades or different root affixations Then we can do similar things inside of Tibet. No problem. So That reviewer drew attention to the following entry in the American Heritage Dictionary which is an English dictionary has a appendix of inter-European roots So here we have the inter-European root wek, which means to speak and We have the O grade form walk which gives us Latin Vox and words like vocal voice and vowel in English and gives us Greek Ops Which comes into Greek with the word caliopee? We have a suffixed O grade so walk wa which gives us all of these words all from vocare in Latin and Then we have a suffixed form in the in the e-grade That gives us, you know, these these other these other words. So Isn't this a word family you see you see these different competing variant reconstructions So let's look at this example in in more detail. So we have the root wek that in the hei wrist Which is a past tense of of Greek and Sanskrit and any inter-European it would have been wek weo which gives us Avocat in in Sanskrit and apon said in in Greek So the So so From this root we can make a root noun that gives us Vox in Latin and Ops in Greek And then as far as this second form that that that that we discussed above this this suffixed O grade If you just project backwards from Latin into into European, which is something we called a Transponent is a kind of mechanical backward reconstruction from one language you would get walk with this suffix and That's What would lead to vocare in Latin? and from from a perspective of Indo-European morphology is perfectly legitimate thing to do but it's only supported by the italic family So in this word, it's probably not of Indo-European provenance. It's an italic innovation by applying this This Denominative suffix to the verb for voice so rather than forming a verb directly from the root They've taken the the root noun and apply the suffix a denominator suffix to it And and that is how you get this verb in Latin. Okay, so that's the second option and Then in the in the third we have Another sort of known way of forming nouns in Indo-European Which has to do with an accent class. I won't get into it too much But the accent class is called proto kinetic and it's an S stem. So this gives us apos in Greek and vachas in Sanskrit. So those are the three, you know Let's say earlier. We were looking at how they're presented in the American Heritage Dictionary here. They are And now I'm saying it's not really the case that they're just kind of three variant forms We have ways to explain them as as morphological derivatives from a single root So in a sense, there are only two variants One is the root noun because the second variant is formed from the root noun through Through through a suffix that changes it into a verb And the second one is an S stem so now if we look at the the English words these are these all these different words in English are Are borrowed from either Latin or French One way or another that the details are there no point going through it so we have this long list of of Latin words and They are either nominal or or verbal derivatives of the same Latin word of a car a and all of the morphology that relates them was productive and transparent in Latin Synchronic grammar and the developments from Latin in in in the Romance languages is also well known and well understood and You know when they were tested in English and how they came to to be used today is also all documented so all of this You know apparent Word family variation disappears once we look carefully at the linguistic system use the comparative method and apply philology rigorously and that's the kind of let's say the key methodological point that that that we are trying to make is that if you see someone talking about word families it means that they are not quite done with their work and and and Instead if you continue studying the problem and really come to solve it Then you don't need to invoke this idea of a word family. So You know that was the The case that was mentioned by this reviewer all of these words coming from Wequa in in Indo-European Which was kind of easy for us to deal with in a way But we want to be fair so point to a kind of really More tricky example and this actually comes from from from from Trask's Introduction to historical linguistics and he has a dictionary of terms in historical linguistics Where he looks at different kinds of cognates and this is his example of an oblique cognate Which are which are words that go back to different forms of the same route So so then sort of it seemed like Trask who was who was someone who worked on Basque Is also happy with this idea of there being different forms of the same route in a proto language And we're not happy with it. So we want to Look at his example and say like okay. Well, if we can deal with this harder example, then that proves our point as well so we're looking at feather in English and Pteron which means feather in Sorry means wing more than feather but means feather and wing in in Greek and You know, I I don't know. I assume most people probably know the word But it comes up in English words like helicopter is is a you know is a is a wheel like wing and Pterodactyl is a is a As a dinosaur with with wing fingers. Yeah, so So it so the Greek word comes up in English as well. So here are the Let's say if you like to transpose it again If if we just take the English word and throw it back according to regular phonology into Indo-European We would get this pet And if we did the same with Greek and said, okay, we just throw the Greek terror on in back into Indo-European We would get terror. So the point then let's say from from the opponent's side is These are not the same, right? So if if Indo-European had both Petrash and terror then it must be the case that there are such things as word families So now we Comes kind of the heavy lifting and if Indo-European isn't your thing or you want to just sort of have your eyes Glaze over then that's point. That's that's fine That's fine. The point is just that we can't explain it. So Also, this will maybe give you a kind of a glimpse of what what an explanation You know all the phenomena like this in Indo-European linguistics looks like But but don't you know get too worried about the the details so originally Indo-European had a Protokinetic heteroclite where proto kinetic is the accent class and heteroclite refers to nouns that have an R ending in the nominative but an N ending in other Forms and you actually will know Cases like this like water ends in an R in English because it comes from the nominative but Oh, I don't know like the Sanskrit word for water has an R in the nominative in the end in the in the accusative As does the Greek one. So anyhow So Indo-European had this kind of accent class and this kind of conjugation pattern for this word so that means the nominative looked like Petr and the oblique stem from which all the other case forms Were formed was something like pretend and you can see this directly attested in Hittite Which has a nominative petar and the oblique stem peton? So that's that's the original thing you should reconstruct in Indo-European now. How do we get from that to these? forms that that we see so English derives from pet Which should mean something like a collection of feathers where this a suffix is is is put on the inherited nominative petar and This is just a parallel to show this sort of thing Happening but not in exactly the same way also in Irish and Latin Whereas Greek instead started from an adjective a possessive adjective that meant feathery thing That came from petar, which itself was was an analogically renewed Oblique stem and and we give an analogy of the type we saw yesterday So Let me just kind of talk us through it so pet Pertu is to put a which are two words from That meant something like crossing in Indo-European they give us fjord in in Norwegian and And port portus like door in Latin So that morphology was there and then if you forgot that the accusative of the word for feather in Indo-European should have been 10 and you sat around wondering you might have formed this analogy And then you would have come up with an answer like that. Yeah, so That's our explanation to use four-part analogy to explain the invention of this alternative oblique stem And then once you have Petar Pter then you can add the O to it to make an adjective and then that gets you the form we need in Greek so Thank you for you know sticking with me through that While it is correct from a certain perspective to reconstruct both Petar and Pter in Indo-European the point is at no moment did any community of speakers have both of those words for For feather or wing yeah, you you you have to have forgotten what the inherited accusative is To get to the second one so so so so Yeah, so no Proto-language had both variants which is to say there was never a moment where we can say there was a word family and both of these were were variants That were part of that word family. That's the point we We want to make And just say in fairness to to Matasoff's 21 words for lung cases like feather in Indo-European can approach that level in complexity so in particular Nussbaum in 1986 monograph sets up 12 related words for head horn and skull In Indo-European, it's a very hard problem that had been you know sitting around for a long time and he tried to To solve it and I think his solution is seen as pretty good And in this 300 page monograph he explains each of these forms one by one as ultimately deriving from a single noun Keck which meant head bone the bone the bone of the skull and uses different combinations of Derivational morphology analogy semantic change as The case may be to get to these various attested forms so our conclusion is That these 21 forms for for lung are is not totally unprecedented or Unreasonable but until each form is rigorously accounted for in an elaborated theory of sound of Tibetan historical phonology and morphology it's not a Helpful to describe these as members of a word family, but instead just as problems to be solved So so so that was the sort of first section and now I will go through a different phenomena that we think have come to be Described under this rubric alfam or word family and we'll start again with where Matasoff Kind of defines things because I think that kind of when he initially came up with the idea he was not very far from the traditional perspectives, but over time as the discipline has gotten used to Talking about word families. It's become a way of kind of avoiding progress rather than making progress So this is what he says he said word families are groups of forms Which bear a non fortuitous phonological and semantic relationship to each other The sound meaning relationship among the alophams of word family may follow a more or less productive pattern So that in favorable cases variations may be traced back to systematic or at least plausible Alternations in the proto language itself often involving proto-affectations in many cases. However the synchronically Observable intra and inter alophamy follows no particular pattern. They repeat itself elsewhere, which is to say We wouldn't agree entirely with that put that way, which is basically when it's easy to figure out It's easy to figure out when it's hard to figure out. It's hard to figure out So he goes on to say the situation may result from conflicting or overlapping morphological processes that obscure each other's outputs unsystematic or sporadic Increments to roots roots inference or contamination from genetically unrelated forms die like mixture Or of course it is always possible that the forms in question were never co-out alophams at all And their resemblance is entirely specious. So again the in Formulating his proposal for for for alopham. He recognizes that they have multiple Possible origins and that in principle we should figure out what those origins are So looked at carefully We think each alopham tells a story that combines in some measure regular phenology borrowing and analogy so So we're back back to sort of basics, you know in in the history of language There is phenology borrowing and analogy. So let's just try to stick with those and not bother with word families So so now we'll go through Examples of different phenomena both looking at an inter-european case and looking at a sino-tibetan case that has been analyzed as a Word family that that we proposed should be analyzed along the lines of the inter-european example. So first dialect variation Misanalized as proto-variation So hopefully some of the the the inter-european cases are familiar Just to make it a little bit easier so which is that we've tried to to choose simple ones So all English words that begin with the are loan words like very is from the array and Vicar is from the care But what about vain vat and vixen because if you look at German they have quite good dramatic etymologies Fanna, which means flag fast, which is barrel and füchsen, which is the same as vixen, right? So so why aren't they? Why don't they have an F in in in English? Well a very strict application of the comparative method would require that you you reconstruct some kind of variation back into proto-Germanic where you had the V for Vain vat and vixen that let's say changed to an F in in German because there's a different Correspondence then you see for example in Fox to Fuchs. Yeah, we're both languages have F But that's not right that would be wrong and we can tell that in the history of English alone where Vain was Fanna that was fat and Vixen was something like füchan. Yeah So the answer is actually that these are inter dialectal borrowings and the Canonical explanation is that in summer set dialect they changed all of their Fs to Vs And so they said things like a fish instead of fish and Var instead of far and that there was as it was a kind of concentrated immigration from the summer set region to to London at one point and For some reason and this part is maybe a little bit where the card comes out of the sleeve Why was it that? mainstream English borrowed these three words specifically from the summer set dialect. Well, you know That's that's one of the ways. I think that historical physics is history They could have borrowed different ones So another example Of inter dialectal borrowing from Sanskrit So Sanskrit R and L both correspond to both R and L in other inter European languages So I'll just look at some examples. So R corresponding to R. We have a Raji direction in in Sanskrit corresponding to orego reach in Latin in Greek and orego Guide or steer in Latin and English, right? So we have R in all the languages. Beautiful. We reconstruct R, right? I'm responding to L where we have a Rocha tea In Sanskrit it shines which then corresponds to things. I'll skip the Hittite and Cocharion things like Leukos bright in Greek looks light in Latin and English light So here we have R in Sanskrit corresponding to L in other languages Then we also have L and L. So Loka world in Sanskrit corresponding to Leukos sacred Grove for example in in Latin and Then we also have L and R so Something like a loha copper in Sanskrit corresponding to reduce lump of bronze in Latin so Again according to the sort of Textbook version of the comparative method We would have to set up a different proto segment For each of these in inter European some so the RR one would clearly be an R and the LL one would clearly be an L But then what about the RL and the LR? So for four liquids in inter European well, no For one thing often Sanskrit itself has internal variation like hair. You have both Roman and Lomon in Sanskrit Where where external comparisons suggest are and another example is Rojita versus Lojita meaning red But also if you if you do your philology in Those cases where both R and L are options in Sanskrit R is more prevalent in older texts and more Western texts and L is more prevalent in the East and in younger documents so this suggests that There were sort of two early dialects of of Sanskrit one further in the West, which is also where the older documents are from and one further in the East and the one had an R Changed everything to R and the one changed everything to L So so so what you get is a collapse of R and L into a single segment and then a split Unconditioned split of R and L again, and that's the explanation of why you have those four correspondences So now I look at an example from Chinese Of dialect inner dialectal borrowing so some phonetic components in middle Chinese have both Ya final and N final readings. So here's none and Ne and you can see that the whole character none is sitting on top of the radical meat in the second character so if you know phonetics are used to Represent sound you would expect the second one to be none, but it's not it's an A. So that's the kind of phenomenon we're interested in And we can't propose either final N or final ya because there are series phonetic series that are that have clearly one or the other so I Give it this this first example where Every member of the series has a final N and Then the second example where every member of the series has a final ya Although if you look at the middle Chinese readings, they don't have that that's because of a kind of late Sound change, which is why I've added the reconstructions of the rhyme So so yeah, which is to say we we have solid reason to To have the pure N series and good reason to have the pure J series So how are we going to handle these these mixing N and J series? well Sergei Starostin proposed that in all Chinese there was a separate final R and these series that mix N and Ya are evidence of this original final R that in the West Changed into N and in the East changed into ya and then its subsequent dialect mixture that That leads to these mixed series. So so Generally the reading tradition Continues the Western readings, but for some characters for whatever reason they were borrowed from the Eastern dialect into mainstream Chinese and That's why you have the ya series So this proposal is actually a little controversial in in Chinese linguistics, but I'm convinced of it and I think it's it's Making the evidence is pointing more and more in that direction over time So in any case now you've seen an example from English an example from Sanskrit an example in Chinese of inter dialectal variation and I think that some of Matasoff's proto variation can be explained along these lines So he reconstructs a route that means good where he gives three forms Lyak Lyang and Mediak and points to Tibetan Jack as evidence for this But actually in the dictionary he's using yeshka The the dictionary author points out that this is what he calls a vulgar pronunciation of the normal Tibetan word yak so it's a it's a borrowing from from a Tibetan dialect that has regularly changed ya into ja back into Tibetan not Recognizing that that was a Tibetan internal inter dialectal borrowing Matasoff projects the variation back to the proto language So that's our first, you know example of some some word families are not real because they're Inter dialectal borrowing this that have been Misanalized as proto variation so now the next case is non etymological resemblance and Misanalized as proto variation and I start with the classic example of deus and Phaos So deus is the Greek the sorry Latin word for God and Phaos is the Greek word for God and early into European Assumed that they were related because they look sort of the same and they have the same meaning But they're not and it was only when we figured out all of the sound changes in both languages that you could really prove that they weren't related and Let's just look I think a fun example of Habeo in Latin and English have which look too similar to not be related And mean the same thing But in fact you have two different Indo-European roots here one is kept which gives us Kapio which is to take in Latin and have in English and Then the other one which is a gab That gives you Habeo in Latin and give in English so those are the correct comparisons now the question is Maybe we could call kept versus gab Alephams or or or or you know word families members of a word family and I don't say anything Oops, I don't think there's anything wrong with that in in in Theory because you know what are the chances that the Indo-European had to unrelated words for to have or to take that both started with a A vealer and both ended in a labial something like that But no known process in Indo-European Historical phonology or morphology can relate these two roots, so they're treated as unrelated roots, and I think that's the prudent thing to do Now looking at an example from from senator to Venn Mattoff reconstructs a word a little Chuck Meaning iron that he sees as having cognates in in Tibetan and Burmese, so Chuck in Tibetan and Jack in in Burmese But native Burmese words never begin with voice stops, so it can't be right Also the semantics I think are weak comparing iron to bridle bit. It is not impossible, but they're not strong and most maybe Or helpful in this regard is clearly the science the pro-science Tibetans didn't know iron because iron came after bronze and bronze and iron were let's say discovered by the Chinese in Historical times More or less bronze a little bit prehistoric, so iron is too recent to to be reconstructable And then you know, I think this case shows kind of some of the principles I was talking about yesterday where like well if if the semantics were perfect and the phonology were perfect You know, we might have a problem in terms of well, okay I guess we we need to reconstruct iron and then and then figure out You know, maybe they were talking about unprocessed iron or or some other kind of a shiny rock or something like that Yeah But in this case the semantics the Phenology the morphology and the archaeology are all pointing to this being wrong. So let's just say it's wrong and then so now that's another type of Phenomenon that can be misanalyzed as as a word family. So now I move on to another one aerial words So let's look at wine in Indo-European. This is a fun one Because there's lots of similar looking words for wine, but they reconstruct slightly differently Into Indo-European. So if you if you take Oinos in Greek and project it back into Indo-European you get this och no Whereas if you take vinum and land and project it back into Indo-European You get week no, which is a little bit different and there's no obvious way to reconcile this evidence, which means the Indo-Europeans did not have wine and the The the the perspective that maybe the Indo-Europeans didn't have wine is helped by noticing that Semitic also has a similar word for wine as Does the cartovali in the family? So what I think most people this is controversial still but what most people thing happened was that the caucus speakers Figured out how to make wine and and gave it a name from their language and Then that name spread with the commodity quite quickly After the Indo-European language family had already broken up, but not very long after which is why these different Indo-European words Point to quite similar Protoforms, but that are irreconcilable. So This I think makes sense read the same thing happens more recently like I was saying with coffee tea with with iPods and and Another similar example actually in Indo-European is is hemp or cannabis Isn't quite reconstructible so we can know that The proto-Indo-Europeans didn't have wine or cannabis, but Quite early on in the dispersal of the Indo-Europeans They got wine and cannabis and I personally am sort of amused by the idea of Someone showing up at a campfire and saying, you know, look at this thing. I got from Georgia. You'll you'll love it It's called wine You know, which is what now happens with With things too. So, you know some things never change So now looking at an aerial word in inside of Tibetan and I touched on this yesterday horse So matters of actually reconstruct this horse this monstrous thing smur Wrong, yeah, I'm not quite sure What all the slashes and hyphens mean? But these are the forms he cites. So Marang in Burmese a Ramang in Old Tibetan and Mra in Chinese so they look quite similar But the proposed reconstruction violates something that I call Simon's law It's a it's a discovery of Walter Simons Which is that an MR in Chinese should correspond to a BR in In Tibetan so you get the word for a fly, you know, like buzzed fly is sbrang in Tibetan and in Chinese and the word for snake is sbrul in Tibetan and Mrui in old Chinese and also Matters of reconstruction for horse doesn't work in terms of the finals because you see where Tibetan where sorry where Chinese has a With a lot of stop Tibetan should have a so let's just look at the the horse forms, right? So if Chinese has a Then Tibetan should have Basically, but it doesn't So we conclude that horse is a Vandervoort. That's what the technical term for these sort of cultural technological words that spread quickly across language families And this is supported by archaeology as I mentioned yesterday So moving on to another kind of source for proto variation One is overlooked to sound laws So cigar in his in his review of Matasau's handbook says that he has missed sound correspondence pointing to this Which is a G in Tibetan corresponding to a W in Burmese and this is a fun sort of tit-for-tat between cigar and Matasau if you you know are bored some some rainy afternoon so Matasau dismisses around because he prefers to Recon to to to compare one in Burmese to Val in Mizo, and I don't even quite know what his logic is but anyhow, that's what he says It's not related to I Guess it's that he thinks it should be an L final and not an R final in Tibetan but it's not totally clear and Then he accepts the comparison of groma Which is some kind of root vegetable? to To war in in Burmese, but this is what he says It says the only way to make sense of it is to assume a form like Growa, which was treated by Burmese as having a double prefix gr So cigar paraphrases that opinion as saying Burmese has treated C says Burmese has treated G and R as prefixes Understand has lost G and R as a result of untold random processes So that only W remains and I think that's a good a good paraphrase Which is which is what you know my co-author Hannes and I are objecting to So And then and then just by way of reminder, so he says Matasau says The only way to make sense of this so I just want to point out that There are other ways to make sense of them. So for example Armenian Changes what into God, which is why we have the word work in in English, but the Armenian word is gorg So if Armenian can change what to go why can't I can't have been I'm not necessarily that I am proposing that that's actually not the solution I propose in my book But but it's just to say I think whenever someone says there's only the only conceivable answer is blah It should raise a red flag in your mind I think maybe this is more about someone's lack of imagination than than anything else Okay, and then Next I come to contamination and contamination is it is a type of analogy, but a very specific type That that I and I mentioned this before where words that are part of a sort of semantic subsystem Influence each other's form. So the textbook example is female Which should be femelle has been influenced by male Looking at an Indo-European example the Indo-European word for four is quattro which Turned sort of randomly in proto-germanic into having a pee initial so it became pet war And then fed war Which gives us four for example in English And this is under the influence of the pee in five Where where greek and sanskrit show you that pee had had a sorry the word for five had a pee so basically The proto-germanic speakers copied the pee of five back onto four and I think something like this happened in in sign of tibetan where mattoff reconstructs Lebaugh, sorry Lebaugh for five With either an l or a b prefix or but actually this is a sort of Problem with using slashes in your notation. I'm not quite sure Does it mean either an l or b or does it mean either an l or b or nothing? Or does it mean either an l or b or nothing or both an l and a b? But in any case It means something along those lines So we think the l is etymological which is to say sign of tibetan the sign of tibetan word for five was Like we get in tibetan and in dakpa Uh, and we think that uh words like mizu punga with a pee the pee has been copied from four so Sort of you know like almost the mirror image of what happened in dramatic where dramatic copied a pee from Five to four and we think we think the pee inside of tibetan was copied from four to five uh, and you see that that uh in In the word for four both mizu has a pa And tibetan has a pa and kurtop, which is a language spoken in britain as is dakpa So that's our explanation is is the b is new cause by contamination the l is old And uh moving then on to our next you know type of cause of Seaming word families is misanalyzed language internal developments and This basically is a point about philology where we're studying texts in the original uh, especially early texts has been uh the A sort of staple of uh into european Whereas it seems not to be very popular in sign of tibetan And uh, uh, let's look at the the the root right So madisov reconstructs a root for sign of tibetan bre which means to draw or to write And he says that this is on the basis of tibetan aliphans like a deriva Sorry, I should pronounce it in ultimate a brio draw or write bris a picture And ris figure form and rimo on the other hand So basically, uh, let me just make clear the first two support the b The second two don't support the b which is why he has the b hyphen Is he's saying oh the b can kind of come and go like you see in tibetan But actually the old tibetan conjugation of this Uh verb is different. So it has a d in the present and a b in the past and the future Which is totally regular according to tibetan Historical morphology. So we think that what happened was the the the db alternation although regular was a little bit Untransparent to speakers. So that so they generalized the past slash future form into the present Which is to say The the the b in the nominal forms Uh, or or yeah the the two examples that matta soft gives of the b in tibetan are not uh Don't prove the claim he's making because in the verb it's it's An innovation and in the word picture it's it's derived from the past a picture is something that has been drawn. Yeah So the root is re And uh and no tibetan evidence supports the reconstruction of the b in bre The present is late and analogical And and the word for picture is the derived from uh the past And I also just want to point out that it would be really surprising if the sign of tibetan has had a word for to write Yeah But you know, maybe that's a little bit unfair as a criticism because it can also mean to draw And the proto signer pen probably could draw or or scratch oftentimes, you know verbs for drawing or scratching come to mean right Okay, and then uh just another example Uh matta soft reconstructs the tibetan word sal to a proto sign of tibetan root sal So gsal which means to clear to clear away like a stain Uh, but written tibetan s actually merges two Things in proto sign of tibetan one is sts and one is s So if we look at old texts, we can see that uh That in this case, it's the sts form. That's original. So we have a dick patam che sald Clear away all sins. So this is the past tense of the verb to clear b s t s a l d And here's another example from tibetan Uh, completely clear away all hindrances. So uh, bar che is hindrance tam che all yom su completely besal tte with b s t s So The root is sal not sal. So the reconstruction to proto sign of tibetan must also be wrong okay, so that's my little kind of uh survey of different, uh Or or let me put it two different ways one is survey of the kinds of phenomena That can lead to the appearance of proto variation uh, but uh You know, we're saying Then that That proposing proto variation is never a legitimate move So, uh word families are a bad idea Uh, but we want to make a point now kind of at the at the end of this Methodological comparison between how historical linguistics is done in sign of tibetan and how linguist historical linguistics is done in european That uh, this isn't Some great new discovery of ours, right? It's a it's a it's a essentially conservative position Yeah, so august Conradie back in 1896, uh said about uh sign of tibetan that Sound laws are what we should be looking for Now unfortunately that what that call wasn't really answered And then in book reviews of benedict's 1972 volume Miller was very, um critical in particular saying that uh, that there is a considerable chasm between uh, benedict's method and uh The comparative method with its sound correspondences and similarly, uh, changoon said that, um Systematic phonological reconstruction is the first requisite for historical work in linguistics and it is generally absent here and then for for sort of specific reasons the quotes weren't convenient to give, uh, but, uh, tatsuo nishida and Very recently george starosteen have also criticized word families and And and alephans Uh, but for whatever reason somehow the the mainstream traditional historical linguistics methodology Perspective in sign of tibetan has always been kind of the outsiders Looking in, you know, so like changoon george starosteen Miller We're all sort of active in sign of tibetan linguistics, but not As active as mattis off for benedict and and and their students So that's the the end of my presentation on comparing methodology between sign of tibetan and uh into european language