comment-MultilateralComparison.htm

COMMENT

(LIGHTLY EDITED AND FORMATED FOR THE WEB BY PATRICK C. RYAN)

1. Draft consensus statement on the value of Multilateral Comparison as heuristic.

2. How this can contribute to civility in our field.

3. Examples of successful uses of Multilateral Comparison — some validated cases and as-yet-pending cases.

4. Greenberg's view that M.C. is sufficient proof — his extrapolation beyond the validated cases.

5. Classification BOTH as a precursor to the Comparative Method AND as a result of the Comparative Method!

6. How to find a null hypothesis opposite of M.C. results? Other ways of testing the results of Multilateral Comparison.

7. Resistance of Multilateral Comparison to "noise" in the data, where bilateral comparison (the Comparative Method) is not resistant to as great a degree. Lack of any need to assume ultimate relatedness.

8. Importance of refining judgements of "similar" or "closely related", beyond current intuitive or superficial definitions.

9. So what has Greenberg actually done?


Something very similar to the Cambridge team.

1. Draft consensus statement on the value of Multilateral Comparison as heuristic.

Here is a summary statement which I think can be supported by many without reservation, at least if the terms are understood with the meanings clear from the following context. Any suggestions for improvements in such a statement will be most welcome, so that it is even more balanced and moderate. Those of us who do NOT wish to be assaulted by the obviously political battles can do something about it. Expressions of simple agreement with this, from moderates in these debates, might also be useful. (Sometimes moderates have to take a stand to constrain extremists.)

? Consensus statement ?




Multilateral Comparison is a heuristic which has been successfully used many times in the past and may be used in the future to throw up promising hypotheses to be further investigated also by other methods, especially the Comparative Method which can handle the data with more detail and precision.



There has as yet been insufficient empirical work to estimate to what depths Multilateral Comparison can be useful.

There can also be more empirical work to estimate what refinements or extensions of the Comparative Method may be able to penetrate greater depths.

2. How this can contribute to civility in our field.

From an active supporter of the "conservative" tradition of comparative method and reconstruction, I received the following statement.



" ...I myself find it [hard] to muster any enthusiasm for [multilateral] comparison, except perhaps as a heuristic for throwing up promising hypotheses to be further investigated by other methods."



(The words replaced in brackets were in the original "harder" and "mass". Since "mass comparison" and "wide-rangers" and other such terms have a pejorative cast, I am using more neutral terminology.)

The "except" in the quoted statement is crucial, assuming as is normal in science that heuristic discovery procedures are VALUED (and of course are distinguished from proofs). I think we would have a very civil field of historical and comparative linguistics, at least on these issues, if we could reach some greater consensus. Those who practice comparative reconstruction and for that or any other reason dislike Greenberg's work should be more eager to say such things as I have quoted above more publicly, preferably in a simple positive form something like the statement near the beginning of this message. Greenberg and advocates should be more willing to grant at least that the conclusions from only this one method are not as solid as conclusions using also other methods.

3. Examples of successful uses of Multilateral Comparison — some validated cases and borderline cases.

I think there are a LARGE number of us who accept Greenberg's methods as a heuristic, and as a heuristic only. I am certainly one, and have always been. I have always been agnostic about claims to "proof" using only multilateral comparison, simply because it has not been sufficiently tested.

Here are some examples where it has been successfully used:


A. The great collection of Eurasian vocabularies done under Catherine the Great of Russia in the 1700's arranged those vocabularies to place the most similar ones adjacent to each other.

My understanding is that the classification so established has remained valid, has not been superseded by more recent family trees (at least not by trees "proven" valid by the Comparative Method or in other ways). This should then be counted as a successful use of multilateral comparison.

B. Greenberg's work on African language classification years ago can probably be seen in the same light. Although there were precursors (which we need neither minimize nor exaggerate), and he created new larger classifications (which we need neither minimize nor exaggerate), my understanding from debates pro and con some years ago was that his classifications have remained valid. This also should be counted as a successful use of multilateral comparison. (Same caveats as above for A.)

There are obviously many other cases like these. Pioneers in Polynesian or Austronesian and in many other language families have used Multilateral Comparison, implicitly or explicitly. They have ALSO at various stages used the Comparative Method or its precursor fragments.

C. In his Language in the Americas, Greenberg gave a table of basic vocabulary from languages of Europe, showing that the method of Multilateral Comparison correctly classifies those into major families, where those are known via the Comparative Method. This should be counted as a successful illustration of Multilateral Comparison.

(Question: did it include the difficult case of Albanian? Albanian-with-some-other-IndoEuropean-language(s) is a fruitful set of data for testing both Multilateral Comparison and the Comparative Method, by reducing the number of languages used in the method to see what the method is then able to accomplish, or what modifications could enable it to accomplish more.)

D. In his Language in the Americas, Multilateral Comparison clearly singles out Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene (Athabaskan etc.) as two families, and does NOT segment the rest in the same way. To the extent of those two families, Multilateral Comparison is at least congruent with knowledge resulting from use of the Comparative Method.

(Does anyone think Greenberg fudged his results to get this, or that it would not result from Multilateral Comparison alone?

It's probably an easy application, just like Greenberg's example in Language in the Americas using a table of the European languages, the obvious matches mostly just jump out at the reader?)

What about the rest?

E. What is additional in Greenberg's Language in the Americas is particularly the following two points. These are not yet confirmed or disconfirmed, to the level of "proof", so we cannot yet estimate whether Multilateral Comparison has been valid in this extended application at presumably greater time depths.


E-1. Neither Eskimo-Aleut nor Na-Dene are grouped by Multilateral Comparison with other languages or families of the Americas. This is a negative statement. Is it ultimately true? The problem now posed more clearly and strongly is to attempt to group them with something from Northeastern Asia.

If any progress is made there, we can consider that this will have resulted in part from a successful use of Multilateral Comparison. (Whether Ruhlen's Ket(Yenisei) - Na-Dene comparison's will be successful in the long run is not yet known?)

E-2. Multilateral Comparison does not lead to the conclusion that there are other cleavages in the Americas between families as divergent as Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene are from each other or from any other language families of the Americas. (While Greenberg does posit some moderately deep cleavages there, he is not as sure of them, and we might assume no one else is sure of deep links between families usually considered "unrelated" which are contradictory with Greenberg's links?)

This also, like E-1, is a negative statement.

What are possible conclusions we might draw, if we for the sake of argument grant that the results of Multilateral Comparison so far may be valid for case E-2 as well as for cases 3A-B-C-D?

It may be that the remaining Amerind, or much of it, formed a family at a much greater time depth; or that there has been sufficient borrowing back and forth in many directions to blur any deep cleavages which may once have existed, or ???)

Notice the above statements do NOT conclude either "related" or "not related" concerning the remaining Amerind. I have tried to word them very precisely to reflect exactly what Multilateral Comparison CAN contribute AS A HEURISTIC. As a heuristic, what it suggests is that we look for additional deep genetic relationships, which we may be able eventually do prove by refinements of Comparative Method, WITHIN remaining Amerind, but not between parts of Amerind and Na-Dene or Eskimo-Aleut.

This heuristic conclusion does not seem highly improbable to me. It may or may not be true, but that is quite another matter, a matter for the future.

4. Greenberg's view that M.C. is sufficient proof — his extrapolation beyond the validated cases.

Greenberg obviously believes that his methods establish firm knowledge. This appears to be based on an extrapolation from the clear cases like 3A-B-C-D and probably also E1. Whether such an extrapolation is valid remains to be tested, since presumably Multilateral Comparison has not been used on data sets with such potentially gigantic time depths as all of Amerind, and there is little chance anytime soon of confirming these of Greenberg's conclusions with other methods.

5. Classification BOTH as a precursor to the Comparative Method AND as a result of the Comparative Method!

Greenberg believes Classification is a PRECURSOR to the Comparative Method, which it may very well be in terms of heuristics and the history of how useful hypotheses have been discovered. Look at the History of Science to study this question, not at the Philosophy of Science.

However, Classification is a RESULT of the Comparative Method when viewed from the point of view of establishing secure knowledge, "proofs" of relationship. Look at the Philosophy of Science to study notions of "proof".

Many of the battles over Multilateral Comparison and the Comparative Method seem really to be turf battles, practitioners of one method who feel slighted by or who slight the practitioners of another method. If we recognize that the same word can have two very different logical statuses from different turf perspectives, perhaps we can help to avoid such battles or at least to shorten them, to tell the combatants to lay off, we need both, and they themselves USE both even if they don't like to admit it (in both directions, here). Comparativists DO multilateral comparison when deciding which small set of languages to apply the Comparative Method to. Multilateral Comparativists DO use results of the comparative method and historical reconstruction done by others, even if the data they use in comparisons tends to be only attested languages not reconstructions. (Including reconstructions would pose some interesting logical issues about independence of data sets, so Multilateral Comparison would have to be wary of certain circularities.)

6. How to find a null hypothesis opposite of M.C. results?

The results of Multilateral Comparison are a statement of roughly the following form:

"The following Classification tree of given individuals (languages) appears to reflect their likely historical close relations vs. divergencies better than any other Classification tree."

And in cases where an algorithm is used, there may be a measure of the security of the conclusion, based on how much better this particular result is than alternative Classification trees would be for the same data.

That result is a hypothesis about the real world. WHAT is the null hypothesis corresponding to such a hypothesis?

It is very difficult to word one, except trivially as the negation of the result-statement, negating "appears ... better".

Presumably that implies tests something like this: some (other) algorithm which we also take to be a valid application of classification principles would NOT replicate the same results? Or another human judge applying the same method would not replicate the same results? (But see below.)

We all know that this is indeed a hypothesis. Yet if we are responding to it carefully, we have trouble, if the specifics are good, trying to falsify it.

Why?

One reason is that the hypothesis is entirely post-hoc, there is (at the stage it is formulated) no additional evidence available for use, all the evidence used to develop the hypothesis is the same evidence which would at that stage be used to test it. So if we used a computer algorithm to evaluate, the result would be the same again.

Yet it IS an empirical hypothesis.

If the human judge or the algorithm is a good one, we are not likely to disagree with the conclusions by proposing any alternative as a better conclusion, though we may sometimes think there is not enough convincing data to draw any conclusion at all.

The hypothesis can be tested by enlarging the data set, to see whether the results are still the same, or by eliminating certain languages from the data set, to see whether the results are robust against such changes for the languages which remain in the set, or by using slightly different algorithms, to see whether they yield the same results, or by applying the Comparative Method if possible, to see what it yields.

Are there additional significantly different ways of testing it?

7. Resistance of Multilateral Comparison to "noise" in the data, where bilateral comparison is not resistant to as great a degree.

This is often not understood.

It does NOT need to assume that all the languages considered are in fact ultimately related.

Because Multilateral Comparison is IN PRINCIPLE only concerned with which are CLOSER vs. MORE DIVERGENT, a matter of degree, Multilateral Comparison with informal judgements of similarity does not, except in the clearest cases, lead to secure conclusions about genetic relationships per se, neither yes nor no.

One can assume as a working hypothesis that all languages are ultimately related at some very deep level, but such an assumption is absolutely unnecessary to get results from Multilateral Comparison.

One can also use it without assuming that all languages are related. In this second case, the results can be expressed as the converse: "More divergent" implies "more likely to be unrelated", and "less divergent" implies "less likely to be unrelated".

A strength of Multilateral Comparison is that random noise in the data will, if it is truly random, not usually affect the results in terms of rankings of DEGREES of closeness vs. divergence. Random noise will eliminate similarities in more or less EQUAL PROPORTIONS from each potential comparison of closeness.

That is really a consequence of the definition of "random".

(If the amount of evidence for closeness is reduced to near the quantum level of single units of evidence, then the amount of noise is too great for the method, noise would completely swamp any conceivable residue of earlier relationships. But that is quite another matter.)

By contrast, bilateral comparison (many applications of the Comparative Method) depends more essentially on the absolute quantity of evidence available. For this reason, practitioners of the Comparative Method maintain that it cannot penetrate beyond some limit (which they may give as 2000 or 4000 or even 10,000 years, rarely more, rarely even that much), because the residue of evidence for genetic relation decays fast enough to leave too few traces. Multilateral comparison can work with RELATIVELY FEWER traces of earlier relationship, though just how many fewer is a matter for empirical study.

A similar potential stabilizing factor in Multilateral Comparison is that it may easily lead to recognition of loan words from language family Z which could interfere with comparisons between languages X and Y both of whom borrowed the loan word from Z. A specialist comparing only X and Y might not be aware of the word in family Z.

8. Importance of refining judgements of "similar" or "closely related", beyond current intuitive or superficial definitions.

Increases in the power of both Multilateral Comparison and the Comparative Method will come as we build an empirical basis, like the Handbook of Chemical and Physical Constants, for explicit conscious judgments of "similarity", or rather, changes, rather than the current informal judgments or systematic computerization of informal judgments:


what sounds more often change proximally into what other sounds, in languages of which kind of phonetic structure, and what meanings more often change proximally into what other meanings, in languages of which kind of semantic structure?

9. So what has Greenberg actually done?


Well, the preceding has been my attempt at a synthesis.

I have never believed that Greenberg had "proven" his conclusions. I have always believed that Multilateral Comparison was a valuable heuristic, from the moment I understood the concept. I see no reason for any turf specialists to trash others whose contributions can be made use of.

What Greenberg has DONE with Multilateral Comparison is not necessarily what he says he has done. What he has actually done is to organize a large body of data to suggest paths for future research, by suggesting relative degrees of similarity vs. divergence among languages and language families. In this regard, if we discount his excess claims to have proven his conclusions, rather than to have used a heuristic to suggest them, it is very much like what the Cambridge group has been doing, as described by Larry Trask, which is also a useful heuristic, for the same reasons. (The Cambridge group is using computer algorithms, which has advantages of consistency, but can also have disadvantages of insufficient subtlety and, if biases are unknowingly built in, more systematic influence by those biases.)

Errors in any of the data as Greenberg used it should be corrected, and before judging Greenberg's method invalid on the grounds of errors, one should examine whether the correction of those errors actually has any substantial affect on the conclusions Greenberg would draw, or the conclusions someone else would draw from the same data set in their own understanding of Multilateral Comparison.

the latest revision (and revisions are presently contemplated) of this document can be found at

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