Mass comparison


Mass comparison is a method developed by Joseph Greenberg to determine the level of genetic relatedness between languages. It is now usually called multilateral comparison. The method is rejected by most linguists, though not all.
Some of the top-level relationships Greenberg named had already been posited by others and are now generally accepted. Others are accepted by many though disputed by some prominent specialists, others are predominantly rejected but have some defenders, while others are almost universally rejected.

Theory

Mass comparison involves setting up a table of basic vocabulary items and their forms in the languages to be compared. The table can also include common morphemes. The following table was used by to illustrate the technique. It shows the forms of six items of basic vocabulary in nine different languages, identified by letters.
ABCDEFGHI
Headkarkarsekaltututofipi
Eyeminkuminmiŋminašminidiiri
Nosetortörnitolwaswašwasikam
Onemitkankankaŋhakankεnhečak
Twonitanekilneninegumgun
Bloodkursemsemšamisemsemfikpix

The basic relationships can be determined without any experience in the case of languages that are fairly closely related. Knowing a bit about probable paths of sound change allows one to go farther faster. An experienced typologist—Greenberg was a pioneer in the field—can quickly recognize or reject several potential cognates in this table as probable or improbable. For example, the path p > f is extremely frequent, the path f > p much less so, enabling one to hypothesize that fi : pi and fik : pix are indeed related and go back to protoforms *pi and *pik/x, while knowledge that k > x is extremely frequent, x > k much less so enables one to choose *pik over *pix. Thus, while mass comparison does not attempt to produce reconstructions of protolanguages—according to Greenberg these belong to a later phase of study—phonological considerations come into play from the very beginning.
The tables used in actual research involve much larger numbers of items and languages. The items included may be either lexical, such as 'hand', 'sky', and 'go', or morphological, such as PLURAL and MASCULINE.

Detection of borrowings

Critics of mass comparison generally assume that mass comparison has no means to distinguish borrowed forms from inherited ones, unlike comparative reconstruction, which is able to do so through regular sound correspondences. These questions were addressed by as of the 1950s. According to him, the key points are as follows :
Greenberg considered that the results achieved through this method approached certainty : "The presence of fundamental vocabulary resemblances and resemblances in items with grammatical function, particularly if recurrent through a number of languages, is a sure indication of genetic relationship."

The place of sound correspondences in the comparative method

It is often reported that Greenberg sought to replace the comparative method with a new method, mass comparison. He consistently rejected this characterization, stating for instance, "The methods outlined here do not conflict in any fashion with the traditional comparative method" and expressing wonderment at "the strange and widely disseminated notion that I seek to replace the comparative method with a new and strange invention of my own". According to Greenberg, mass comparison is the necessary "first step" in the comparative method, and "once we have a well-established stock I go about comparing and reconstructing just like anyone else, as can be seen in my various contributions to historical linguistics". Reflecting the methodological empiricism also present in his typological work, he viewed facts as of greater weight than their interpretations, stating :

Summary

The thesis of mass comparison, then, is that:
The conflict over mass comparison can be seen as a dispute over the legacy of the comparative method, developed in the 19th century, primarily by Danish and German linguists, in the study of Indo-European languages.

Position of Greenberg's detractors

Since the development of comparative linguistics in the 19th century, a linguist who claims that two languages are related, whether or not there exists historical evidence, is expected to back up that claim by presenting general rules that describe the differences between their lexicons, morphologies, and grammars. The procedure is described in detail in the comparative method article.
For instance, one could demonstrate that Spanish is related to Italian by showing that many words of the former can be mapped to corresponding words of the latter by a relatively small set of replacement rules—such as the correspondence of initial es- and s-, final -os and -i, etc. Many similar correspondences exist between the grammars of the two languages. Since those systematic correspondences are extremely unlikely to be random coincidences, the most likely explanation by far is that the two languages have evolved from a single ancestral tongue.
All pre-historical language groupings that are widely accepted today—such as the Indo-European, Uralic, Algonquian, and Bantu families—have been established this way.

Response of Greenberg's defenders

The actual development of the comparative method was a more gradual process than Greenberg's detractors suppose. It has three decisive moments. The first was Rasmus Rask's observation in 1818 of a possible regular sound change in Germanic consonants. The second was Jacob Grimm's extension of this observation into a general principle in 1822. The third was Karl Verner's resolution of an irregularity in this sound change in 1875. Only in 1861 did August Schleicher, for the first time, present systematic reconstructions of Indo-European proto-forms. Schleicher, however, viewed these reconstructions as extremely tentative. He never claimed that they proved the existence of the Indo-European family, which he accepted as a given from previous research—primarily that of Franz Bopp, his great predecessor in Indo-European studies.
Karl Brugmann, who succeeded Schleicher as the leading authority on Indo-European, and the other Neogrammarians of the late 19th century, distilled the work of these scholars into the famous principle that "every sound change, insofar as it occurs automatically, takes place according to laws that admit of no exception".
The Neogrammarians did not, however, regard regular sound correspondences or comparative reconstructions as relevant to the proof of genetic relationship between languages. In fact, they made almost no statements on how languages are to be classified. The only Neogrammarian to deal with this question was Berthold Delbrück, Brugmann's collaborator on the Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. According to Delbrück, Bopp had claimed to prove the existence of Indo-European in the following way:
Furthermore, Delbrück took the position later enunciated by Greenberg on the priority of etymologies to sound laws : "obvious etymologies are the material from which sound laws are drawn."
The opinion that sound correspondences or, in another version of the opinion, reconstruction of a proto-language are necessary to show relationship between languages thus dates from the 20th, not the 19th century, and was never a position of the Neogrammarians. Indo-European was recognized by scholars such as William Jones and Franz Bopp long before the development of the comparative method.
Furthermore, Indo-European was not the first language family to be recognized by students of language. Semitic had been recognized by European scholars in the 17th century, Finno-Ugric in the 18th. Dravidian was recognized in the mid-19th century by Robert Caldwell, well before the publication of Schleicher's comparative reconstructions.
Finally, the supposition that all of the language families generally accepted by linguists today have been established by the comparative method is untrue. For example, although Eskimo–Aleut has long been accepted as a valid family, "Proto-Eskimo–Aleut has not yet been reconstructed". Other families were accepted for decades before comparative reconstructions of them were put forward, for example Afro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan. Many languages are generally accepted as belonging to a language family even though no comparative reconstruction exists, often because the languages are only attested in fragmentary form, such as the Anatolian language Lydian. Conversely, detailed comparative reconstructions exist for some language families which nonetheless remain controversial, such as Altaic and Nostratic.

A continuation of earlier methods?

Greenberg claimed that he was at bottom merely continuing the simple but effective method of language classification that had resulted in the discovery of numerous language families prior to the elaboration of the comparative method and that had continued to do so thereafter, as in the classification of Hittite as Indo-European in 1917. This method consists in essentially two things: resemblances in basic vocabulary and resemblances in inflectional morphemes. If mass comparison differs from it in any obvious way, it would seem to be in the theoretization of an approach that had previously been applied in a relatively ad hoc manner and in the following additions:
The positions of Greenberg and his critics therefore appear to provide a starkly contrasted alternative:
Besides systematic changes, languages are also subject to random mutations that affect one word at a time, or small subsets of words. For example, Spanish perro, which does not come from Latin, cannot be rule-mapped to its Italian equivalent cane. As those sporadic changes accumulate, they will increasingly obscure the systematic ones—just as enough dirt and scratches on a photograph will eventually make the face unrecognizable.
On this point, Greenberg and his critics agree, as over against the Moscow school, but they draw contrasting conclusions:
In spite of the apparently intractable nature of the conflict between Greenberg and his critics, a few linguists have begun to argue for its resolution. Edward Vajda, noted for his recent proposal of Dené–Yeniseian, attempts to stake out a position that is sympathetic to both Greenberg's approach and that of its critics, such as Lyle Campbell and Johanna Nichols. George Starostin, a member of the Moscow school, argues that Greenberg's work, while perhaps not going beyond inspection, presents interesting sets of forms that call for further scrutiny by comparative reconstruction, specifically with regard to the proposed Khoisan and Amerind families.

Works cited