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lessdazed comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
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teageegeepea:
Maybe it wasn't clear enough from my writing, but this is not an isolated phenomenon. There have been many attempts at quantitative methods along these lines that are supposed to yield numerical estimates of the timing of language divergence. The approach is known as glottochronology (be warned that the Wikipedia article isn't very good, though), and there's a large literature discussing it. For a summary of the mainstream criticism, see e.g. the section on glottochronology in Historical Linguistics: An Introduction by Lyle Campbell (you might be able to find it on Google Books preview).
What is important in this context is that the mainstream consensus has never accepted any such estimates into its body of established knowledge, even though they provide superficially plausible answers to tantalizing questions. (This in contrast to the results obtained using the traditional comparative method, which are a matter of consensus.)
Glottochronology seems to deal primarily with vocabulary and cognates. Many criticisms there aren't on point for examining trends of changes in conjugation of verbs. The latter approach seems both less suspect and less potentially useful.
Do you know of any concrete breakthroughs in historical linguistics achieved by studying trends in verb conjugation?
That paper you link to isn't very impressive. It dredges the English data to derive a rule that I'd bet would be falsified if one were to study other languages.
Off the top of my head, I can think of one striking counterexample. Proto-Slavic had a small class of irregular verbs (the so-called athematic ones), with only five verbs. Yet in modern Croatian (and Bosnian/Serbian/whatever), the 1st person singular of this irregular conjugation has spread to nearly all verbs, and is now the regular one -- with only two exceptions. (In Russian, in contrast, there are only two verbs that still have the old athematic 1sg suffix. In various other Slavic languages, its current extent can be anywhere in-between.)
So we have a language where the entire verbal system analogized to a tiny irregular class. With this in mind, I find it absurd to postulate such simple general rules about irregular verbs.
I wasn't arguing they aren't dismissed, just that perhaps they shouldn't be. Arguing that there are no accepted breakthroughs is weak evidence against that, if the method is rejected by the mainstream the strongest favorable evidence we might have expected to see would be theories proven by other methods, theories found in hypothesis space by using the questionable method. I don't know if this is even possible in linguistics.
The scope of the rule can be the wrongest part, and it would still be useful. The rule as stated might be specific to Germanic languages but be an instantiation of a more general concept.
The counterexample you spent the most words describing would be the typical strongest sort to give to a hypothesis in that you described the most extreme cases of irregulars becoming regular. But the hypothesis of the paper, read charitably at least, is not challenged by it. It allows for "the 1st person singular of this irregular conjugation has spread to nearly all verbs, and is now the regular one," as it's about the rate of change in conjugation once a regular rule takes over and begins spreading. At some point in Croatian the irregular conjugation had enough momentum to fit under a moderately changed version of the hypothesis.
The counterexamples you only hinted at would be stronger. Are there coexisting regular rules of conjugation in other Slavic languages, with irregulars assimilated variously into one or another regular rule? If so, I think that wouldn't challenge the thrust of the argument unless verbs changed between rules.
My entirely uninformed perception of the verb-based method is that it has low sensitivity but isn't invalid compared to the other linguistic methods.