Linguistic diversity in space and time
Johanna Nichols (Author)
"Scholars have long sought to discover whether there is a detectable genetic relationship among the world's languages, whether linguistic methods can demonstrate that all of the world's languages evolved from a single "mother tongue." In this book, Johanna Nichols offers original and important material that is likely to change significantly the way this exploration is conducted." "For over a century, the comparative method has been the principle analytic tool in the reconstruction of prehistoric languages from which historically attested languages have developed. This method looks for regular laws which govern sound correspondences among the cognate words of related languages." "The problem with cross-linguistic work based on theories of sameness is that it is necessarily limited to seeking genetic relatedness and reducing structural variety to types. It is restricted to shallow time depths and cannot draw inferences from diversity. But unless it is fairly well understood in what ways languages may group and differ over great depths of time within a geographical area, speculation about whether a certain isolated shared feature signals a genetic relationship is futile. In this groundbreaking book, Nichols proposes means of describing, comparing, and interpreting linguistic diversity, both genetic and structural, and thereby provides the foundations for a theory of diversity based upon population science."
Print Book, English, 1992
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992