Language documentation and historical linguistics

John Benjamins Publishing Company

This is a contribution from Language Contact and Change in the Americas. Studies in honor of Marianne Mithun. Edited by Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, Diane M. Hintz and Carmen Jany. © 2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com

Language documentation and historical linguistics Lyle Campbell

University of Hawai‘i Mānoa This paper examines the relationship between language documentation, especially documentation of endangered languages, and historical linguistics. It address the questions, why is language documentation important to historical linguistics? and what can historical linguistics contribute to language documentation? Several ways in which the two are interconnected, mutually supportive, and together contribute to linguistics generally are discussed, illustrated by examples from a number of indigenous languages of the Americas. Keywords: language documentation; endangered languages; historical linguistics

1. Introduction The goals of this paper are to examine the relationship between language docu mentation, especially documentation of endangered languages, and historical lin guistics. I address the questions, (1) why is language documentation important to historical linguistics? (Sections 2–5), and (2) what can historical linguistics con tribute to language documentation? (Section 6). I survey several ways in which the two are interconnected, mutually supportive, and together contribute to linguistics in general.1 Here at the outset, it is important to clarify what is meant by language documen tation. Scholars working in language documentation do not always agree on how to define it. Many follow Himmelmann’s (1998, 2006) view. He contrasts language descrip tions and language documentation, saying of the latter that it “aims at the record of the linguistic practices and traditions of a speech community” (Himmelmann 1998: 9–10; emphasis in original), and that “language documentation may be characterized as radically expanded text collection” (Himmelmann 1998: 2; emphasis in original).

. I thank an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

doi 10.1075/slcs.173.11cam © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

 Lyle Campbell

immelmann (2006: 1) gives the definition, “a language d H ocumentation is a lasting, multipurpose record of a language,” further defining language documentation as: a field of linguistic inquiry and practice in its own right which is primarily con cerned with the compilation and preservation of linguistic primary data and inter faces between primary data and various types of analyses based on these data.

Woodbury (2010: 159)’s definition is similar: “Language documentation is the cre ation, annotation, preservation and dissemination of transparent records of a lan guage.” The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project website says that language documentation: emphasises data collection methodologies, in two ways: first, in encouraging researchers to collect and record a wide range of linguistic phenomena in genuine communicative situations; and secondly, in its use of high quality sound and video recording to make sure that the results are the best possible record of the language. 〈www.hrelp.org/documentation/〉 (26 October 2014)

With statements such as these, it is little wonder that so many, according to Himmelmann (2012: 187), have misinterpreted this approach to mean:

Documentary linguistics is all about technology and (digital) archiving. Documentary linguistics is just concerned with (mindlessly) collecting heaps of data without any concern for analysis and structure. Documentary linguistics is actually opposed to analysis.

Other scholars follow the Americanist approach, which holds that language documen tation should include a grammar and a dictionary, as well as texts/recordings repre senting a large range of genres. In this view, language documentation: involves the development of high-quality grammatical materials and an extensive lexicon based on a full range of textual genres and registers, as well as audio and video recordings, all of which are fully annotated, of archival quality, and publicly accessible.(Rehg 2007: 15)

Rhodes et al. (2007: 3), in the statement from the Linguistics Society of America’s Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation (CELP), list as neces sary for adequate language documentation all of the following:

All the basic phonology; All the basic morphology; All the basic syntactic constructions; A lexicon which (a) covers all the basic vocabulary and important areas of special expertise in the culture, and (b) provides at least glosses for all words/morphemes in the corpus; A full range of textual genres and registers.

© 2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

Language documentation and historical linguistics 

Clearly there has been disagreement about the demarcation between language documentation and description or analysis, but as Himmelmann (2012) explains, in spite of misunderstandings, there is actually broad agreement but with differences of emphasis. All agree that documentation should include a rich corpus of recordings, and most agree that a grammar and dictionary can be a valuable part of language documentation, though some place greater emphasis on a large number of recordings representing many genres and on the technology for recording and archiving, while others place more attention on the description and analysis that includes a grammar and dictionary. Therefore, for purposes of this paper, adequate language documentation is taken to have as its goal (paraphrasing and adding to Woodbury’s [2010: 159] definition) the creation, annotation, preservation and dissemination of transparent records of a language where that record is understood explicitly to include the production of a grammar and a dictionary, along with a rich corpus of recordings. Section 2 of this paper looks at the historical background and at lessons from founding figures. Section 3 addresses the question: why is language documentation (of endangered languages) important to historical linguistics? Section 4 is concerned with hypotheses about the kinds of changes possible in endangered languages. Section 5 discusses ways in which language documentation contributes to issues in historical linguistics, with several of the examples involving language contact, while Section 6 is dedicated to historical linguistic contributions to language revitalization. The conclusions are given in the final section.

2. Historical perspectives Throughout history, comparative and historical linguistic work has typically involved both written, well-documented languages and at the same time languages known only from fieldwork documentation. Nevertheless, a common view has been that compara tive and historical linguistics has largely restricted attention to only languages with a long written tradition, well-documented in the sense of having abundant attestations (see, for example, Campbell 1994, 2013: 396–8; Haas 1969). However, many language families contain languages that have no written tradition or early attestations along side other well-attested languages that have long written traditions. I mention just a few examples. In the Uralic language family, Hungarian had written records from the eighth century, while some of the other languages of the family had no tradition of writing (e.g., Mansi [Vogul], Khanty [Ostyak], and some Samoyed languages). Comparisons involving these unwritten languages relied on efforts at documentation from dedicated scholars. Nevertheless, Finno-Ugric was one of the earliest language families to be demonstrated (see Stipa 1990 for details; see also below). © 2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

 Lyle Campbell

The Semitic family has among its members languages with some of the earliest known written records alongside Ethiopian Semitic relatives, some of which have scarcely been recorded at all (cf. Hetzron 1997). In the Austronesian family, for example, old written materials are known for Old Cham (from 829 A.D.), Old Malay (682–686 A.D.), and Old Javanese (9th–15th centuries), alongside many languages that to this day have little or no written records or documentation. Blust (1990: 136) makes the point that sometimes even when we have older written attestations, they may not contribute very much to reconstruc tion or classifications of the languages involved, particularly in cases where the older attested languages had already changed as much as some modern languages: [Old Javanese] had already changed more than many modern Austronesian languages, and the study of Old Javanese texts, valuable in its own right, contributes little to higher-level reconstruction that cannot be gained from the study of modern Javanese.

In short, the absence of written records has not prevented comparative research on these language families; rather, the contributions of language documentation for those languages without a history of writing have been important to comparative and h istorical linguistics. Moreover, a written tradition is not always an advantage for comparison; and certainly the lack of old writing need be no obstacle (see Haas 1969: 17–24), as the work of some founding figures in linguistics shows. The Comparative Method involved fieldwork documentation of unwritten lan guages from its earliest applications. The Hungarian Jesuit mathematician Joannis [János] Sajnovics (1770) is considered the founder of the comparative method by many (see Stipa 1990; Campbell and Poser 2008: 25–6). On an astronomy research trip to the Norwegian arctic, Sajnovics elicited North Saami words and transcribed them in an orthography that he devised himself. These field data were the basis for his application of the comparative method, which demonstrated that Hungarian, Saami, and Finnish were related and which established the Finno-Ugric family. However, the assumed value of written records nevertheless complicated Sajnovics’ efforts. Sajnovics reasoned that to convince skeptics he must use previously published data. Sajnovics (1770) employed none of his own fieldwork data on North Saami in his famous publication, but instead cited examples from the only published sources available, Knut Leem’s textbook (1748) and lexical samples (1768–81) of North Saami, recorded in an inadequate Danish orthography with Danish glosses, both of which were obstacles to Sajnovics – Sajnovics’ own documentation was much better. (See Stipa 1990.) Thus, fieldwork data and questions of documentation of unwritten languages for historical linguistics have been with us from the beginning of the comparative


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method. Sajnovics’ work was so well-known and influential that Rasmus Rask (1818), famous for his work in Germanic and Indo-European, was of the opinion that his own evidence for a relationship of Germanic with Greek and Latin, foundational for IndoEuropean, should be considered convincing because it compared favourably with Sajnovics’ “proof that the Hungarian and Lappish [Saami] languages are the same,” proof which Rask (1818[1993]: 283) said “no one has denied since this [his] day.” We come forward now some hundred years to Sapir’s (1913, 1915–19) demon stration of the validity of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Sapir’s proof that estab lished Uto-Aztecan once and for all involved evidence from both Nahuatl, a language with abundant written records since the 1500s, and from Sapir’s own fieldwork on Southern Paiute, then an undocumented language. Powell (1891), in his extremely influential classification of the American Indian languages north of Mexico, had rejected Uto‑Aztecan as a language family. Sapir’s work demonstrated with command ing elegance that the Uto-Aztecan family is valid, that the comparative method can be applied successfully to unwritten languages, and that language documentation can and does serve historical linguistics. Bloomfield’s comparative work on Algonquian was even more famous than Sapir’s on Uto-Aztecan for its impact on historical linguistics. Bloomfield’s reconstruction of Proto-Central Algonquian (PCA) involved data from his own fieldwork for some languages, for example Cree and Menominee, as well as reliance on written attestations from other languages of the family. Bloomfield’s (1925, 1928) famous proof that sound change is regular also in unwritten or “exotic” languages is a major contribution to lin guistics. He set out deliberately to disprove claims that reconstruction by the compara tive method could not succeed without written records and might not be applicable to little-known languages of the Americas, as Meillet and Cohen (1924: 9) in their famous book Les Langues du Monde told the world: One may well ask whether the languages of America (which are still for the most part poorly known and insufficiently studied from a comparative point of view) will ever lend themselves to exact, exhaustive comparative treatment; the samples offered so far hold scant promise … it is not even clear that the principle of genealogical classification applies.

Bloomfield set out to debunk this and similar assertions. His demonstration of the regularity of sound change in these kinds of languages involved distinct sets of sound correspondences that involved the same limited set of sounds but which matched up with one another in different patterns in Central Algonquian lan guages. He pointed out a set of five systematic sound correspondences, however, where only four distinct sounds were involved but in different patterns of matching across the sets. This is illustrated in Table 1 of the corresponding sounds before k in consonant clusters.


 Lyle Campbell

Table 1. Some of Bloomfield’s Central Algonquian sound correspondences Fox

Ojibwa

Plains Cree

Menominee

PCA

1.

hk

šk

sk

čk

*čk

2.

šk

šk

sk

sk

*šk

3.

hk

hk

sk

hk

*xk

4.

hk

hk

hk

hk

*hk

5.

šk

šk

hk

hk

*çk [cf. Swampy Cree htk]

We note that in set (1) Bloomfield compared šk in Ojibwa with the corresponding clusters of the other languages; however, as will become clear below, this was an error and the true Ojibwa correspondence for set (1) turns out to be sk. Bloomfield reconstructed *çk for set (5), distinct from the reconstruction for the other sets, even though no sound that occurs in (5) is not also found in the other languages; however, the pattern of how the sounds correspond is different in this set from in the other four correspondence sets. So Bloomfield reconstructed *çk for set (5), different from the reconstructions proposed for the other four correspondence sets, based on the assumption that sound change is regular and that set (5)’s differ ence could not be explained in any other way than by having come from something that originally was different from the sounds of the other four sets. His decision to reconstruct something different for (5) was confirmed later when Swampy Cree was discovered to have the correspondence htk for set (5), distinct in Swampy Cree from the sounds of the other four correspondences sets. The discovery that set (5) really did have a difference in the Swampy Cree correspondence was taken as vindication of the assumption that sound change is regular, which required a different reconstruction for set (5) from the other four sets, even though these all involved only the same sounds but in different corresponding combinations. Bloomfield’s (1928) famous paper was first presented at the 1927 Linguis tic S ociety of America Annual Meeting in Nashville, entitled “A reconstruction confirmed.” This proof was very influential in historical linguistics. However, the story does not end there; there are other lessons to be learned from this case. B loomfield’s proof also shows how insistence on written sources can be an obstacle to reconstruc tion. As mentioned, Bloomfield relied on written sources for the data for some of the languages and on his fieldwork data for others. He used sources for Fox and Ojibwa written by William Jones. Jones, from Oklahoma, was a native speaker of Fox; he was trained in anthropology and was killed by head-hunters in 1909 while doing fieldwork in the Philippines – not to be confused with Sir William Jones of much earlier h istorical linguistic fame. Bloomfield used Fox and Ojibwa material written by Jones, but since Fox (Jones’ language) does not contrast sk and šk, Jones failed to


Language documentation and historical linguistics 

record the contrast in his Ojibwa materials. Thus, the written material Bloomfield used for Ojibwa failed to represent this contrast (and mistakenly had šk in Ojibwa for both sets (1) and (5)). Swampy Cree would not have been the only witness to the distinctness of set (5) if this error missing the contrast in Ojibwa had not been made. As Hockett (1948: 126) affirmed, “Swampy Cree no longer stood as the only extant dialect to keep PA [Proto-Algonquian] çk separate; O[jibwa] was now known to do so too.” As Bloomfield (1946: 88) later acknowledged: The fuss and trouble behind my note in Language [Bloomfield 1928] would have been avoided if I had listened to O[jibwa], which plainly distinguishes šk (< PA *çk [set (5)]) from sk [set (1)]; instead, I depended on printed records which failed to show the distinction.

In short, in this case reliance on the older written materials was an obstacle to reliable reconstruction using the comparative method; it was the accurately recorded fieldwork documentation that supported the correct solution. As Hockett (1948: 122) concluded from this case, “written records are a means to an end, and there is no justification for holding them in high esteem, or even in reverence (as is sometimes the case) EXCEPT as indirect evidence for what one is trying to discover.” Later in an article on the comparative method as a method of social sciences, Sapir (1931) both commended Bloomfield’s proof and added another example similar to it from his own earlier work on Athabaskan. In sum, Sapir and Bloomfield contributed significantly to language documen tation and to historical linguistics, not to mention to general theoretical think ing in linguistics as well. All the cases just seen establish the connection between fieldwork documentation and historical linguistics. They include specifically early contributions to the development of the comparative method and the proof of the regularity of sound change also in unwritten and less documented languages, not to mention the d emonstrations of language family relationships and working out the history of the languages involved. It is very common in the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific, and not uncommon elsewhere, for the linguists who document lan guages to be also involved in working out the classification and historical linguistics of those languages – many of Marianne Mithun’s publications illustrate the rela tionship between documentation and historical linguistic research in exemplary fashion.2

. In this section, I have focused on examples where fieldwork produced more reliable data than those found in the written records. Naturally, this is not just about fieldwork data being superior to written records, but in fact would be true of any materials inadequately transcribed – some records are better than others, whether fieldwork or written records.


 Lyle Campbell

3. W hy is language documentation, particularly documentation of endangered languages, important to historical linguistics? In anticipation of the answer to this question, let us start with some numbers. Of the 7105 languages spoken in the world today (according to Ethnologue.com), 3232 are endangered – that is 45% of living languages that are endangered (endangeredlanguages.com [accessed 10-28-2014]). Some 639 languages that we actually know something about are extinct; of those, 227 became extinct after 1960. Put differently, of all the languages throughout the millennia of recorded history that have become extinct, 35% of them became extinct only in the last 50 years. This confirms the oftenrepeated lament that the rate of language extinction is alarmingly more accelerated now than in the past. Perhaps more significant for historical linguistics is the fact that entire families of languages have become extinct – all the languages of precisely 100 language families (including isolates) are now extinct, from among the c.420 known language families of the world – in other words, essentially a quarter (24%) of the linguistic diversity of the world, calculated in terms of distinct language families, is just lost (endangeredlanguages.com). These losses and the threat of extinction of many languages have significant implications for historical linguistics. The extinction of an individual language is a monumental loss of scien tific and human information (cf. Evans 2010; Hale 1998; Harrison 2007; Nettle & Romaine 2000: 50–77; Maffi 2005), comparable in gravity to the loss of a whole spe cies, such as the endangered the Bengal tiger or the right whale. However, the extinc tion of whole families of languages is an unspeakable tragedy, comparable to the loss of whole branches of the animal kingdom, say to the loss of all felines or all cetaceans. Imagine attempting to work out the history of the animal kingdom with a quarter of the major branches missing – and yet, 24% of language families are already extinct! Those that have been lost to history with inadequate or no documentation leave a huge deficit: the history that could have been obtained from them is now forever lost to us. Without adequate documentation of these languages we cannot work out their genetic classification, nor can we investigate the many other types of historical evidence that could be gained from linguistic evidence – information on human migrations and contacts, interactions among groups, original homelands, relationships among lan guages, changes the languages have undergone, what (pre)historical cultures they may have represented, and so on. For all these reasons and many more, documentation of endangered languages is extremely important to historical linguistics.

4. Hypotheses about possible kinds of changes in endangered languages Not only can documentation of endangered languages provide information crucial to answering questions about language history and through that about human history, © 2016. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

Language documentation and historical linguistics 

information on endangered languages can also provide insights into how languages change, in particular when they are severely threatened. Investigations of endangered languages have raised questions about the very nature of language change itself, to which I now turn. The examples discussed in this section are selected from severely endangered languages that have only a few semispeakers, and which do not reflect endangered languages that, in spite of their endangerment status, still have numbers of fully competent speakers. The first question is: is sound change in endangered languages required to be regular? Though in non-endangered languages sound change is generally considered regular (Campbell 1996, 2013; Labov 1994), the answer to this question appears to be “no”: sound change in endangered languages does not necessarily have to be regular.3 Some will find this conclusion shocking. I illustrate it with examples from my own work with several endangered indigenous languages of the Americas. Changes in endangered languages often do not change all instances of a particular sound in the same way, sometimes changing the sound in some words and sometimes not changing it in others. For example, in Tlahuica (a.k.a. Ocuilteco, an O tomanguean language of Mexico), fully fluent native speakers voice stops after nasals, but semispeak ers of the language who are not as fully competent as native speakers sometimes voice (e.g., nd) and sometimes do not (e.g., nt), irregularly. Semispeakers of Cuisnahuat Pipil (a Uto-Aztecan language of El Salvador) irregularly sometimes devoice final /l/, and sometimes do not, though fully viable speakers always produce the voiceless allophone word finally (see Campbell & Muntzel 1989 for these and other examples). These are not regular changes. Examples such as these go against the Neogrammarian regularity hypothesis, that sound laws suffer no exceptions. What does this mean? Given that the regularity of sound change holds true in non-endangered languages, we would not give up this valuable principle just because sometimes the speech of semispeakers may fail to con form, just as we would not abandon an otherwise well supported linguistic principle if we found violations of it only in the speech of adult second-language learners or of persons with various speech pathologies.

. An anonymous reviewer asked about the diffusion of sound changes through the lexicon, wondering whether it is true that sound change in non-endangered languages is generally regular, “or does the study of endangered languages lead us back to the study of non- endangered languages in order to better understand the nature of sound change and how variation works?” There are, of course, supporters of lexical diffusion and dissenting opinions about regularity of sound change generally. However, most historical linguists do not agree, rejecting lexical diffusion of sound change and supporting the regularity of sound change. I personally find the arguments against the first (cf. Labov 1994: 421–543; Campbell 2013: 195–7) and for the second (cf. Campbell 1996, 2013: 15, 135–42. 189–90, 337–8; Labov 1994: 452–74, 501) completely compelling.


 Lyle Campbell

4.1 Normal change? Another question is: can endangered languages change in ways not normally possible in non-endangered languages? The answer to this appears to be “yes”. For example, some semispeakers of Jumaytepeque (a Xinkan language of Guatemala) arbitrarily glottal ized essentially every possible consonant (C > C’) (Campbell & Muntzel 1989: 189) – this is not a normal sound change; it would not be expected in fully viable languages. As Campbell and Muntzel (1989: 189) say: Things that are marked or “exotic” from the point of view of the dominant language may not be completely mastered by imperfect learners, and not knowing exactly where they belong, these speakers sometimes go hog-wild, as it were, employing the “exotic” version with great frequency in ways inappropriate for the healthy version of the same language.

It is essentially impossible that a viable language would change all its plain voiceless stops into glottalized (ejective) stops, leaving no plain voiceless stops in the language. This would violate the universal that the presence of glottalized (ejective) consonants implies the presence of plain non-glottalized counterparts in a language (C’ ⊃ C). Changes in fully viable languages do not violate linguistic universals (cf. Labov 1994). In another example, semispeakers of Teotepeque Pipil (Uto-Aztecan, El Salvador) overgeneralized voiceless “l”, losing plain voiced “l” from the language. In viable Pipil, voiceless “l” is an allophone of /l/ word-finally, as in: /čil/ [čiɫ] ‘chilli pepper’, but / čiltik/ [čiltik] ‘red’ (based on the root for ‘chilli pepper’ plus -tik ‘adjective suffix’). Teotepeque semispeakers lost sight of the context that conditioned the pronunciation of voiceless “l” versus those for plain voiced “l”; they changed l > ɫ everywhere, as for example in peeɫu ‘dog’, čakaɫin ‘shrimp’, čiɫtik ‘red’ – none of which had voiceless “l” in the speech of older, fully competent speakers (see Campbell 1985).4 Such a change is all but unknown in non-endangered languages; it is not an expected or normal change, but is typologically strained. In one further example, also from Teotepeque Pipil, semispeakers changed ṣ̌ > r (/š�/, a retroflex non-apical laminal fricative, to a trilled “r”). This change is unknown from other languages; native Pipil has no r sounds of any sort, and the change ṣ̌ > r is unnatural and unexpected. The change appears to have to do with speakers impos ing the prejudices of the dominant language onto Teotepeque Pipil. Local Spanish, the dominant language, has a stigmatized variant [š�] of its trilled “r”. The stigma of the assibilated [š�] pronunciation of /r/ in local Spanish caused these Teotepeque Pipil

. It should be noted that the symbol here represents a voiceless lateral approximant, and not a fricative of any sort. This is the symbol typically used in the Americanist phonetic tradition to represent this sound, although in the IPA it would be [l ̥].


Language documentation and historical linguistics 

speakers to shift the native Pipil sound to match Spanish prestige, replacing their ṣ̌ with trilled “r”, for example ručit < ṣ̌učit ‘flower’. This change is not natural and would not be expected in non-endangered languages.5 (For these and other examples, see Campbell & Muntzel 1989.) These two questions – of the existence of irregular and of unnatural sound changes in endangered languages – merit more investigation. They have important implica tions for historical linguistics.

5. Language documentation contributions to historical linguistics I turn now to present a few cases where language documentation has contributed to historical linguistics. Historical linguistics is defined here conventionally as what scholars who call themselves historical linguists do; this covers a wide range – a nything involving how and why languages change, including linguistic prehistory – in short, the things covered in introductory textbooks on historical linguistics (for example, Campbell 2013). Many examples could be cited; cases from Sajnovics, Sapir, and Bloomfield have already been mentioned, above. Here I cite only a few from my own language documentation work.

5.1 Xinkan agriculture and views of language diversification Nearly all terms for cultivated plants in Xinkan languages are borrowed from Mayan languages (Campbell 2003). Xinkan is a small family of four languages in s outheastern Guatemala. We infer from this that Xinkans were not agriculturalists until their con tact with Mayan groups from whom they acquired agriculture. It is the fieldwork doc umentation of these languages that recorded these words and allowed us to identify them as loanwords. This in turn allowed us to contribute to understanding the his tory of these languages, and through that to understanding aspects of the prehistory the Xinkan peoples and of Mesoamerica. One of the languages, Jumaytepeque, was unknown until 1972. I discovered this language as part of a Xinkan language docu mentation project – determining just which languages exist is also an important part of language documentation. The resources for historical linguistic investigation of the

. An anonymous reviewer suspects that a change from a retroflex fricative to a trilled r “seems like something that is not so unnatural, given that the fricative is retroflex.” Similar changes, however, are all but unknown elsewhere in the world – the change would involve changing voiceless to voiced, retroflex (post-alveolar) to dental, and adding the trill: not straightforward by any means. (Since such changes are not known, it is not possible to find references to document their non-existence.)


 Lyle Campbell

Xinkan family were, of course, greatly expanded by the discovery of an additional lan guage belonging to this small language family. Moreover, not only does the case of borrowed agricultural terms tell us about Xinkan prehistory – a contribution to linguistic prehistory (see Campbell 2013: 433) – it also has implications for broader views about language diversification, a primary concern for historical linguists. The Xinkan case challenges aspects of the farming/ language dispersal model (Renfrew 1996; Bellwood 2001, 2002; cf. Campbell 2003; Campbell & Poser 2008: 337–44), which emphasizes agriculture as the driving force for language dispersal, for the spread of language families, such as Indo-European, Austronesian, etc. The claim is that farmers expand, taking over non-agricultural groups and their territory. As Renfrew (1996: 70), puts it, “farming dispersals, gen erally through the expansion of populations of farmers by a process of colonization or demic diffusion, are responsible for the distribution and areal extent of many of the world’s language families.” However, agriculturalist Mayan languages did not spread and wipe out the non-agricultural Xinkan languages; agriculture spread, but the languages stayed put. Xinkans maintained their identity and their language, first as non-cultivators, then later as cultivators who acquired agriculture through contact with their Mayan neighbors, not by “demic spread” as the model predicts. The Xinkan case is a clear counterexample to the farming/language dispersal model, and provides insights relevant to models of language diversification.

5.2 L anguage contact in Misión La Paz and change in situations of intensive language contact I report here several historical linguistic findings that come from language documen tation involving the languages spoken in Misión La Paz, Salta Province, Argentina (henceforth MLP). Three indigenous languages are spoken in MLP: Chorote, Nivaclé (a.k.a. Chulupí, Ashluslay), and Wichí (formerly called Mataco). All three are mem bers of the Matacoan language family, diversified on the order of Germanic languages. In particular, I focus on changes involving language contact and beliefs about con vergence. The commonly held view about languages in intensive contact is that they should undergo structural convergence, to become more similar to one another, and not undergo changes that make them less similar. For example, Bloomfield (1933: 476) declared: “When two speech communities are in continuous communication, linguis tic convergence is expected, and any degree of divergence requires an explanation.” Labov (2011: 5) and several others repeat this quote, and citations with similar content could be added from many different scholars. As we will see, examples of changes from MLP bear significantly on assertions of this sort. I provide first some background on the multilingualism in MLP, which is relevant for understanding the changes described below. (For more detail on the history and


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intensity of the language contact in MLP, see Campbell & Grondona 2010.) Speakers and hearers in conversations in MLP are typically not speaking the same language to one another. Instead, people communicate regularly with speakers of different lan guages, but often not replying in the same language as the one addressed to them. Each participant in a conversation typically speaks his or her own language, while the other participants in the conversation reply in their own language. This non-reciprocal use of different languages in conversation has been called dual-lingualism (Lincoln 1979). Linguistic exogamy is also practiced in MLP – one marries someone who speaks a different language. Here, each spouse speaks his/her own language and is addressed in and understands the other spouse’s language in return – a spouse does not accom modate by speaking the other spouse’s language; each maintains and uses his or her own language (see Campbell & Grondona 2010 for details). In general, people identify with a single language and speak it with all others. They assert that they understand but do not speak one and in most cases both of the other two indigenous languages in MLP. Nevertheless, the other two languages are spoken around them constantly and they usually have perfect comprehension of the languages that they say they do not speak. In most families, multilingual, dual-linguistic conversations are going on all day long, every day. It is generally believed that in situations of intensive language contact languages tend to undergo structural changes that make them more similar to one another. For example, in famous cases from India, different languages in contact have changed to become more structurally similar to one another, so that rather exact one-to-one struc tural matching in morpheme-by-morpheme translations is possible (see Gumperz & Wilson 1971; Nadkarni 1975). However, against expectations, the three indigenous languages in MLP show no obvious evidence of changes that make them structurally more similar to one another; rather, they have undergone changes that make them structurally more different. I illustrate this with three examples. All three languages have or had /ɫ/, phonemic voiceless ‘l’, as in Nivaclé ɫuʔp, Wichí ɫup, Chorote lop/xlop ‘nest’, to cite one set of cognate forms. However, Chorote speak ers in MLP have changed this. They no longer have /ɫ/; rather they have changed it to a consonant cluster of /x/ + voiced /l/, which alternates with just plain /l/ (with no /x/) in some contexts, especially word-initially and word-finally, as in: xlop/lop ‘nest’, xlaʔa/ laʔa ‘fruit’, xlam/lam ‘he’, xloma/loma ‘day’, samexl/samel ‘we’, etc. This change has taken place in spite of the fact that these Chorote speakers are in constant intensive contact with the speakers of the other two languages that pre serve their unitary voiceless “l”, /ɫ/. To change this /ɫ/ when the other languages main tain it goes against expectations about languages in such close, intensive contact. It is expected that if the other languages in this intensive contact situation have voiceless “l” there would be pressure on Chorote not to lose or change its voiceless “l” but instead to remain structurally similar to the other two languages with regard to this trait.


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In another example, both Nivaclé and Wichí have contrastive first-person plural inclusive and exclusive pronominal forms, as seen in Nivaclé in the contrasts between the (a) and (b) pairs in (1), (2), and (3); the contrast in Wichí is seen in the difference between the (a) and (b) pairs in (4), (5), and (6).6 (1a) kas-waʔtša 1pl.incl.poss-pron.root ‘we’ (all of us) (1b) yi-waʔtša-ʔeɫ 1.poss-pron.root-pl.excl ‘we’ (but not you) (2a) katsi-tata 1pl.incl.poss-father ‘our father’ (of all of us) (2b) yi-tata-ʔeɫ 1.poss-father-pl.excl ‘our father’ (but not yours) (3a) šta-sekkis 1pl.incl.act-scrape ‘we scrape it’ (all of us) (3b) xa-sekkis-eɫ 1act-scrape-pl.excl ‘we scrape it’ (but not you) The inclusive-exclusive contrast in Wichí is seen in difference between the (a) and (b) forms in Examples (4) through (6). (4a) n-ʔameɫ 1pl.incl.poss-pron.root ‘we’ (all of us) (4b) no-ɫamel, o-ɫamel 1.poss.excl-pron.root ‘we’ (but not you) (5a) ɫa-čoti 1pl.incl.poss-grandmother ‘our grandmother’ (of us all)

. Abbreviations used in this chapter are as follows: act = active, excl = exclusive, incl = inclusive, masc = masculine, pl = plural, poss = possessive, pron = pronoun, prosp = prospective, sg = singular, stat = stative.


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(5b) n-čoti 1pl.excl.poss-grandmother ‘our grandmother’ (but not yours) (6a) yaʔ-lɑn 1pl.incl.act-kill ‘we kill it’ (all of us) (6b) na-lɑn 1pl.excl.act-kill ‘we kill it’ (but not you)

(Wichí examples from Terraza 2008)

However, Chorote speakers in MLP have lost this inclusive-exclusive contrast in first person plural pronouns which the language once had, and they now have only a single non-contrastive first-person plural pronoun. The single Chorote form in (7a) and (8a) is compared with the Nivaclé contrasting forms in (7b)–(7c) and (8b)–(8c). (The noun and verb roots in these examples are cognates in these languages, as are some of the affixes, while other affixes are not cognate.) (7a) Chorote: si-ʔleh ‘our language’ (7b) Nivaclé: kas-kliʔš ‘our language’ (incl) (7c) Nivaclé: xa-kliʔš-eɫ [1act-language-pl.excl] ‘our language’ (excl) (8a) Chorote: a-lan-a [we-kill-suffix] (8b) Nivaclé: šta-klɑn [1act.pl.incl-kill] (8c) Nivaclé: xa-klɑn-eɫ ‘[1act-kill-pl.excl]

‘we killed it’ ‘we kill it’ (incl) ‘we kill it’ (excl)

Again, Chorote would not be expected to lose a morphological contrast that is so salient in the other two languages, and which speakers of Chorote hear and under stand constantly in MLP. The third example involves a change in Nivaclé. In both Chorote and Downriver dialects of Nivaclé spoken in Paraguayan, when active verbs appear with the ‘prospec tive’ (future intent) morpheme, they are required to take the pronominal prefixes for stative verbs – even when an inherently active verb is involved – as seen in the con trasts in Chorote between (9a) and (9b) and between (10a) and (10b). (9a) a-ʔwešiy [1act-hunt] ‘I hunt and gather’ (9b) si-ʔwešiy=ayi [1stat-hunt=prosp] ‘I’m going to hunt and gather’ (10a) hi-kapehnan [2act-cook] ‘you cook’ (10b) in-kapehnan=ayi [2stat-cook=prosp] ‘you are going to cook’ This construction, in which the ‘prospective’ requires stative pronominal agreement affixes on the verb (regardless of whether the verb is inherently active or stative), is the original state of affairs for these languages. However, MLP Nivaclé has changed: the corresponding construction in Nivaclé does not take stative pronominal agreement


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markers with the prospective, but can only bear the active ones with inherently active verbs, as in (11a). The same utterance but with a stative subject prefix (as required in the other languages) is ungrammatical here, as in (11b). (11a) xa-woʔ=xayu (11b) *tsi-woʔ=xayu

[1act-hunt.for=prosp] ‘I’m going to hunt for it’ [1stative-hunt.for=prosp]

It could be expected that, because of intensive language contact, the requirement that holds in Chorote and other Nivaclé dialects (several speakers of which also live in MLP) would be maintained in the Upriver dialect of Nivaclé spoken in MLP. However, this is not what happened; in spite of assumed influence to maintain this restriction coming from these other languages and dialects with which Nivaclé is in intensive language contact, MLP Nivaclé lost it. (See Campbell & Grondona 2010.)

5.3 Lexical borrowing in Matacoan languages These languages are remarkable because they have very few loanwords from Spanish or other languages. This tendency not to borrow words was discovered in the docu mentation of the languages of MLP. It has broader implications, intersecting with other aspects of the intensive language contact there. Nivaclé and Chorote generally do not allow items of acculturation to introduce foreign lexical material to these languages; rather, they utilize native linguistic resources to create terms for newly acquired items. Some of the mechanisms involved are: [1] By derivational suffix: for example, Nivaclé tašinštax ‘goat’, derived from tašinša ‘grey brocket deer (Mazama gouazoubira)’ + -tax ‘similar to’, and Chorote sonta ‘goat’, from sonaʔ ‘grey brocket deer’ + -ta ‘similar to’; Nivaclé itɑtax ‘match’, from itɑx-tax ‘fire-similar.to’. [2] By onomatopoeia: as in Nivaclé k’ututut ‘motorcycle’, Chorote pohpoh ‘motorcycle’. [3] By description/metaphor: for example, Nivaclé tišxan ‘radio, tape recorder’, from t-išxan ‘it sings’; Chorote t-ikyenisyen ‘radio, tape recorder’, from t‑ikyénisyen ‘it sings’; Nivaclé siwɑklɑk ‘bicycle’, from siwɑklɑk ‘spider’. (See Campbell & Grondona 2012) Is there an explanation for this resistance to borrowing? There is no secure account, but it is possible to speculate that the relative absence of loanwords may be due to the dual-lingualism and patterns of multilingual language use. Could the resistance to loanwords be due in part to the fact that people understand the various languages but choose to speak only one of them? Borrowing is usually associated with multilingual “speakers” bringing words from one of the languages they speak into another one as they speak it. Could it be that if they do not actually speak the other languages that


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they understand then there is little call to import foreign words from them? If they never utter aloud the word in another language, why would they use the foreign word while speaking their own language? This deserves investigation.

5.4 Broader implications of the MLP situation Cases such as these in MLP challenge us to investigate more thoroughly what hap pens in situations of intensive, intimate language contact. None of these changes just reported would be known without the recent language documentation undertaken in MLP; these findings contribute not just to understanding the structure and history of these particular languages, but also have several broader implications for language change. The examples from MLP just presented make clear that the assumed pressure towards convergence in intensive language contact did not prevent these three lan guages from becoming more distinct from one another. Rather, they have undergone changes that result in greater difference among the three, while no changes towards convergence are evident in MLP. In short, it is wrong to insist that languages in inten sive contact must necessarily change only in the direction of more structural similar ity and never in the direction of more divergence. As Bloomfield (1933: 476) said, as mentioned above, such cases do require an explanation.

6. H istorical linguistic contributions to language documentation and language revitalization It is worth pointing out that not all contributions are in the direction of language docu mentation to historical linguistics. Historical linguistics can sometimes also contribute to language documentation and language revitalization. For example, the “Breath of Life” programs often help indigenous communities find and interpret older written documents on their languages. The interpretation sometimes requires philological techniques (understanding of how the written attestations actually work). Tunica provides a concrete example. The major sources on Tunica are from Mary R. Haas (1941, 1946, 1950, 1953). Even these sources require interpretation to make them useful to tribal members currently working to revive their language; however, this exam ple is about findings from the philological investigation of earlier work. Haas worked with the last (semi)speaker of Tunica, Sesostrie Youchigant, who had not spoken the language in twenty years when Haas worked with him. As Haas (1941: 10) wrote: Indeed, I often had the feeling that the Tunica grooves in Youchigant’s memory might be compared to the grooves in a phonograph record; for he could repeat what he had heard but was unable to make up new expressions of his own accord.


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Haas’ description of Tunica verb agreement is confusing and, as we now know, was also erroneous in some parts, from the perspective of the language of earlier more completely fluent speakers. Heaton (2013), in a philological investigation of Albert S. Gatschet’s field notes from c.1886 (published in Swanton 1921), discovered that Tunica had productive active-stative verb alignment, not marked, as reported in Haas’ description. Gatschet had listed full verb paradigms, and from these Heaton was able to discover the original Tunica verb alignment that was not available to Haas because Youchigant, as a semispeaker, had not learned it fully. The Tunica active-stative alignment is seen in the following examples (from Heaton 2013). Transitive: (12) uhk-po-ni (13) ihk-po-wi 3masc.sg.stat-see-1sg.act 1stat-see-3masc.sg.act ‘I saw him’ ‘he saw me’ Active Intransitive verb: (14) pata-wi (15) pata-ni fall-3masc.sg.act fall-1sg.act ‘he fell’ ‘I fell’ Stative Intransitive verb: (16) uhk-yahpa (17) ihk-yahpa 3masc.sg.stat-be.hungry 1sg.stat-be.hungry ‘he is hungry’ ‘I am hungry’ Here, in the active verbs (events, where something happens), the suffix -ni ‘1st person singular active’ marks the subject both of the transitive verb ‘to see’ (in (12)) and of the intransitive active verb ‘to fall’ (in (15)). However, the prefix ihk- ‘1st person singular stative’ marks the subject of the intransitive stative verbs, as in (17), and the object of transitive verbs, as in (13). That is, the subjects of intransitive verbs differ depending upon whether they are active ((14) and (15)) or stative ((16) and (17)). Haas said of her “static” verbs (the statives) that there are “not more than thirty of them in the available material” (Haas 1941: 59), that they are inflected “by means of the inalienable pronominal prefixes which function on the grammatical level as objects, on the interpretive level as subjects” (p.40), and that the verbs “may not be used without them [the inalienable pronominal possessive prefixes]” (p.59). In the Gatschet materials, however, stative verb pronominal subjects take the affixes that are equivalent not to the inalienable pronominal possessive prefixes, but to the alienable set of pronominal possessive prefixes, as in (18) (compare the subject of stative (16)): (18) uhk-sa 3masc.sg.alienable-dog ‘his dog’


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The contrasting inalienable pronominal possessive affix is seen in (19): (19) u-ési-ku 3masc.sg.inalienable-father-3masc.sg ‘his father’ The alienable possessive prefixes (as in (18)) are the same in form as those marking the subject of the stative verbs in (16) and (17), and the objects of the transitive verbs in (12) and (13). The difference between Gatschet and Haas can be seen in the compari son of (20) from Haas (which has a subject prefix equivalent to the inalienable posses sive prefix) with (21) from Gatschet (where the subject prefix, in contrast, is equivalent to the alienable possessive prefix): (20) u-wana [from Haas] 3masc.sg.inalienable/3masc.sg.stat-want ‘he wants’ (21) uhk-wana [from Gatschet] 3masc.sg.alienable-want ‘he wants’ The stative verb category is apparently an open one, not limited to the few verb roots listed by Haas. Heaton’s analysis of the older Gatschet Tunica materials showed stative verb inflection that consistently employed the subject affixes equivalent to the alien able pronominal possessive affixes, as opposed to the inalienable possessive affixes as described in Haas, which renders the verb agreement system of Tunica understandable. The clear, apparently exceptionless active-stative verb alignment system Heaton discovered in Gatschet’s materials is used now in Tunica revitalization materials. Thus, the philological investigation of Tunica has contributed to language revitalization (Heaton 2013).

7. C onclusions The examples in this paper show the following: 1. Without documentation of endangered languages, we stand to lose much – we have already lost essentially a quarter of the language families of the world. In contrast, with documentation we gain much, including access to language history and through it to human history, as illustrated in examples presented here. 2. In language documentation, we can find evidence of specific changes in particular languages, patterns of borrowing, and changes due to language contact, among other things.


 Lyle Campbell

3. Research on endangered languages supports the finding that sound change in endangered languages need not be regular and often is not normal or natural (i.e., that it does not conform to typological expectations and some linguistic uni versals). Neither of these results, however, holds for fully viable languages, where both regularity of sound change and naturalness of changes hold. 4. We can discover the patterns of borrowing, which in some instances have implica tions that challenge claims such as the farming/language dispersal hypothesis, and which have broader general implications for general claims concerning language diversification. 5. Language documentation in the service of historical linguistics can uncover lan guage changes in multilingual situations of intensive language contact, with impli cations for general claims about language contact. 6. The examples from language documentation in Misión La Paz (Argentina) pro vide an understanding of unique patterns of language choice and use in the inter action of linguistic exogamy and dual-lingualism. 7. Historical linguistic investigation of earlier documentation can help to recover aspects of grammar, which in turn can be of value for language revival and revi talization programs, as in the Tunica case. 8. Linguists should be aware of the implications of language documentation for historical linguistics and of the contributions it makes to historical linguistics generally. Those doing language documentation should be aware of and attend to the possible historical linguistic contributions their work can make so that information relevant to interpreting the history of the languages involved and to understanding language change is not missed or lost.

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