A trope I see in a lot of student writing (and computational linguistics writing at all levels) is a critique of prior work as being only on “Indo-European languages”, and sometimes a promise that current or future work will target “non-Indo-European languages”.<\/p>\n
To me, this is drivel. The Indo-European language family is quite diverse; i.e., for the vast majority of things I’m interested in, either, say, Italian or Russian is sufficiently different from English to make a relevant comparison. And there are a huge number of “non-Indo-European” languages that are typologically similar to at least some Indo-European languages on at least some dimensions; i.e., Finno-Ugric, “Aquitanian” (i.e., Basque) and the (narrowly defined) “Altaic” families (Mongolic, Tungusic, and Turkic) have quite a bit in common typologically with IE, as do, say, Japanese and Korean. Genetic relatedness just isn’t that typologically informative in very dense, very “old” families like IE. <\/p>\n
If you want to talk typology, you should focus on typological aspects actually relevant to your study<\/em> rather than genetic relatedness. If you’re studying phonology, the presence of vowel harmony in the family may be relevant (but note that Estonian, despite being Finnic, does not have productive harmony); if you’re interested in morphology, then notions like agglutination may be relevant (though not necessarily). Gross word order descriptors (like “VSO”) are likely to be relevant for syntax, and so on.<\/p>\n In some cases, one of the relevant typological aspects is not language typology, but rather writing systems typology. There, genetic relatedness isn’t very informative either, because the vast majority of writing systems used today (and virtually all of them outside East Asia) are ultimately descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs. And we shouldn’t confuse writing system and language.<\/a><\/p>\n Linguists ought to know better. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A trope I see in a lot of student writing (and computational linguistics writing at all levels) is a critique of prior work as being only on “Indo-European languages”, and sometimes a promise that current or future work will target “non-Indo-European languages”. To me, this is drivel. The Indo-European language family is quite diverse; i.e., … Continue reading ““Indo-European” is not a meaningful typological descriptor”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2361"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2365,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361\/revisions\/2365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}