1

Linguistics is the scientific study of languages, and yet it seems to me that many, if not most statements would fail falsificationist or even verificationist demarcation criteria. How can statements like:

  • "Hebrew and Arabic are North Semitic Languages, Amharic is a South Semitic language."
  • "Proto-Indo-European had 10 vowels"

ever be verified, let alone falsified?

Even Chomsky style analysis and classifications of language seem at best to fall under the category of mathematical statements or Humean relations of ideas, not empirical testable and verifiable knowledge.

In what way is linguistics scientific?

Improve this question
3
  • Chomsky makes a number of empirical claims about language acquisition in children, which have been verified experimentally.
    – Teusz
    Mar 1, 2016 at 13:43
  • Additionally, the link between linguistic sub-disciplines, phonetics and phonology, is a great example of psychological and physical analyses of speech, which together provide scientifically rigorous models of language acquisition, dialect, accent, change and so on. Theories that account for the interface between phonetics and phonology are the subject of much scientific debate.
    – Teusz
    Mar 1, 2016 at 13:46
  • Additionally, the link between linguistic sub-disciplines, phonetics and phonology, is a great example of psychological and physical analyses of speech, which together provide scientifically rigorous models of language acquisition, dialect, accent, change and so on. Theories that account for the interface between phonetics and phonology are the subject of much scientific debate.
    – Teusz
    Mar 1, 2016 at 13:48

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

(Not a linguist, so take this with a grain of salt, but I believe it's accurate.)

So, first we need to divide historical linguistics which is the bit of linguistics concerned with grouping languages into historical families from what we might call descriptive linguistics which is more closely aligned to psychology and the cognitive sciences.

Let me say a bit about methods in historical linguistics. To create a family tree of languages you first start by gathering words with similar meanings that look obviously related:

  • Latin: unum, duo, tres, quattor, quinque, sex, septem, octo, novem, decem.
  • Spanish: uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez.
  • German: ein, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun, zehn.
  • English: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

On a first glance, it's obvious that Latin and Spanish are more closely related to each other than to German and English, and it's obvious that German and English are more closely related to each other than either is to Latin or Spanish. So we now have two candidate families. But notice there are some similarities between the two families---the words for "six" sound similar in all, for instance.

So perhaps we come up with a hypothesis: there was once a language which was the last common ancestor of the Latin/Spanish family and the German/English family. To flesh this hypothesis out I need to do two things:

  1. I postulate some primitive vocabulary for this last common ancestor language, and then
  2. I postulate some sound change rules that would let me systematically transform the primitive vocabulary of the last common ancestor language into the vocabulary of the descendent languages.

For sake of concreteness, let's get a proposal on the table. (Not being a linguist, I'm sure the actual claims are wrong, but it's just an illustration). Suppose I call my last common ancestor language proto-indo-european, and I hypothesize that the word for "three" in PIE was "tre". Further, I hypothesize that the Latin/Spanish family didn't like words that ended with a soft e sound, and so they tended to add an "s" to such words, and so you get "tre" > "tres". Suppose, however, that the German/English family didn't have a problem with words ending in a soft vowel, but then later they began to not like the initial consonant cluster "tr". Perhaps the German speakers tended to mutate "tr" to "dr" and the english speakers tended to mutate "tr" to "thr". Then you'd get intermediate forms like "dre" in German and "thre" in English. Postulating further vowel changes would give us "drei" and "three" respectively.

Of course, what I've drawn here is a really simplistic picture. Languages are constantly mutating and evolving, and they always come in a variety of dialects. The point is that each of the hypotheses above is testable. If my historical hypothesis is true, I should expect to find some dialects of German, or some historical inscriptions in German where the word for "three" is "dre" rather than "drei". Further, we can also look at historical and archaeological evidence for examples of language change.

Also, notice that we can draw on some important non-linguistic evidence to help us chart the chronologies too---we already know from history that Latin is the older language, and Spanish descended from it and that will help us figure out that PIE is going to be a lot more like Latin than Spanish probably.

tl;dr. Historical linguistics uses a variety of methods: comparison of dialects, archaeology and anthropology to help verify its reconstructed languages.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .