Germanic dispersion beyond trees and waves

日耳曼人分散在树木和波浪之外

• 批准号: 429663384
• 负责人: Professor Dr. George Walkden
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Bereich Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/429663384?language=en
• 关键词: Germanic; dispersion; beyond; trees; waves

Since the close relationship of North and West Germanic languages was first postulated, the way we view the internal hierarchy of the Germanic languages has more or less remained the same. It seemed that all relevant languages were considered and their interdependencies and genetic relationships were best described by the standard tree model that incorporates Northwest and East Germanic, the former further branching into North and West Germanic later on, often while disregarding the smaller, less well-attested languages. This confidence, however, was always accompanied by a distinct skepticism of the tree model as an adequate heuristic to describe the processes leading up to the early Germanic languages. The underlying linguistic and social mechanics necessary to be best approximated by such a model are unlikely to occur in reality. Tree models, in general, require 'hard' splits where two languages simultaneously break off from a common proto-language with little to no later mutual influence. Slower dissolution processes found in dialect continua in which asynchronous diverging and converging movements of related speech communities occur at varying speeds can hardly be accounted for by tree models. Subsequently, several counter-proposals have been suggested by scholars throughout the debate that seem to better capture these observable mechanisms of proto-language dissolution. However, regardless of prominence, none of these proposals ranging from wave theories and areal change radiation to glottometrics could yet fully account for the linguistic data at hand.In an attempt to approach cladistics from a computational angle, new methods have been adopted in recent years from sciences such as biology. These approaches, phylogenetics in particular, brought new methods and techniques to test previous assumptions against the results obtained through these models. In the case of Germanic, previous studies were either carried out with a larger scope, such as the entire Indo-European family, or were smaller case studies. The aim of our project will therefore be to apply known computational methods specifically to Germanic with a particular focus on a wide range of languages in addition to the well-attested ones. Yet since even these methods do not approximate the data in the best possible way as they often also assume a tree shape dissolution, the ultimate goal will be to program a new model for this task that not only accounts for different speeds of change and incorporates less well-attested languages but is also capable of simulating dialect continua as well as rapid migration movements. The technique we intend to use for this simulation task is the method of agent-based modeling which is currently almost exclusively known from studies in political and social sciences as well as economics. The agent-based models exactly allow the fine-tuned specialization needed to program the best-possible model for the dissolution of Germanic unity.

自从北日耳曼语和西日耳曼语的密切关系被首次提出以来，我们看待日耳曼语内部等级的方式或多或少保持不变。似乎所有相关的语言都被考虑在内，它们的相互依存关系和遗传关系最好用标准的树模型来描述，该模型将西北日耳曼语和东日耳曼语合并在一起，前者后来进一步分支为北日耳曼语和西日耳曼语，而通常忽略了较小的，不太好证明的语言。然而，这种信心总是伴随着一种明显的怀疑，即树模型是否足以描述导致早期日耳曼语言的过程。这种模型所需要的最佳近似的潜在语言和社会机制在现实中不太可能发生。一般来说，树模型需要“硬”分裂，即两种语言同时从一种共同的原型语言中分离出来，并且几乎没有相互影响。在方言连续统中发现的较慢的溶解过程中，相关的语音社区以不同的速度发生异步的发散和收敛运动，很难用树模型来解释。随后，学者们在整个辩论中提出了几个反建议，似乎更好地捕捉了这些可观察到的原始语言溶解机制。然而，尽管这些方法的重要性很高，但从波动理论、面积变化辐射到声门测量学，都不能完全解释现有的语言学数据。为了从计算的角度研究分支分类学，近年来，生物学等科学领域采用了新的方法。这些方法，特别是遗传学，带来了新的方法和技术来测试以前的假设对通过这些模型获得的结果。在日耳曼语的情况下，以前的研究要么是在更大的范围内进行的，例如整个印欧语系，要么是较小的案例研究。因此，我们项目的目标是将已知的计算方法专门应用于日耳曼语，特别关注除了经过充分证明的语言之外的各种语言。然而，由于即使这些方法也不能以最好的方式近似数据，因为它们通常也假设树形分解，因此最终目标将是为这项任务编程一个新的模型，该模型不仅考虑不同的变化速度，并包含不太好的语言，而且还能够模拟方言连续体以及快速迁移运动。我们打算用于这个模拟任务的技术是基于代理的建模，这是目前几乎完全从政治和社会科学以及经济学的研究已知的方法。基于代理的模型完全允许微调专业化所需的程序最好的可能模型的解散日耳曼统一。