Friday Seminar: Genetic Linguistic Analysis

Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

Quite some time has passed since my last Friday Seminar, the series in which I adapt some of my CHRN/AUG 100 course materials for your time stream. So, forgive me if my post today is innappropriate in its complexity.

That said, today I want to tell you about a "back door" method to determine continuity between disparate augury datasets. If you recall, it is notoriously difficult to connect two datasets collected separately, because it is always hard to establish causality at the limits of quantum uncertainty.

Like I've said before, it takes rigorous standards to say two sources come from the same time stream. But there are easy ways to at least group time streams together based on common cultural features.

One such feature is language. Languages mutate based on a variety of factors, and so if you observe two sets of data that are in the same language, you can say with nearly one hundred per cent certainty that the two datasets are either contemporaneous OR they share a common "ancestor" time stream. In fact, since all you need to know for this sort of analysis is how similar the languages are in their written form, you may not even need to know the language. It can be very useful for an Anachronist whose specialty time stream has a language that is not well understood.

This sort of analysis has more advanced forms, too, and they are quite similar to how your contemporary scientists do evolutionary genetics. These scientists can take two different species and compare their DNA to determine their probable common ancestor. That is, the extinct species from which they both evolved.

Image by Colin Purrington via Flickr

Languages are not so different from DNA. DNA tells cells how to make components for their life machinery. Language contains rules and components to give rise to communication machinery. And languages also mutate.

So if we have two languages with similarities, we can analyze and compare their differences to figure out a rough timeline for their divergence. This is timeline only in terms of probabilities, but it is better than nothing. Though we often find these language ancestry trees are inaccurate when we finally decipher the words, many working conclusions based on this analysis remain valid.

While it's a crude tool, it's very useful. I will try and expand more on this complicated topic in a future Seminar.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople