On Language Alliance

Traditionally, scholars do not pay much attention to language contact, for this reason, Prof.Chen Baoya has launched arduous field investigation and theoretical study on this, trying to discover the mechanism, law, essence within language contact and establish an effective method to distinguish homology and loan. After nearly ten years' research, he put forward the new Language Alliance thoery in 1996. this theory has many innovations on language contact, homology and word loan discrimination and Language Alliance model establishment.At the beginning, this paper has introduced some theoretical background of Language Alliance theory.then is divided into three chapters and discuss:first chapter, language contact. This chapter has three parts, the first part discusses the view that language contact has limit. Second part is about Trubetzkoy's view. Third part discusses prof.Chen's theory about language contact.In this chapter, the author thinks Prof.Chen's definition of mother tongue interference is not proper and in fact, the right definition is phonetic interference by mother tongue.Second chapter, on how to distinguish homological word and loan word.this chapter is divided into three parts. First part,Word Family Comparison method(WFC). Second part, Deep Correspondence(DC). Third part, Hierarchical Curve(HC), the third part has five topics: first, how to design a word list; second, rank making of the word list;third,how to judge a pair of correspondent words; fourth, explanation of the hierarchy curve; finally, limitations of Hierarchical Curve.In this chapter, the author's new ideas are as follows: â…  .Word Family Comparison method follows the principle of historic linguistic comparison and meanwhile takes the characteristic of Sino-Tibetan languages into account. This theory thinks word family within a language is not possiably borrowed into another languate at the same time, but Prof. Chen discovered a number of exceptions in his field investigation. â…¡. limitations of Deep Correspondence are as follows:(1)it is still not certain if a group of words with same sound is possiably borrowed into another language at the same time; (2)it is hard to know if the archiac Chinese and the primary X language are in the same period; (3)...