Review Apua5

[Arnaud Fournet]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "De Reuse, Willem" <WillemDeReuse at my.unt.edu>
To: "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud at wanadoo.fr>; "List for the discussion 
of the Athabaskan language family and related languages" 
<ATHAPBASCKAN-L at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2011 5:56 PM
Subject: RE: Review Apua5


Dear Mr. Fournet:

Thank you for your letter.  I was just expressing my opinion as one of the 
members of this list.
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Yes, I was also expressing my own PoV, although I'm a newcomer here, so I 
suppose other listees have their own ideas about what is or what is not to 
be done.
A.
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I do not know whether the moderator of this list feels the same about 
discussing long distance proposals.  It is best to wait what others say 
about this.
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Apparently, that's ok with him.
A.
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I also speak from personal experience when I say that if one tells someone 
about a "general and colossal flaw" in their work they are not likely to 
want to talk with you anymore.
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Actually, Vajda stopped discussing the ND-Y theory with me, much earlier 
than this kind of characterizations.

I'm not really surprised that he now refuses to (or cannot?) attend the 
meeting initially planned on March 12.
To be frank, I think his approach of the ND-Y connection is a kind of Ponzi 
Scheme.
He has built a string of speculations upon speculations, that he has managed 
to sell.
I suppose he is now extremely uncomfortable with the explosion of the "ND-Y 
speculative bubble", that my review entails.

I warned him in a plain and scientific way that there were problems in his 
approach but apparently there was little that could have stopped him.
My first private mails with him about these problems are two years old.

I'm sorry for the people who have been dragged into that Ponzi Scheme.
A.
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Please do not take this personally,
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I have fairly unusual ideas so I've grown used to being rebuked.
I believe in creative ideas and conservative methodologies.
That's not really a problem that you disagree with me or remain neutral.
A.
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but I do admit I am more suspicious about a ND-Uralic connection than about 
a ND-Yeniseian connection.  The history of Uralic is very well known, and 
there are several Athabascanists who know quite a bit about Uralic, and they 
would have noticed a striking Uralic-ND connection a long time ago.
***
That kind of reasoning is tantamount to saying that nothing new can be 
asserted,
because if a new statement is true, then it should have been stated before,
which is obviously false.
So I consider that this kind of reasoning is just completely irrelevant.
A.
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But if you want to discuss things, I would be interested in seeing some of 
your papers on the topic of a Uralic-ND connection, published or 
unpublished, but maybe you shoudl do that by personal e-mail first.  I speak 
French so we can go at it in French!
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ok, it's nice that you can speak French. Feel free to do so in private 
mails.
At this point, I think I first have to deliver a number of counter-proposals 
and I think this should be done in English for fairness sake.

A.
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