isolates once more

[Larry Trask]

For more reasons than one, I suspect this may be my final contribution
to this debate.
 
Alexander Vovin writes:
 
[on my assertion that Austric is not generally accepted]
 
>     I'm sorry but may be you can enlighten me and the rest of us
> what is "general acceptance" and "general satisfaction"? Is it a
> matter of the vote? More people accept IE than Austric,
 
*Everybody* accepts IE.  The status of IE, including elaborate
reconstructions of phonology, lexis and grammar, has long since
reached the point at which anybody who rejected IE would be regarded,
rightly or wrongly, as a lunatic.  It is perfectly clear that Austric
is nowhere near that state.
 
> but you of course can find more people who had some experience with
> IE than with Austric. And of course Austric cannot be as developped
> as IE: the very idea of Austric is younger than a century.
 
> I agree that neither Austric nor Ainu-Austric are finally proven,
 
And that is the point I was making.  End of discussion?
 
> but it is accepted as the only perspective direction of research by
> people who work in this particular field, and I named several.
 
Hardly the same thing, is it?  A medical scientist who satisfies
himself that there is only one prospective direction for tackling AIDS
is not a medical scientist who has conquered AIDS.
 
> However, neither you nor Mark Hale gave a specific reference to
> anyone who outright refutes Austric. Instead, we see references to
> "general acceptance". It seems to me that you a priori throw away
> all cases under construction, whether it is Austric or Nostratic.
> Baby can be gone with the water (:-).
 
I have thrown away nothing, a priori or otherwise.  It is impossible
to find a reference work anywhere on the planet which declines to
accept IE, or Afro-Asiatic, or Algonquian, or Austronesian, or
Dravidian, or... well, you get the picture.  It is also impossible to
find a reference work which accepts even Austric, let alone
Ainu-Austric, as beyond dispute.  If the specialists have decided that
Austric is real, then either they're keeping mighty quiet about it, or
there's a monstrous conspiracy to gag them. And you've already
admitted that neither of these engaging scenarios is the case.
Instead, the specialists simply have not concluded that Austric is
real, and there is no more to be said at present.
 
> L.T.:
 
> > What I did was merely to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction at
> > least, that the evidence on offer *did not stand up to scrutiny*,
> > and hence that their case could not be accepted.  And that is a
> > very different thing from proving the absence of a relation.
 
> A.V.:
 
>    Using the formal logic, you are right,
 
Is there some useful way of proceeding which is *not* logical? ;-)
 
> but as a matter of fact the impossibility to prove the relationship
> means that there is no possibility to prove the relationship,
> therefore it should not concern us as long as we are doing science
> and not entertaining the speculations. Therefore the relationship is
> non-existent for analysis, not in GENERAL, of course.
 
Sorry; again I don't follow this at all.  When I speak of two
languages as being "related", I mean "discoverably related", and I am
often (but not always) careful to say so.  I see no point in pondering
the possibility that certain languages are related at some impossibly
remote time depth but that we can never discover the fact.
 
[Here I've snipped a bit I didn't understand, but it didn't seem that
you were disagreeing with me.]
 
[on my point that a genetic proposal must be evaluated]
 
>   I agree with this point, but please note that evaluation by the
> specialists in the relevant languages is very different from
> "general acceptance" which you used as a criterion before.
 
I meant "general acceptance" by the relevant specialists.  I don't
think a specialist in Algonquian or Bantu is well placed to evaluate a
case for Austric.
 
> Therefore I'd like to suggest to you asking a poll opinion of
> SPECIALISTS in historical Japanese and Korean (not only me, of
> course) or in Austronesian and Austroasiatic before you pronounce
> them isolates (J and K) or unrelated (AN and AA).
 
Alexander, I have better things to do than to organize opinion polls.
If any of the several genetic links you endorse comes to be accepted
by specialists, tomorrow or a hundred years from now, as established
beyond reasonable dispute, then I will no doubt hear about it, if I'm
still around.  So far I have heard nothing of the sort, and Samuel
Martin's very guarded remarks do not lead me to believe that things
are likely to change soon.
 
[I have nothing further to say on Yukaghir and Ket.]
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk