From cwinter at orion.it.luc.edu Mon Feb 1 02:44:50 1999 From: cwinter at orion.it.luc.edu (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 21:44:50 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > > On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote (inter alia): > > > > > Those who have been on Altainet know that I have not > > agreed with Alexis on a number of issues so if I write > > this in support it is certainly not due to 'buddyism'. > > This is certinly true. I fear my responses to Dr. Hubey > on other lists have bordered on rude. It is very kind of > Mark to rise about that. > > [snip] > > > Most linguists do not seem to study anything at all, > > but merely memorize somethings they read and then assert them > > everywhere they go and expect everyone to bow down and kiss > > their feet. > > I do think that linguists have the same relationship to > language that physicists do to the physical universe, > and that we should be listened to in our area as much > as they are in theirs. This indeed has been my main > bone of contention with Mark, who is one of the many > nonlinguists who seem to feel that they know much > more about lg than we do. > > > There is no such thing as "proof by assertion". > > Contrary to what some of the more ignorant members of this > > profession claim (and write in their books), there is also > > no such thing as "proof by repetetion". > > That's true, but even in the natural sciences we find > people behaving as though there were. > > > > > Linguists like economists, sociologists and psychologists > > before them will have to learn to wield the tools of science, > > mostly logic and probability theory and reason cogently. > > I disagree in the sense that I think linguistics is > in most regards much more scientific than the other three > fields mentioned. Moreover, I believe that, when the real > history of Western science is written, everyone will see > that linguistics has been the source of some very important > ideas. More generally, it is not by any means true that > the natural sciences have always been ahead of the social/ > humanistic ones. The whole idea of evolution originated with > Vico in history/social science, first became really > scientific in linguistics, only then (and in part thence) > in geology and biology, and much later in physics. > > AMR > I must disagree, linguistics as it is practiced today does not always appear to rely on science. Science depends on hypothesis testing and experimentation. As pointed out in the Goddard example, the data can be interpreted in both a positive or negative way, but given the stature of Goddard his views were accepted. Science is only one way of knowing. The other ways of knowing are 1) the method of tenacity (one holds firmly to the truth, because, 'they know it' to be true); 2) method of authority or established belief, i.e., the Bible or an "expert" said it, so it must be so); 3) method of intuition (the method where a proposition agrees with reason, but not necessarily with experience); 4) the method of science which calls on self-correction (through falsification) as a way of attaining knowledge. The fact that when one becomes an expert, and has the support of a number of other linguist, that his work is accepted uncritically suggest that we may be adhering to a research method based on "authority", rather than science. This does not mean that some linguists are not using a scientific method to advance historical linguistics because they are. Yet in many cases, views regarding the results obtained by some linguistists advocating the relationship between language A and B, are rejected due to the methods of intuition and authority, rather than a rigorous falsification of the hypothesis rejected by the "experts", for example the Nostratic Hypothesis. C.A. Winters From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 1 02:53:04 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 21:53:04 EST Subject: Nostratic, Afro-Asiatic, and so on In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The more I reread what has been said on this list by various people, the more I feel I was right at one point to suggest that perhaps some people do not know the relevant literature at all, and if so, I was castigating them for the wrong reason (and apologize if that is the case). It may therefore be useful for me not merely to complain that a number of leading scholars and so less leading ones like me are being ignored and our work passed over in silence that to summarize some of the things which are apparently not known at all to a lot of people and which I was taking for granted. 1. The idea that languages can be classified into families on the basis of facts which we take to indicate that the members of each family come from a single ancestral language which is NO LONGER spoken (a protolanguage) is what many scholars assume we say that there is a family we call Indo-European, another one we call Semitic, another one (subsuming Semitic) which used to be called Hamito-Semitic and still is so by some but usually is called Afro-Asiatic, etc. Hence, when we talk about families that are more controversial than these three, e.g., Nostratic, Altaic, Nadene, Pakawan, etc. (more of these later), we mean that some people say that there once was a Proto-Nostratic, a Proto-Altaic, etc., while others say either that there was not, or that we do not have good enough evidence that was, or that there cannot in principle be such evidence (for reasons I will go into later). However, and this is important, there have at all times been (and there are now) scholars who deal with languages (including some who one clearly has to count as linguists and many who one does not, for not all scholars of language are linguists) and who are/were very good at what they do/did who either deny the reality of ANY and ALL protolanguages and hence have an entirely different notion of 'language family' and/or who deny that some particular ones among the widely-accepted protolanguages ever existed. Some of the names here include(d) Prince N. N. Trubetzkoy (better known for his work in phonological theory than in historical linguistics, but still clearly knowledgeable in the latter), Kotwicz (whose first name escapes me at the moment, one of the leading specialists in Altaic languages in the thirties and fifties), Denis Sinor (a leading Altaic scholar of the present day), Gerhard Doerfer (one of the great, and deservedly great, names of Altaic studies, but especially Turkic and Mongolic), and from what I can gather many if indeed not most people who deal with Semitic languages except those who are linguists rather than Semiticists and perhaps with some other exceptions. It is often hard to know if anyone denies ALL protolanguage as a matter of principle or only some as a matter of fact. Trubetzkoy denied Proto-IE and I think wanted to deny them all but am not sure. Kotwicz denied Proto-Altaic but I am pretty sure never spoke to the general issue of principle. Sinor, who is more a historian than a linguist but knows more about more languages than many linguists, seems to deny (or be skeptical about) the whole idea of proto-lgs and has been a vocal critic of Proto-Altaic. Doerfer seems pretty clearly to accept some proto- languages but not others. At one point he published the idea that the Anatolian languages (like Hittite) are not descended from a common protolanguage with the rest of IE, for years (as I have mentioned) rejected and still seems to reject the idea that all the Afro- Asiatic languages have a common origin (and likewise re Uralic) and is of course widely celebrated for his tireless campaign against Proto-Altaic, but I think he clearly accepts a Proto-Turkic, for example, and a Proto-Semitic. It is another matter that as far as I know, and I think I would know, he has no credentials whatever which would entitle him to an opinion re IE-Hittite, Uralic, or Afro- Asiatic. Many Semiticists, whom again I would not generally (but there may be exceptions) describe as linguists but who again know more than many linguist about all kinds of languages, seem to deny the reality of a Proto-Semitic. As for Afro-Asiatic, many Semiticists in my experience do not reject it opnely, but simply pretend as though it had no relevance in practice to their work and say little about it, but there have been some strident voices recently (and not so recently) hotly denying that Semitic is related to the other Afro-Asiatic languages. (2) Given (1), it is hardly meaningful to speak of "established" or "proven" language families (and protolgs) like IE or AA or Semitic as opposed to ones which are not "established" or "proven". One must of course distinguish degrees of controversiality. IE and Semitic are less controversial than AA, and AA is vastly less controversial than Nostratic or Altaic. (3) The Nostratic theory, which seeks to relate IE to some or all of the following (depending on the particular version of Nostratic, since there are many, as we will see) has, like most theories, complex roots, but the term goes back to Holger Pedersen, a Danish Indo-Europeanist of the late 19th and the first half or so of the 20th century, who was (this is one thing that UNcontroversial) one of the very best Indo-Europeanists of his or any age, known in particular for massive contributions to the Celtic, Armenian, Anatolian, Tocharian, and several other branches of IE (like Meillet, his great French rival and rough contemporary, he seems to have focused more than some others on the branches of IE which were not widely or deeply known to many IEnists then and indeed today). He had some experience with the questio of language classification inasmuch as he was involved with the battles within IE about the IE affiliation of the Anatolian languages (many people do not know this, but this was once almost universally denied by Indo-Europeanists and took a very long time to become universally accepted). However, I do not know that he had any great knowledge of the other Nostratic languages, though he clearly knew some Turkic and some Semitic at least, and I do not know that he actively worked in any Nostratic family other than IE or even on the problem of establishing the validity of Nostratic. (4) For the next sixty or so years (roughly 1900+ through 1960+), as now, most scholars ignored the Nostratic issue and such work as was being done on it. And the work that was being done (one particularly important name here is that of Bjorn Collinder, one of the leading specialists in Uralic linguistics) tended to involve pairs of Nostratic subfamilies (most often Indo-European with Uralic) and tended to have trouble finding precise sound correspondences even there. Nor was there much work on reconstructing a Proto-0 Nostratic. In the 1960's Vladislav ("Slava") M. Illich-Svitych and Aron (Aharon) B. Dolgopol'skij (Dolgopolsky) apparently independently convinced themselves of the reality of Nostratic (each had a slightly different list of language families in mind and I believe Dolgopolsky long resisted the term 'Nostratic'), but each told of this to one and the same person who finally brought them together. I-S (and to a much lesser extent) Dolgopolsky then proceeded to (a) compare several language families all at once, and (b) try to reconstruct a common Nostratic proto-language. Furthermore, (c) realizing that the existing body of knowledge about the proposed components of Nostratic was very inadequate, they proceeded to make changes (ranging from minor, as in IE, to major, as in Uralic and Dravidian, to really dramatic, as in Altaic) to the existing reconstructions and in the case of Afro-Asiatic, got busy with the basics such as trying to reconstruct some kind of picture of the major branches of AA (I-S worked on Chadic, Dolgopolsky on Cushitic) and laying the groundwork for a reconstruction of Proto-AA (which neither really accomplished to a very great degree). I-S died before most of his work was either done or even published, and Dolgopolsky after doing some important work emigrated from the USSR to Israel and for a long time published almost nothing of relevance as he was adjusting. I-S's unpublished work was published by a changing team led by the man who had first introduced these two, Dybo, and while it was a heroic and maybe even superhuman effort, I have elsewhere noted that it was in many ways a far-from-successful one. In any case it took a very long time, during which for all practical purposes very little substantive work (for many years none at all) on Nostratic was published or even I suspect done by anyone of this school. An American scholar, Alan Bomhard, quite independently came up with a whole series of arguments for a somewhat (actually importantly) different view of Nostratic, but after learning of the I-S and Dolgopolsky work, some of the gap narrowed. His work, while not widely and certainly not deeply known, did receive a certain amount of exposure, incl. a number of book reviews. I-S's and Dolgopolsky's work on the other hand was widely ignored even in Russia, where to this day as far as I know the only published review of I-S's posthumous Nostratic dictionary is a recent translation of a review I myself published earlier in English in Bernard Comrie's Studies in Language (in 1993 I think). In some European journals, especially in one pubslished in Czech, notice was taken of the work, but in the English-speaking world and especially in the US, that was not the case. Comrie's invitation to me to write to the review was a brave and radical departure from tradition, some twenty years after the first volume of the book being reviewed was published. To this day, despite private and public appeals from some leading American linguists, some historical but some not (incl. Hamp, Fromkin, Wasow, and others), the journal Language (edited by Sally Thomason and then by Mark Aronoff) has refused to do a review of this enormously important book, and as far as I know, the first (and maybe only?) discussion of the school of Nostratic founded by I-S and Dolgopolsky in that journal was in a brief review I have there of a Russian-lg encyclopedia of linguistics, whose treatment of Nostratic I got a chance to pan. Other journals of course have done little better. Speaking of encyclopedias of linguistics, some have chosen to ignore or dismiss Nostratic (e.g., Bill Bright's, which is probably the best known one in the US), some have begun mentioning it, as does (or will) the new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Most textbooks of historical linguistics have only recently treated Nostratic or still do not and if they do, they generally purvey disinformation (there may be exceptions). While essentially no substantive work on Nostratic has been getting done by the self-styled school of Nostratic in Moscow (which is why I have often said that there are no Nostraticists at the present time, although this is slightly less true today than when I said it a few years back) or very little by Dologopolsky isn Israel (although I keep hearing that he has been DOING a lot, but only publishing very little), Bomhard in this country has done an impressive amount of research, most of which I find not compelling (but some improtant scholars have praised it highly) and little bits and pieces have been done by various scattered people in Europe (of very uneven quality). But back in the US, Vitaly Shevoroshkin, a personal friend of I-S and Dolgopolsky's but himself an Indo- Europeanist (mostly an Anatolianist in fact) found himself through the late 1970's and the 1980's the possessor of one of the best-kept secrets in ling and tried in various ways to tell American (and other Western) linguists about, with mixed success. He also at length did a small amount of work on Nostratic himself and trained one student, Mark Kaiser, who did some work as well but has now left the field. Shevorshkin also managed to hold the first conference outside of the USSR that dealt to a significant extent with Nostratic and related issues, to get some coverage of the Russian Nostratic work in the popular press, and the like, and he inspired a few people (incl. me) to continue making noise of this kind after he himself largely gave up in disgust at the modest gains. As a result, there was some more press coverage, more conferences (one at Ann Arbor, the next at Ypsilanti), the failed effort to get Language and other journals to review I-S's work, etc. I believe that it was this noise that inspired Comrie to make his move to get I-S's work reviewed in Studies in Lg, although I do not now recall the events clearly. A small amount of (to my mind entirely misguided) criticism of Nostratic was also provoked, esp. on the part of Donald Ringe, which is better than the silent treatment, of course, but only marginally so. On the other hand, I do not know what got Brent Vine (now at UCLA) to write the only critique of Nostratic to date which neither the author who wrote it nor the editor who accepted it should feel deeply and mortally ashamed of. This is not to say that I agree with almost any of it, but it is a piece of honest scholarship by an honest (and excellent) scholar (some rebuttal of it appears in the paper which I coauthored with Michalove, Adams, and Baertsch appearing in the just-published Joseph-Salmons anthology). This brings us into the early or mid-1990's, by which time I had become somewhat tired of merely fighting for the right of Nostratic to be heard, and decided to see if I could actually believe any of it. As I recall, my first project involved looking at a proposal of I-S's involving a proposed Nostratic etymology for the Armenian plural ending -k`. To do this, I had to learn IE, which took a bit longer than it should have since I was teaching computer science full time and had to learn THAT first, and ended up writing an unbelievably long paper on the problem, which turned out to be a neat problem for IE (with Pedersen and Hamp being my heroes on this occasion, as on many later ones) but without finding out anything useful about Nostratic. I then did some work which started out trying to evaluate (and as it turned out usually rebut) all published critiques of Nostratic, many quite obscure, that I was able to find (except Vine's, which I intended to deal with separately). I think I did manage to deal with all the arguments involving typological issues in a paper in JIES not too long ago, and many otheres elsewhere, but a few may remain. (A series of replies to Ringe's series of attacks has started, too.) And in the process I found myself doing two other things I had not envisioned: (a) criticizing more and more of the I-S and Dolgopolsky work and (b) making some proposals of my own for improving on it or adding to it. A couple of years ago I had all but convinced myself that Nostratic, or at least the cluster IE-Uralic-Altaic, was really related, but was too ill to publish the arguments (some of them were publicized by George Johnson in the New York Times, and some are discussed in the paper in the Joseph-Salmons anthology). Some other bits appear in various papers, and some remain unpublished. Most recently, Dolgopolsky has published a little book which makes me cringe and which almost convinced me that Nostratic was all a matter of a set of coincidences and a set of very old borrowings. On the heels of the book, Lord Renfrew and others organized a conference on Nostratic whose proceedings will be out soon. Also, Brian Joseph and Joe Salmons, two honorable and excellent Indo-Europeanists, put out an anthology of papers pro, con, and on Nostratic based mostly on the Ypsilanti conference of a number of years ago. And I cannot see how the main journals will be able to avoid reviewing it, so some word will surely go out now. Also, even as some of the so few people working on Nostratic have been dropping out (not usually of their own choice), a small number of excellent minds from different backgrounds have in various ways come to deal with Nostratic. If I have made any real contribution, in fact, it is having gotten Peter Michalove to work on Nostratic, and having gotten Bill Baxter (in my view one of the best linguists, esp. historical linguists in the US) and Christopher Hitchcock (a philosopher of science at Cal Tech) to grapple (with some small help from me) with the mathematical (or as I hold voodoo mathematical) attacks that have been on Nostratic, esp. by Ringe. Of course, there are other names too that should be mentioned, esp. perhaps those of the people (usually quite misguided in my view) whom Joseph and Salmons got to write anti-Nostratic papers for the anthology, e.g., Lyle Campbell, Brent Vine again, etc., and the various people (whom I have not had the pleasure to meet, due to illness) whom Renfrew et al. assembled at their recent conference. (5) So what families belong to Nostratic? In I-S's formulation, IE, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian. But there are many variations on this, though I think IE, Altaic, and Uralic are part of all schemes. END OF PART 1. If there is interest and I can find eht energy, there will be a part 2 later. Alexis MR From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 1 02:57:02 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 21:57:02 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Clyde A. Winters wrote: [snip] > linguistics as it is practiced today does not always > appear to rely on science. Science depends on hypothesis testing and > experimentation. As pointed out in the Goddard example, the data can be > interpreted in both a positive or negative way, but given the stature of > Goddard his views were accepted. I do plan to say in my reply to Campbell's critique of my work on relating Comecrudan to the further languages Cotoname and Coahuilteco (and even further to Karankawa) that he accepts Goddard's Comecrudan on the basis of data which he then turns out and rejects when I use them as a (tiny) part of my case for my groupings (Pakawan and Pakawa-Karankawan alias Coahuiltecan, as I call them), and I do not dispute that personal factors may have had a role. But things are not simple. For example, I think it is not so much a matter of stature as of familiarity. Also, only very few linguists have actually LOOKED at the question. And most importantly it is a well known fact that in every science this kind of thing goes on. The real question is whether linguistics is any worse than physics or biology say at the kind of long-run self-correction that Carl Sagan took to be the hallmark of science--to me, one of the few useful ideas about what makes science science out of the BIllions and BIllions that various scholars have proposed (sorry). I think the answer is clearly yes. In some ways, we may even be better. But it takes time, and it takes jobs and money for people to do the relevant research. The wholesale destruction of comparative and esp. classificatory ling. programs in so many universities in the US and some other countries makes that process difficult, of course, but in principle I think linguistics does OK on this score. [snip] > Yet in many > cases, views regarding the results obtained by some linguistists > advocating the relationship between language A and B, are rejected due to > the methods of intuition and authority, rather than a rigorous > falsification of the hypothesis rejected by the "experts", for example > the Nostratic Hypothesis. > For someone who has spent a lot of time and energy I really could not afford to spend first arguing that Nostratic not be simply ignored to death and then that it might actually be right, there is some temptation to agree with this. But it is a temptation one must resist. There are some very good reasons why few experts accept Nostratic. The best is that there are few people who are experts in the relevant field(s). The fact that many people who have no right whatever to address the question have nevertheless made all kinds of loud pronouncements, e.g., in textbooks, is a pity, but that is something that happens in every science, I think. And even real experts are often wrong, in every science. Nor is it either uncommon or unreasonable for people to trust other people, who are thought to be good scientists. Just recently, someone has written a book arguing that modern theoretical physics is totally based on the trust a small number of people have in each other's claims, because it has become impractical to replicate the crucial experiments on a wide scale. The real question is whether (a) it is possible to break the wall of silence surrounding (real) Nostratic, and (b) in the long run arrive at a rational decision based on fact. The jury of necessity is still out. The fact is too that Nostratic research has been slow and halting, and that much of it has been of poor quality. It also has not helped that proponents of Nostratic have tended to be too bombastic in their claims. And lastly it helps not at all that Nostratic is much more often talked about in various forums, e.g., electronic lists, buy people who as far as I know have done no research at all or at least not anything the rest of us would regard as research on the subject. AMR From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Mon Feb 1 12:20:55 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 07:20:55 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > There may be cases where we would like to say this. Eastern > Armenian Romany is the classic example, although recent > surveys of the topic tend to focus on other examples > (Mitchif, Copper Island Aleut, etc.). The W. European Jewish > language known as Loshnekoudesh (apparently also once used in > at least one Christian village in Bavaria) and distinct > from Yiddish (it is in fact a mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew > in the way that EAR is a mix of Romany and Armenian, > Mitchif of French and Cree, etc.) is one that I don't > think is EVER cited, but it happens to be the only of these > which I have studied in some detail, so I thought I'd > put in a plug. It would be possible to make similar ones for language families. For example, Semitic would have two parents (one of them the African branch) and the other parent would be also the parent or ancestor of IE. Turkic would have two parents, one of them proto-Euphratic (from Landsberger) and the other some Altaic language. This would fit in with population movements over the the last 12,000 years or so when the glaciers started melting. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Mon Feb 1 12:22:28 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 07:22:28 EST Subject: what is the verdict? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It says that this is a response to Larry Trask, but it isn't. Larry Trask wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Alexis Manaster Ramer writes: > > [snip quote of me claiming that comparative linguistics is hard] > > > While I respect Larry and we usually agree about a lot of stuff, this is > > just plain wrong, and I think it is a cop-out typical of the people who > > like to criticize work on language classification but who rarely do it > > themselves and who also seem to be reluctant to discussing specific > > examples such as those I have repeatedly cited. I agree completely with Alexis Manaster-Ramer (AMR) and the basis of reasoning called probability theory and the methods based on it, usually lumped under the name "statistics" support AMR and what I say. IT is not just a cop-out but an insult to the profession to claim that they are too stupid to understand what can be taught to freshman and sophomore pscyhology, and computer science students. Economists, students of finance, sociologists all learn basic quantitative reasoning based on probability theory. If I wrote anything resembling this kind of an insult to the linguistics community, I would probably be evicted from every list. I have some works before me which are written by linguists. Bender, Marvin, "Chance CVC correspondences in unrelated languages", Language, No. 45, 1969, pp.519-531 Cowan, H. "Statistical determination of linguistic relationships', Studia Linguistics, 16, 1962, pp.57-96 Greenberg, J. 'A qualitative approach to morphological typology of language', IJAL, vol. 26, No.3, July 1960, pp.179-194 Embleton, S. Statistics in Historical Linguistics, Studienverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer, Bochum, 1986. Fox, A. Linguistic Reconstruction; An Introduction to Theory and Method, Oxford University Press, 1995 Lass, Roger, 'How realist are reconstructions?", in Historical Linguistics, edited by Charles Jones, Longman, 1993 Ohala, J. 'Phonetics of sound change', same book edited by C. Jones Nichols, J. 'The comparative method as Heuristic', edited by Ross and Durie. Ringe, D., 'Nostratic and the Factor of Chance', Diachronica XII: 55-74,1995 Lass, R. Historical Linguistics, 1998 Ringe, D. On Calculating the Factor of Chance in Language Comparison, American Philological Society, vol. 82, part 1, 1992 Hubey, H.M., Mathematical and Computational Linguistics, Mir Domu Tvoemu, Moscow,1994. Everyone of these seems to say something about chance and the historical method. For example, according to Cowan (see above) you only need 3 pairs of CVC syllables to establish geneticity. According to Greenberg (see above) you only need 3-4 pairs, and according to Bender (see above) you need somewhere between 2 and 7. I am sure J. Nichols, who is probably on this list has probably also calculated some numbers. What I am interested in is how many pairs are needed. How many? PS. To Georg, The Fox book on p. 240 has a Sanskrit word 'uccakka' (meaning 'high') which is practically identical to Turkic uch (fly) and uc (end of some material thing). Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Mon Feb 1 12:23:04 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 07:23:04 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances, etc. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I so rarely agree with anything Johanna says and vice versa > (in THIS area at least, for I like most of her work in ....J.Nichols wrote > > were the entirety of our data on those three languages, we would be > > justified in considering relatedness to be probable. For each of > > the seven glosses, at least two and often all three of the languages > > have resemblant forms; for each of the languages, each word resembles > > one or both of those of the other languages. > > > This is THE most important point, although absolute numbers cannot > be completely ignored (one of our small disagreements). Is it possible to get a summary of what this particular agreement is about? Thank you. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From Georg at home.ivm.de Mon Feb 1 12:42:59 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 07:42:59 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >I can and you know that, because I have named him in various >postings in discussions you were involved in (and in print, >but who has time to read!?). Gerhard Doerfer is certainly >a better known name in hist ling than yours or mine, and >he did for many years claim precisely that Semitic is not >related to Cushitic, he then seemed a couple of yearsago >to take it back (to my great relief), but I have reason to >believe he in fact did not mean to take it back and still >holds that opinion. But I am not 100% sure. But, Alexis, while you know me to admire Doerfer even more then you do (;-) ?), I don't see a reason for mentioning his name in the context of AA. It is true that he said those things. But is also true that he has never worked on it (he knows Arabic well, but that's it), he just voiced his general doubts on AA in some footnotes or footnote-like passages, trying to fight critique against his anti-Altaistic positions off. He may have been ill-advised to do this, but his claims to this effect *do not play a single role* in AA studies. I take it that, while every Altaicist - pro or con - knows Doerfer, there may be excellent AA'ists who have never heard his name. And they don't have to, for G.D. is simply not one of them and never wished to be. Actually, though I hate to say this in public about a scholar whom I regard in many respects as a (semi-) teacher of mine, what Doerfer said on AA was simply uninformed nonsense. Why quote it ? AA is really, to the best of my knowledge, uncontroversial today, i.e. with those people who know enough about the issue to have a say in it. By your procedure, you'd require everything, for which the smallest voice of dissent may exist somewhere - well-informed or not - , to be called "controversial". What then isn't ? Is the proposal of a Basque - Armenian connection (to the exclusion of IE) "controversial" ? At least one person out there holds it (and I think only one, and this was on an e-mail list, but these things *do* sometimes get published !). If I write in one of my next papers that I don't really understand what makes people believe in the validity of such an abominable thing as "Algonquian", while everybody knows that Cree is Siouan, Menomini Na-Dene and Fox Sino-Tibetan, will you call Alg. "controversial" and point people to what I've written ? No, you'll drop me a note and ask me whether I'm feeling OK and (hopefully) forget about the issue, assuming I was temporarily out of my mind (if I'm lucky !). Is Sino-Tibetan controversial (Roy A. Miller fights it ruthlessly, but he seems to be the only one) ? Is Uralic (Doerfer in his younger days was quite skeptical about it, but again without having actually worked on it) ? Is Indo-European (remember Trubetzkoy !) ? Let's stop this futile discussion, if I don't think that two or more languages are related, I say so, assuming that everyone listening to me is educated and intelligent enough to know that I'm a human being only and by this virtue - fallible. Everybody who asks around will find that there are actually people who do believe that, say, Altaic is valid grouping. I happen not to. And when I say "No, I don't think it is", this is an accurate information. About what I think, that is. Even saying "It isn't" is not more than that. Every intelligent and truly interested person will then go on asking me what makes me so positive about it, and I'll have no choice but to mention all those names, including yours, who hold different views. If I'm not asked further, so what, then the asker doesn't deserve better. What's the problem with that ? St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 1 21:21:05 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 16:21:05 EST Subject: Nostratic, Afro-Asiatic, and so on (fwd) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dorothy, hi, Peter Michalove can't seem to be able to post the attached and asked me to forward it.Thanks. Alexis **Peter writes:** The recent exchanges on this list have brought up a number of important points and, despite some of the rhetoric used in the heat of battle, some ideas are firming up that I think everyone would agree with. First, Alexis has pointed out that there have been a number of very well-informed scholars who have done their homework, and have been convinced of, or at least sympathetic to some incarnation of a Nostratic family. Thus to dismiss any genetic connection between IE and Semitic (or more properly Afroasiatic) without any reference to the Nostratic theory would be misleading. The correct answer, as Alexis pointed out, is simply that it's controversial. Alexis' excellent summary of the history of Nostratic research explains some of the reasons why many scholars may not be aware of it, or may have only read somewhere that it's absurd and deserves no further consideration. But there's another factor too. In reality, there has been (and continues to be) a huge number of uninformed proposals of language connections suggested between, say, Basque and Tagalog (as Larry Trask can well attest), and most of these just aren't worth considering or even responding to. So we live in an environment where otherwise busy scholars are used to dismissing such hair-brained ideas. The point to make here is that Nostratic (even if it ultimately turns out to be a chimera) is presently worthy of substantially more serious consideration than the latest Basque-Tagalog theory. It is taken seriously by a large number of scholars who have studied the languages involved. And there's a substantial body of literature on it (of greatly varying quality) that can be evaluated on its own merits. Going back a step (in the thread), Larry mentioned that when we speak of "related" languages, that's simply shorthand for "languages shown to be related and accepted as such by scholars who have worked in that area." I agree that's a mouthful, and I humbly suggest "demonstrably related" as a convenient expression. Of course that still begs the question of "demonstrably related to whose satisfaction?" but it does define the question, which is a step forward. And finally, I'd like to bring up a point that's been alluded to here, but needs to be stated explicitly: If you're going to propose a relationship among some set of languages, OR if you're going to say, "No, the evidence just isn't there to support such a claim," IN EITHER CASE you first have to make the effort to learn something (actually quite a lot) about the languages involved. An exception to this might be the case in which a critic who is only knowledgeable about part of the data offers an analysis of the part of the proposal with which he's familiar. An example is Larry's criticism of the Dene-Caucasian proposal, in which he limits himself to discussing Basque forms compared that may be loans, incorrectly segmented, etc. Larry has never claimed any expertise in Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski, and the other language families involved. Similarly, Brent Vine in his critiques of Nostratic has scrupulously confined himself to discussion of the data about which he is knowledgeable, the Indo-European portion. And proponents of both hypotheses agree that the constructive criticism of Trask and Vine has been a positive thing, the kind of thing we need more of. It goes without saying that open-minded scholars can study the evidence and honestly come to different interpretations. Unfortunately though, much of the criticism of Nostratic has come from people who reject the entire thing despite their limited background, without examining the data. Or much worse, those who say it simply can't be done, so the data is a priori meaningless. In fact, if you take the effort to learn about the data involved, you'll find much that can justifiably be criticized in all the versions of Nostratic that have been put forward so far. But it's only through that kind of informed criticism that we can make any headway in seeing if there's something persuasive there despite the noise, of if there isn't. Peter A. Michalove Assistant to the Head Department of Geology University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (217) 244-3190 peterm at hercules.geology.uiuc.edu Peter A. Michalove Assistant to the Head Department of Geology University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (217) 244-3190 peterm at hercules.geology.uiuc.edu From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 1 21:17:19 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 16:17:19 EST Subject: Mixed Languages In-Reply-To: <36B53502.C20A3E15@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mark Hubey responds to my posting wherein I said that while mixed languages (like Mitchif, Loshnekoudesh etc.) do exist, there is no sense in treating Semitic as one, saying: On Mon, 1 Feb 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > It would be possible to make similar ones for language families. > For example, Semitic would have two parents (one of them the > African branch) and the other parent would be also the parent > or ancestor of IE. Turkic would have two parents, one of them > proto-Euphratic (from Landsberger) and the other some Altaic > language. This would fit in with population movements over the > the last 12,000 years or so when the glaciers started melting. It is NOT possible to say that because neither Semitic nor Turkic exhibit any signs whatever of being mexied languages like the ones I mentioned. Once again, I ask Mark to leave linguistics to linguists or at least those who, without having degrees in linguistics, have mastered the literature and the craft (like Dr. Michalove for example--another personal hero of mine). AMR From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Mon Feb 1 14:51:52 1999 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 09:51:52 EST Subject: end of discussion Message-ID: Dear colleagues, Once again discussion has hit a brick wall. I don't see that the discussion about genetic relationships can go any further -- I think that we must simply agree to disagree and drop the topic, at least from formal postings on HISTLING. Discussion of other topics is, of course, welcome. Dorothy Disterheft From manaster at umich.edu Tue Feb 2 02:46:27 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 21:46:27 EST Subject: Arabic and IE (response to Dr. Georg) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Mon, 1 Feb 1999, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: > But, Alexis, while you know me to admire Doerfer even more then you do (;-) > ?), I don't see a reason for mentioning his name in the context of AA. It > is true that he said those things [sc. that Semitic is not derived from the same source as Cushitic--AMR] > But is also true that he has never > worked on it (he knows Arabic well, but that's it), I pointed that out myself. > he just voiced his > general doubts on AA in some footnotes or footnote-like passages, trying to > fight critique against his anti-Altaistic positions off I dispute this too. These are central points in his work, e.g., his famous paper on Japanese and Altaic, and they are not responses to criticism but rather a crucial part of HIS attack on Altaic. His arguments against Altaic take the form of certain universal claims about what lg families MUST look like (e.g., that in a REAL lg family the word for '2' through '5' must be cognate throughout the family) and the further claim that Altaic does not satisfy the universal, therefore is not a real family. For these arguments to work, AA, Uralic, IE (and some other lg families which even Sally Thomason or Larry Trask would probably accept as real but which Doerfer does not discuss) would HAVE to be spurious because they also do not satisfy his universal claims. Of course, the reality is that AA, IE, Uralic, etc. (AND Altaic) are real families. It is Doerfer's universals that are nonsense. Same thing re various arguments of Serebrennikov, Shcherbak, Clauson, and others against Altaic. And in my view the same thing applies to the methodological claims of Lyle Campbell, Ives Goddard, Sally Thomason, Donald Ringe, Johanna Nichols, and some others. They make up various methodological rules for comparative linguistics, then claim (sometimes correctlty, often not) that these rules were flouted in the setting of proposed language families they do not like (e.g., Nostratic or Pakawan), and hence think they have an argument that these families are spurious. But, of course, as I (and others) have shown time and again, if you took these rules seriously, then IE and AA and Niger-Kordofanian and many other lg families we all accept would have to be rejected too. Of course, it is particularly nice when we find that one and the same person has him/herself done work which would have to be thrown out if these methodological principles were really valid, as in the case of Goddard clearly and Hamp almost as clearly. But that is not essential./ It is essential that we learn that a proposed linguistic universal (as in Doerfer's work) OR a proposed methodological principle (as in Campbell's, Goddard's, etc.) is violated by some of the most widely accepted lg families such as IE, AA, Uto-Aztecan, etc., etc. The logic is the same. > He may have been > ill-advised to do this, but his claims to this effect *do not play a single > role* in AA studies. I take it that, while every Altaicist - pro or con - > knows Doerfer, there may be excellent AA'ists who have never heard his > name. And they don't have to, for G.D. is simply not one of them and never > wished to be. Actually, though I hate to say this in public about a scholar > whom I regard in many respects as a (semi-) teacher of mine, what Doerfer > said on AA was simply uninformed nonsense. Why quote it ? You are right about the premises but not the conclusion. It IS uninformed nonsense. But you only feel free to say that because Doerfer is not a well-known American linguist active on this list. But it is clear from what I have said in this and earlier postings (and in print) that the claims of Thomason, Campbell, Goddard, Hamp, Nichols, Trask, and others are no better informed and no more sensible. And THAT of course is why I mention Doerfer. Because people are blinded by sociological factors such as prestige, familiarity, etc., and so accept statements from people like these which really should be actionable in a court of law. So I am trying to wake you and others up by a cheap rhetorical trick. If I can get you to accept that what Doerfer says is uninformed nonsense (you words, not mine), then show you that what he says is no better than what yourself hold or what Thomason, Trask, et al. propound, then perhaps you will draw the inevitable conclusion. For example, Ringe has no more right to say ANYTHING about probability than Doerfer does about Afro-Asiatic and what he does say (to the applause of the opinion makers in the field) is no more correct. Nichols has no more right to say ANYTHING about Altaic than D about AA and again what she does say (as you and I jointly show in a paper with Michalove and Sidwell in JL) is no more correct. Trask SURELY has no right to say ANYTHING about the many lg families he does hold forth on than Doerfer on AA, and again what he does say is no more correct. But I do not hear saying in public that they all (and sometimes you) are talking uninformed nonsense. But fair is fair. And my cheap trick WILL work, and one day soon you will (unless you are censored). > AA is really, to > the best of my knowledge, uncontroversial today, i.e. with those people who > know enough about the issue to have a say in it. If you mean by people whom I would consider competent. But some (maybe many) Semiticist think they are compoetent and they do question or even openly reject AA. And this is relevant because there is a widespread feeling that someone who knows a lg has therefore some insight into this lg's genetic connections. So that an IEnist is assumed to be competent to speak about Nostratic, a Turkologist about Altaic, and so on. Larry Trask just told us on another list that people he calls Caucanists are competent to speak as to whether East Caucasian and West Caucasian families are related to each other. But he includes people who work on the phonetics or syntax of Caucasian languages, without inquring as to whether they do any comparative linguistics. On THIS list Trask said something about how Goddard and Campbell may somehow because of their knowledge of American Indian languages in general be able to see why Comecrudan is a valid family even though he Trask does not. But how exactly does Lyle's work on Uto-Aztecanm or Mayan or Ives's on Algonquioan give them an insight into Comecrudan? Just because it is the same continent? Does someone who knows Hungarian very well thereby become an expert on the classification of the languages of Eurasia? Does someone who knows Arabic become an expert on the languages of Africa? Does Chomsky, who I happen to know from personal experience knows English and Hebrew, have a right to speak as to whether IE and Semitic are related? Of course, not. And he does not pretend to. So why do we applaud people who speak of probability who do not understand things taught in Statistics 101, people who speak about the methods of linguistic classification who have never done any work on classifying anything, people who tell us that IE is unrelated to Afro-Asiatic who have never read a page of Illich-Svitych and/or use their power to prevent the review and discussion of his work? Why? Why? Why? Because of the banality of error (the title of a book I will finish when I recover from my current illness, so please dont nobody steal it). It is all too easy to acquiesce in error which is all around us and supported by prestige and familiarity. THAT is why I mention Doerfer and Afro-Asiatic. He is not as prestigious OR familiar to THIS audience (although IN HIS OWN BAILIWICK he is a truly great historical linguist) and so it is easier to see and admit that he is talking "uninformed nonsense". And that then makes it possible to see that he is not alone... > of dissent may exist somewhere - well-informed or not - , to be called > "controversial". The equality of women, the right of the people of Timor to independence, the evolution of species, these all ARE controversial. We cannot unfortunately SAY they are not and let the forces of darkness take over. I am sure S. J. Gould has better things to do than fight the creationists, but he has no choice, and he certainly cannot make them disappear by saying they do not exist. > What then isn't ? Is the proposal of a Basque - Armenian > connection (to the exclusion of IE) "controversial" ? At least one person > out there holds it (and I think only one, and this was on an e-mail list, > but these things *do* sometimes get published !). If that person were running the official journal of the Linguistic Society or writing a widely used textbook or encyclopedia of lx, you would HAVE to deal with it, as Gould deals with creationism and as I try to deal with, say, Ringe's "probabilities". As it is, you don't have to worry about him (her?) TOO much. If it DOES get published, well, I have an easy criterion: if it is published ina journal which refuses to publish or review work on Nostratic, then you DO have a responsibility to fight. Otherwise, you have no moral responsibility as far as I can see. > If I write in one of my > next papers that I don't really understand what makes people believe in the > validity of such an abominable thing as "Algonquian", while everybody knows > that Cree is Siouan, Menomini Na-Dene and Fox Sino-Tibetan, will you call > Alg. "controversial" and point people to what I've written ? No, you'll > drop me a note and ask me whether I'm feeling OK and (hopefully) forget > about the issue, assuming I was temporarily out of my mind (if I'm lucky !). Of course. But I have written you such notes re your opposition to Altaic, I have tried patiently to explain about Nostratic and the Nostraticists to Sally Thomason. I have tried patiently to teach Ringe some elementary mathematics. I have tried sending notes to Larry Trask and I have spent hours with Eric Hamp. It does not work, though. But discussions like the present one MAY. > Is Sino-Tibetan controversial (Roy A. Miller fights it ruthlessly, but he > seems to be the only one) ? I seem to recall Sagart attacking ST as well. Certainly the state of ST lx is not satisfactory. Is Uralic (Doerfer in his younger days was > quite skeptical about it, but again without having actually worked on it) ? > Is Indo-European (remember Trubetzkoy !) ? > I mentioned both of these myself. > Let's stop this futile discussion, if I don't think that two or more > languages are related, I say so, assuming that everyone listening to me is > educated and intelligent enough to know that I'm a human being only and by > this virtue - fallible. Eric Hamp has noted in print that you should NOT say that. I defer to him on this point. > Everybody who asks around will find that there are > actually people who do believe that, say, Altaic is valid grouping. I > happen not to. And when I say "No, I don't think it is", this is an > accurate information. About what I think, that is. Even saying "It isn't" > is not more than that. Every intelligent and truly interested person will > then go on asking me what makes me so positive about it, and I'll have no > choice but to mention all those names, including yours, who hold different > views. If I'm not asked further, so what, then the asker doesn't deserve > better. > What's the problem with that ? > None, IF the asker knows that you are just expressing YOUR opinion and that the issue is controversial. But then why would (s)he ask? Certainly the person who asked whether Arabic might be related to IE did not know that the people to tried to misinform him were merely expressing THEIR opinion and that the question was controversial. I am not sure they themselves knew that either. That's why I posted my long posting about Nostratic. Alexis From J.Hope at mdx.ac.uk Wed Feb 3 12:19:21 1999 From: J.Hope at mdx.ac.uk (Jonathan Hope) Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1999 07:19:21 EST Subject: Research Studentships In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Research Studentships The School of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University, London, UK is offering four fully funded three-year research studentships (incorporating maintenance grant �6,855, teaching bursary �1,200 and full-time fees) in English Studies. The studentships will be in two fields: English literature, drama, language and culture of the early modern period; and twentieth century fiction, especially that of the later century, with particular emphasis on issues of gender and sexuality. As a potential supervisor of successful applicants, I would be very interested in hearing from students with an interest in pursuing a PhD topic on any aspect of Early Modern English (literary or non-literary). I have just begun a research project in collaboration with the Arden Shakespeare, and would hope that anyone taking up a studentship in this area would wish to become involved. Please feel free to contact me informally: J.Hope at mdx.ac.uk For further information and application forms please contact: Anna Pavlakos, School of Humanities and Cultural Studies, Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR, UK. email: a.pavlakos at mdx.ac.uk tel.: 0181 362 5363 Jonathan Hope Middlesex University From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu Thu Feb 4 12:57:01 1999 From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 07:57:01 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Mon, 1 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > Is Sino-Tibetan controversial (Roy A. Miller fights it ruthlessly, but he > > seems to be the only one) ? > > I seem to recall Sagart attacking ST as well. Certainly the > state of ST lx is not satisfactory. Hmmm ... "not satisfactory"? You could say that about any language family, I suppose. I won't be satisfied with Indo-European until there's some consensus on the subgrouping of the major branches, for example. And the state of Altaic linguistics has been discussed often enough here, and elsewhere ... But if you mean to imply that there is serious room for doubt about the genetic unity of Sino-Tibetan, I don't think that's the case. The older opposition to the idea stems primarily from a gross misunderstanding of the relevance of typology. I can't imagine that on this list we have to go very far into the argument that Chinese and Tibeto-Burman can't be related because they are so typologically dissimilar, or the converse (often held by exactly the same people) that Chinese must be related to Tai because they are so typologically congruent. More legitimately, I've heard the argument made (by Chris Beckwith, I think, among others, though he shouldn't be held hostage to my imperfect memory) that ST can't be considered *proven* because the lack of morphology in Chinese makes it impossible to find the kind of nice syntagmatic and paradigmatic morphological correspondences that make us so confident of Indo-European or Semitic or Algic. This of course isn't really an argument *against* ST unity, only a healthy cautionary note. But let us remember that at least certain morphological *processes* can be reconstructed for pre-Old Chinese which are strikingly parallel to attested TB morphology, most strikingly an *-s suffix with a range of functions, especially derivation of nouns. Since this morphology is derivational, and was already somewhat decayed and hence unsystematic at the earliest stage of Chinese which we can reconstruct, no one has been able to find much in the way of paradigmatic sets of cognates, but there are lots of cognate sets where a one form in Chinese corresponds to one of a set in Tibetan, or vice versa. As for Sagart, he is indeed convinced that the Chinese-TB link is a chimaera, but as far as I know he is the only working Sino-Tibetan linguist who takes that view, and I cannot for the life of me see what his argument is. (And I'm far from alone in that). On the one hand, he has identified some significant Austronesian elements in the Chinese vocabulary, but this is hardly surprising (or new; Tsu-lin Mei and Jerry Norman pointed some of that out 30 years ago). And he would like to build a case for a special genetic relationship between Chinese and Austronesian, which would indeed require splitting Chinese off from TB. But I have to say that the few arguments I've seen of his *against* ST are not impressive, to put it diplomatically. Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Thu Feb 4 13:27:27 1999 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 08:27:27 EST Subject: LISTSERV problems Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, On Tuesday, February 2, we experienced some LISTSERV problems here. which resulted in all of the posted messages being lost. Please, if you sent me something to post on Tuesday, would you send it again so that it may be distributed? I would very much appreciate this. I myself posted a message to HISTLING on Tuesday, which never was distributed. It acknowledged the fact that several people wrote to me, asking if I would reconsider my decision to cut off discussion of genetic language families. In particular, they wanted to read Part Two of Alexis Manaster Ramer's promised posting on Nostratic. My message on Tuesday told list members that I would have AMR post his Part Two, and that they should continue discussion of the topic, as long as their contributions remained relevant to historical linguistics, were not redundant, and were of reasonable length. The fact that Tuesday's message was lost explains the fact that I have continued to post messages on this topic despite Monday's announcement. Dorothy Disterheft From manaster at umich.edu Thu Feb 4 22:01:11 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 17:01:11 EST Subject: Sum: Yakhontov's principle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Does anybody have the list of 65 meanings which belong in part 2 of Yakhontov's hypothesis? AMR From jrader at m-w.com Thu Feb 4 22:00:03 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 17:00:03 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In reference to Tsu-Lin Mei and Jerry Norman, I think you mean Austroasiatic rather than Austronesian, don't you? The article I have a reference to is "The Austroasiatics in ancient south China: some lexical evidence" (_Monumenta Serica_ 32 [1976], p. 274-301). Jim Rader > > As for Sagart, he is indeed convinced that the Chinese-TB link is > a chimaera, but as far as I know he is the only working Sino-Tibetan > linguist who takes that view, and I cannot for the life of me see > what his argument is. (And I'm far from alone in that). On the > one hand, he has identified some significant Austronesian elements > in the Chinese vocabulary, but this is hardly surprising (or new; > Tsu-lin Mei and Jerry Norman pointed some of that out 30 years ago). > And he would like to build a case for a special genetic relationship > between Chinese and Austronesian, which would indeed require splitting > Chinese off from TB. But I have to say that the few arguments I've > seen of his *against* ST are not impressive, to put it diplomatically. > > Scott DeLancey > Department of Linguistics > University of Oregon > Eugene, OR 97403, USA > > delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu > http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html > From manaster at umich.edu Thu Feb 4 21:58:58 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 16:58:58 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Scott DeLancey wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Mon, 1 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > > > Is Sino-Tibetan controversial (Roy A. Miller fights it ruthlessly, but he > > > seems to be the only one) ? > > > > I seem to recall Sagart attacking ST as well. Certainly the > > state of ST lx is not satisfactory. > > Hmmm ... "not satisfactory"? You could say that about any language > family, I suppose. I won't be satisfied with Indo-European until > there's some consensus on the subgrouping of the major branches, > for example. And the state of Altaic linguistics has been discussed > often enough here, and elsewhere ... I was afraid of that. Just as Hockett got yelled at twenty years ago or so for pointing out scandalous state of Athapaskan or Nadene linguistics (I think I have this right). As I point out in my Part 2 (to appear here soon), all too briefly, I agree re IE (but not because of the branching so much as because of the all-too-great disregard for the regularity of sound laws, morphological analysis, and semantic responsibility even there). Altaic the same story but more so, except that I do not see how anyone can deny that the Altaic languages are related, which is distinct from questioning the validity of the current reconstructions (which leave a lot to be desired obviously than Altaic does). But what I meant was precisely that just as people who doubt Altaic altogther seem to be misled by this very elementary cnfusion and say in effect that if the current reconstruction is so bad (this of course was true 20 or 30 years ago much more than now) than the whole family is in doubt, so too I think that the few critics of ST are really reaction to the unsatisfactory state of the actual work on ST (and again just as in Altaic to some extent I suspect that Miller is reacting to ST as it was some decades ago esp. to Benedict's work much as the anti-Altaicists are still really responding to the errors of Ramstedt in the 50s and Poppe in the 60s). I myself to the extent that I have a right to an opinion (which being a mere mortal who can barely read a little Chinese and has no Tibetan or any other ST language at all, though I did once know a bit of whatever the language of Mizoram is called (Mizo is it) but have now forgotten it down to the last morpheme is a very small extent) do not qustion the validity of ST, and have repeatedly urged Sagart (and just the other day Miller) to reconsider. But does anybody listen? I certainly support 100% Baxter's recent elegant demonstration of (a) how obviously ST lgs must be related and (b) how to do probabilistic testing of language relatedness if you are gonna do it at all --though I do not in general believe the latter is (so far anyway) at all necessary or (more to the point) useful. But Benedict's methods and those of other ST scholars have not been free of problems. > > But if you mean to imply that there is serious room for doubt about the > genetic unity of Sino-Tibetan, I don't think that's the case. I dont mean to imply that. I agree with you, as far as I am entitled to say anything about ST. > The > older opposition to the idea stems primarily from a gross misunderstanding > of the relevance of typology. I can't imagine that on this list we > have to go very far into the argument that Chinese and Tibeto-Burman > can't be related because they are so typologically dissimilar, or > the converse (often held by exactly the same people) that Chinese > must be related to Tai because they are so typologically congruent. I agree about the early history of the subject (I have written something on this general problem in East/SE Asian languages though I talked by the Maspero brothers' celebrated obsessions with separating "tonal" from "atonal" languages (as in Austroasiatic) rather than with ST), but I do not agree about this list. Sure, in theory, everybody knows that typology has no place in lg classification. But I dont think this is so in practice necessarily. I would think that some of the opposition to Nostratic also has in part typological roots. > > More legitimately, I've heard the argument made (by Chris Beckwith, > I think, among others, though he shouldn't be held hostage to my > imperfect memory) that ST can't be considered *proven* because the > lack of morphology in Chinese makes it impossible to find the kind > of nice syntagmatic and paradigmatic morphological correspondences > that make us so confident of Indo-European or Semitic or Algic. Thank you very much for bringing this up. I have both in print and here excoriated Godard and others for this false methodological "principle" which seems to go to a paper in which Meillet got carried away in his fight with Kroeber and asserted it but later even Meillet saw he was wrong and specifically said that it is the languages of E Asia that show that the principle is a false one--although he underestimated the role of morphology in E Asia. > This of course isn't really an argument *against* ST unity, only > a healthy cautionary note. Not even that. It is simply a false principle. Of course, more evidence is always better than less and morphology usually makes for better evidence but that is a matter of detail not of principle. We have know this ever since Rask and it is one of the things we really do know and which will not change. > But let us remember that at least > certain morphological *processes* can be reconstructed for pre-Old > Chinese which are strikingly parallel to attested TB morphology, > most strikingly an *-s suffix with a range of functions, especially > derivation of nouns. Totally. That's just what I was alluding to. But it would be nice if thre really WERE no morphology in Pre-Old chinese to compare to TB languages, for the sake of the theoretical points, But Comecrudan will make the same point. [snip] > > As for Sagart, he is indeed convinced that the Chinese-TB link is > a chimaera, but as far as I know he is the only working Sino-Tibetan > linguist who takes that view, and I cannot for the life of me see > what his argument is. (And I'm far from alone in that). I have argued with Sagart too, many times. But I would like to say something sociological here. I have attended ST meetings but I know Sagart as well as some leading ST people (I knew Benedict too) and I have seen Sagart argue with e.g. Baxter at other meetings and I have seen the literature where the debate about Chinese-TB vs. Chinese-Austronesian goes on and I am impressed by the professional and scholarly tone of teh debate, no matter how ANNOYED most of you must be with Sagart and how FRUSTRATED he must be so alone. This is such a sharp and refreshing contrast to the tone of similar debates elsewhere in this field that I think it important to call attention to. No one as far as I can see calls for "shouting down" Sagart, as campbell famously did Greenberg, no one villifies and libels the other side, above all no one tries to suppress and censor the discussion of opposing viewpoints as has so long been the case with Nostratic where as I said even to this day most journals will not admit that Illich-Svitych ever existed. > On the > one hand, he has identified some significant Austronesian elements > in the Chinese vocabulary, but this is hardly surprising (or new; > Tsu-lin Mei and Jerry Norman pointed some of that out 30 years ago). > And he would like to build a case for a special genetic relationship > between Chinese and Austronesian, which would indeed require splitting > Chinese off from TB. But I have to say that the few arguments I've > seen of his *against* ST are not impressive, to put it diplomatically. > I think they are incorrect too but he has in my opinion done an impressive job with so little and with a theory seems to me hopeless. He is a certainly an impressive scholar all around, although I think that his most important contribution by far, and which will one day revolutionize the study of ethnology and anthropology and indeed socail sciences generally (and bring them to the level of linguistics) is his study with Immanuel Todd on the prehistory of certain types of family structure in Eurasia. It is not linguistics but it uses methods first developed by linguists and opens up the possibility of an anthropological science no less successful and important than comparative linguistics. Alexis MR From manaster at umich.edu Thu Feb 4 21:54:29 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 16:54:29 EST Subject: Nostratic et al. Part 2: The Challenge Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dorothy has been kind enough to suggest I do a quick and brief (!) part 2, so I'll just say some things and refer y'all to the literature for more (on general issues, please see my paper with Michalove and Georg in the Annual Review of Anthro, just published). And I will only use less than third of the over 20K bytes of part 1. (1) Re Nostratic, please read Nostratic: Evidence and Status, ed. by Brian Joseph and Joe Salmons, out of Benjamins as well as my review of I-S's dictionary in Studies in Lg in 1993. In addition I can email the draft of Hitchcock's and my reply to Ringe's (highly acclaimed) voodoo-mathematical "refutation" of Nostratic to anybody who asks. As for my own views (which several people asked me about) on Nostratic, it struck me that in the recent Dolgopolsky book, which I do NOT recommend except if you run out of firewood, the best etyma for kinship terms are for in-laws, which, assuming exogamy, strongly hints of borrowing. For this and many other reasons published by me, a significant number of the supposed Nostratic etyma are old borrowings. However, some Nostratic comparisons are much less likely to be borrowings, incl. my own comparison of the IE words for FIVE, FINGER, and FIST (all themselves cognate within IE, as per Meillet and Saussure, but many IEnists dissent for reasons I cannot comprehend) with Altaic and Uralic words with various bodypart meanings but no numeral meaning. I see here a real Nostratic etymon: *payngo or something close to that. Perhaps because I discovered it, this (and some other things, of course, which there is no room for here) makes me ready now (as I never have before) to say that Nostratic (meaning IE, Uralic, and Altaic at least) is extremely probable and close to being a fact. (2) Re Altaic (the controversial language family comprising Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese-Ryukyuan), all I'll say say is (1) it is an accident of the sociology and psychology of a few crucial people that it is not as accepted as Uralic or IE, (2) for details, see the in-print paper by Georg, Michalove, Sidwell, and me "Telling General Linguists about Altaic" in Jo. of Linguistics, and the bibliography therein. and (3) it is unconscionable, as we spell out there, that some well-known general linguists with NO expertise in the field have been publishing disinformation about the debates within the Altaic field and that such people write book reviews and encyclopedia articles on comparative Altaic. (3) Re Pakawan, this is a small family of extinct Native American lgs of Texas and N Mexico which I posited and which includes Goddard's Comecrudan. Pakawan = Comecrudan + Coahuilteco + Cotoname. Pakawan is related to Karankawa, forming what I now call Pakawa-Karankawan. Sapir and Swanton (two leading classifiers and describers of N. American lgs a long time ago) claimed that these lgs were also related to Tonkawa and at times they included Atakapa. I exclude Tonkawa, and am unsure about Atakapa (Pam Munro of UCLA has some goodish arguments for Atakapa belonging elsewhere). The MAIN reason why these lgs are good to talk about is that the amount of data we have on them, while adequate, is manageable, and can be accessed by anyone with some basic skills in comparative linguistics (these being very similar in turn to the skills taught in generative phonology) and a week or so of free time. The data are found in just two or three places, which is convenient. All unpublished data known to exist are available from me by email, and will some day be published. (4) Some other controversial linguistic groupings which it would be nice, and not too difficult, to work on are: (a) Vovin's tentative linkage of Ainu to Austroasiatic (which I am sure is right) and Bengtson's proposal to link THAT to Nahali (which appeals me), (b) Diakonov's tentative(?) linkage of Sumerian to Austroasiatic (which also appeals to me), (c) Sapir's linkage of Haida to the rest of Nadene, endorsed by Pinnow and Greenberg and recently ably defended by someone with the same name as me (Anthropological Linguitstics 1996), (d) Eric Hamp's linkage of Hattic to IE (which I strongly doubt), (e) Swadesh and Hamp's linkage of Chukchee-Kamchatkan with Eskimo-Aleut (unless Michael Fortescue has already done it), (f) the competing North-Caucasian and IE linkages proposed for Etruscan, (g) Bengtson's proposals re Basque, North Caucasian, and Burushaski and Starostin's re North Caucasian and Yeniseyan (I leave out Sino-Tibetan cause then it is NOT manageable for mere mortals like me), and (h) Austronesian + Austroasiatic = Austric, as argued by various people every 20 years or so, Pater Wilhelm Schmidt being the first and recently L.V. Hays being of great importance. That's my challenge to y'all. Work one or more of these instead of perpetrating or merely repeating or even merely allowing others to perpetrate or teach, unchallenged, the pseudomethodological fabrications we keep hearing instead of real work, and perhaps as an excuse for not doing real work. I can't think of any other reasonably straightforward problems just now, but there are some I am forgetting. I do think it is a scandal that virtually no one is doing this yet, while so many are doing so much to malign the whole field of language classification and to do away with the teaching of comparative linguistics in universities, instead. (5) Of course, there are many other classification issues that need work, but most are not easily accessible. There ARE some simple mathematical issues that have not been solved and anyone who knows elementary probability theory and loves linguistics is invited. (6) Finally, I say that comparative linguistics of the OTHER kind, i.e., the one that deals not with classification but with the (pre)history of language families only minimally controversial like Indo-European, Dravidian, Uto-Aztecan, Kartvelian, Uralic, etc., is also full of manageable problems which remain unsolved because (oh no, don't say it !) quite simply most of the work being done in THIS field suffers from precisely the methodological problems which are laid by Trask, Thomason, et al. (usually incorrectly) at the door of the kind of linguistics that does deal with classification. The shoe is on the other foot, as I am prepared to document in detail if asked (and already have in various articles, notably in International Jo. of Dravidian Linguistics, IJAL, Georgica, JIES, etc.). If we can have the dravidian etymological dictionary in successive editions not give a single reconstruction, state a set of correspondence which account for a fraction of the comparisons that are then made, and freely mix borrowed and inherited and accidentally resemblent forms, there something wrong ESPECIALLY if at the same time it is widely procalimed that Dravidian is a model language family, and the Dravidianists models of modern comp. linguists. The most beuatiful example, which I discuss in print, is how the DED manages to get the word for menstruation in one Dr. lg derived from the etymon for house simply because they look somewhat alike, sound laws do notr count among friends, and the word happens to occur in the phrase 'menstruation hut' (but they forgot which is hut and which menstruation, no matter the rigid order of such expressions in Dravidian). Kartvelian is little better, esp. in the Klimov version. Much of Native American work ditto (e.g., in the family I have worked on for more than a decade, Uto-Aztecan). IE is FAR FAR better, partly because so much EASIER (thaks to Sanskrit and other old data being available) but even here we find a LOT of this kind of stuff. And yet we all know where the critics of Nostratic, Amerind, etc., come from. This then is theother challenge: let us educate a new generation to clean u[p the historical linguistics of well-established language families even as we try to test and refine theories that posit more far-flung families. Of course, systematically taking positions in comparative linguistics (even IE) in major universities and cannibalizing them for yet more positions in generative or sociolinguistics so that most departments that did just recently no longer can pretend to teach comp. ling. AT ALL is not the way to do it. Nor is the policy of certain journals to effectively ban comp lx as no longer of "theoretical" interest. Alexis Manaster Ramer Professor of Computer Science Wayne State University From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu Fri Feb 5 17:10:27 1999 From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 12:10:27 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) In-Reply-To: <15443510606258@m-w.com> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Jim Rader wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > In reference to Tsu-Lin Mei and Jerry Norman, I think you mean > Austroasiatic rather than Austronesian, don't you? The article I have > a reference to is "The Austroasiatics in ancient south China: some > lexical evidence" (_Monumenta Serica_ 32 [1976], p. 274-301). You're right, of course. But I was sure, when I wrote, and still am, that I remember someone in those days turning up Austronesian etymologies as well. Can anybody jog my memory on this? Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 5 13:42:28 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:42:28 EST Subject: Sum: Yakhontov's principle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Does anybody have the list of 65 meanings which belong in part 2 of Yakhontov's hypothesis? AMR From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu Fri Feb 5 13:41:31 1999 From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:41:31 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 4 Feb 1999 manaster at umich.edu wrote: [a lot] OK, I was just making sure. I agree with most of what you say. It's true that we don't have a clear, coherent, generally-agreed-upon reconstruction scheme for ST, and that is certainly an unsatisfactory situation. And it's quite true that a lot of Benedict's work (much as I loved the man, and never denying his substantial contributions to the field) is not anything you'd want to show your historical linguistics students as an example of how to do reconstruction. And that people like Miller (actually, by this date, I think he's the only one left) are attacking ghosts rather than addressing the overall body of evidence. And, the overall body of evidence for the genetic unity of Sino-Tibetan, in my opinion and (with the exception of Sagart) that of everyone I know of who has looked at it carefully, is overwhelming. > other ST language at all, though I did once know > a bit of whatever the language of Mizoram is called > (Mizo is it) but have now forgotten it down to the Nowadays they call it Mizo; in the older literature it's referred to as Lushai or Lushei. > Thank you very much for bringing this up. I have both in > print and here excoriated Godard and others for this false > methodological "principle" which seems to go to a paper in > which Meillet got carried away in his fight with Kroeber > and asserted it but later even Meillet saw he was wrong > and specifically said that it is the languages of E Asia > that show that the principle is a false one--although he > underestimated the role of morphology in E Asia. Well, in S-T, yes, everybody did, until reconstruction of Old Chinese proceeded far enough that we could begin to see it. But if you're looking for a clear example of an indisputable family established without any morphological basis, Tai will do fine. Actually, I mentioned this to Goddard once when we were disagreeing about exactly this point, and what I remember him saying (again, he's not responsible for my memory) was, essentially, well then, we can never really be sure that the relationship among these languages is genetic. Since Goddard hasn't ever looked at Tai, I suppose I can imagine how he might say such a thing, but really--this is a relationship that is inspectionally evident. > points, But Comecrudan will make the same point. Realistically, I think you might find some resistance to this example, as I'm sure you're aware. Tai is better, because there's no room anywhere for doubt. Take dictionaries of any 2 or 3 Tai languages and the relationship is obvious. And, surely, no historical linguist could spend half an hour with Li's _Handbook of Comparative Tai_ and come away with any doubts at all about what we're looking at. > and I am impressed by the professional and scholarly tone > of teh debate, no matter how ANNOYED most of you must > be with Sagart and how FRUSTRATED he must be so alone. Laurent Sagart is a gentleman and a scholar, and, as you say, an able and well-informed linguist. He happens to be dead wrong about something important. Alas, I rather doubt that that fact significantly distinguishes him from any of the rest of us. Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Fri Feb 5 13:45:09 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:45:09 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I wrote: >> (With regard to racism, Pedersen's discussion makes a particular point of >> denying that the Egyptians or EVEN the Nubians were "Negro" (actually he >> spells it "negro", indicating he is talking about a "racial" >> classification), but concedes that the same cannot be said of the Hausas -- >> currently part of the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic.) AMR replied: >I am not sure whether he was or was not a racist. What you mention >does not prove that he was. I am not interested in labelling Pedersen one way or another in this regard. What he wrote was simply an uncredited report on the opinion of others, which reflects the ideologically inspired institutional racism of his time. I did not think I had to spell out the point. Although he was relying on the opinion of others, he did a common academic thing of simply asserting it without characterising it as an opinion or crediting it to anyone else. Even post-colonial work of political analysis still referred to the Tutsi as being of "Ethiopid origin" (avoiding the antiquated term "Hamitic") and down-played the role of the German and then Belgian colonial authorities in promoting the caste system which they exploited in colonial times. Just to spell out the implications of Pedersen's (no doubt unthinking) acquiescence to insitutional racism, it is thaty there is a (natural?) pecking order (Indo-)European over (Semito-)Hamite over "black" African. In the 19th c there was much concern in institutional racism to remove the Egyptians from "black" ancestry. Somehow, by Pedersen's time that had been extended to the Nubians. That is logical according to institutional racism since the Nubians were literate before the Europeans, and even had some late pharoahs over Egypt (in the late dynastic times called "decadent" by Western historians -- having it both ways apparently. NB: in Western popular culture the Nubians were black and "slaves" of the Egyptians, cf. the black actor playing a explicitly labelled "NUBIAN" slave of the "Mummy", played by (white) Boris Karloff in 1933). Whatever Pedersen's personal feelings about black people, his acceptance of the solemn authority of those who distinguished "Nubians" from "negroes" would certainly preclude it occurring to him that Semitic and Hamitic might have an African rather than a Eurasian linguistic alignment, andthe intellectual climate of the times would discourage him from looking to Africa for the antecedents of Semito-Hamitic (or Hamito-Semitic). From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Fri Feb 5 13:44:19 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:44:19 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >I enjoyed Alice Faber's message criticising the supposed relationship of >"Semitic to Indo-E". In essence, her comments indicate that the wording >of such a proposed relationship is as misleading as proposing a >"relationship" between "AFRO-ASIATIC and GERMANIC". While I admire AMR's >energy and industry in pursuit of countless issues in historical >linguistics, I find it inconsistent that he deplores the rhetoric which >states "there IS NO relationship between Semitic and IE" rather than the >more accurate statement "NO demonstration of a relationship between >Semitic and IE is GENERALLY ACCEPTED (? by those qualified to accept >such)", or innumerable paraphrases of the same, at the same time that he >is lenient about the wording of the "Semitic-IE relationship". Within the >field (as opposed to public relations), the rhetoric of "there is NO >relationship" is readily understood under the GENERALLY ACCEPTED principle >of historical linguists that a relationship has to be demonstrated, NOT >the lack of one ("unrelated until demonstrated"). No one denies that; at >best they disagree about what it takes to demonstrate a relationship (I >guess I mean a GENETIC relationship, at that). > >Alice's counter that AFRO-ASIATIC MAY be more closely related to >NILO-SAHARAN than to INDO-E is instructive at least for its shock value -- >and it makes geographic sense -- though I would hope that there is more to >such a speculation than the fact that some border Ethiopian languages >exhibit "ambiguity" as to whether they should classified as Afrasian or >Nilo-Saharan (convergence!?). > >I particularly enjoyed her closing comments: > >>Furthermore, and now I'm speculating wildly, if I were seriously interested in >>linking Afro-Asiatic with other language stocks, Indo-European, or, indeed, >>any other Eurasian language stock, is *not* where I would look first. Rather, >>I would look seriously at Nilo-Saharan. I fear that at least some of the >>interest, especially from non-specialists, in relating Semitic and >>Indo-European is motivated by a notion of "Judeo-Christian cultural >>tradition" that may, itself, not be supported by the historical record. > >It reminds me of a joke I made (I forget whether on this list or >elsewhere) relating "Nostratic" to "Cosa Nostra", as the "Western >Civilisation mafia". Slightly more seriously, the proposal of a >relationship of Semitic to I-E (inter alia) predates recognition of >Semitic as part of a larger mainly African-based Afro-Asiatic family. >Politically it could have even been "brave" to propose such a thing at a >time and place when there were opposing racist Nazoid theories insisting >on the primeval distinctness of "Aryan" (Indo-GERMANIC) from "Semitic", >and I think Alice is quite right to insinuate that Nostratic was, in >contrast, a "philo-Semitic" theory seeking to identify Indo-European with >Semitic because of the recognised (though belated) impact of Semitic >culture on "Western civilisation". That has no bearing on whether it is >scientifically true or not; it is politics. I can imagine, then, that an >enterprising scientific journalist could make headlines (of a sort), even >in this day and age, if it turned out to be tenable that Afro-Asiatic >(i.e., "Semitic") is a part of a larger AFRICAN family which includes >NILO-SAHARAN sooner than that it is related to the I-E languages, given >how cherished the Semitic heritage of Western culture is, and how strong >the feeling is to identify with that heritage (as opposed to an African >heritage, which is OK only as long as it is pre-homo sapiens.) > From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 5 13:45:39 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:45:39 EST Subject: Nostratic et al. Part 2: The Challenge In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: >I can't think of any other reasonably >straightforward problems just now, but >there are some I am forgetting. Not straightforward (but I don't think all of the problems mentioned by Alexis are necessarily straightforward), but important [and a neglected area] would be, as Alice Faber mentioned the other day, to investigate links between Africa and Eurasia (say, Nostratic and Nilo-Saharan and/or Niger-Congo). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk Fri Feb 5 13:46:01 1999 From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:46:01 EST Subject: Larry Trasks' Hist Ling Dic Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Nobody else seems to have reacted to Larry Trask's announcement of his forthcoming Hist Ling Dic, so I'd just like to say how much I'm looking forward to being able to use it. If it's as good as his other dictionaries, it will be indispensable. ---------------------- rhpwri at liverpool.ac.uk Tell me what you think of my Web-page: http://www.liv.ac.uk/~lynnf/rwright.html From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Fri Feb 5 13:49:41 1999 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:49:41 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- We have prepared a web page for potential graduate students and their advisors, advertising the concentration of specialists in many aspects of historical linguistics at the University of Manchester, now a world-class centre for the subject. Please have a look at http://www.art.man.ac.uk/english/pgdegree/manhstlx.htm The page gives a brief listing of projects currently in progress at Manchester, scholars, and courses, with links to all the relevant information. David Denison and Nigel Vincent <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> David Denison Dept of English and American Studies University of Manchester | Manchester M13 9PL | U.K. +44 (0)161-275 3154 (phone) +44 (0)161-275 3256 (fax) d.denison at man.ac.uk (email) http://www.art.man.ac.uk/english/staff/dd/ From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 5 13:54:22 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:54:22 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Tue, 2 Feb 1999, bwald wrote: > AMR writes in reply to Alice Haber's message (which I commented on in my > last posting) > > >This could well be right, but historically Nilo-Saharan was all > >but unknown to the pioneers of Nostratic.. > > What kind of interest have Nostraticists shown in Nilo-Saharan since? There has been almost no serious published research into Nostratic since the pioneering days by the Moscow school. Bomhard's school consists of one man who works full time outside of academia and yet does more than most linguists working on the inside (though having said that I STILL do not like most of what he has done, but I could be wrong). Greenberg's Eurasian (his version of Nostratic) has not been published as far as I know. Of what may perhaps be called the revisionist school, Peter Michalove has only recently joined work on Nostratic, is not a linguist at all by background, and has an even worse job situation than Bomhard, and I (the other member of this "school") work in computer science full time except that I have been ill for the last several years and do no work except with the help of other people under doctors' orders, and of course Nostratic is a minor area of research for me. In any event, my first priority has been to see if there is any merit to Nostratic at all and trying to extent it surely is not the most obvious way to do that. To my mind, you start out by checking the IE-Uralic-Altaic connection out. Kartvelian comes next. I have not even done any serious work on whether AA is likely to be related to these. But we do not own Nostratic. People who are interested are free to work Nilo-Saharan and Nostratic w/o having to wait for us or our permission. > > To get back to racist theories that were discredited by GREENBERG's > establishment of the Nilo-Saharan (and Niger-Congo) families, while AMR is > quite right, in pre-Greenbergian times when a Nostratic was conceived that > included Semitic and Indo-E, various Nilo-Saharan languages were indeed > known to linguists and were classified, along with other languages (which > turned out to be Niger-Congo) as "Nilo-HAMITIC" and such. The concept > "Hamitic" by itself was applied to languages now classified as > (non-Semitic) Afro-Asiatic (since Greenberg). PEDERSEN himself devotes a > SINGLE section 5. to "Semitic and Hamitic" in his Chapter (V) on "the study > of non-Indo-European languages", and notes the likelihood that Semitic and > Hamitic are genetically related (as now accepted). Yes, but he hardly did any WORK if at all on these languages. He was an IEnist only. > He does not treat > "Nilo-Hamitic" and such, so I am not sure how aware he was of them, but > contemporaneous with him were such influential Africanists as Carl MEINHOF, > who supposed that Nilo-Hamitic was a mixture of "Negro" and "Hamitic", a > proposal that expanded among Africanists throughout Europe and remained > until Greenberg, who specifically went after Meinhof and bashed the racist > basis of his ideas. > Again, since Pedersen did no original work of his own, all this is purely academic. > (With regard to racism, Pedersen's discussion makes a particular point of > denying that the Egyptians or EVEN the Nubians were "Negro" (actually he > spells it "negro", indicating he is talking about a "racial" > classification), but concedes that the same cannot be said of the Hausas -- > currently part of the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic.) > I am not sure whether he was or was not a racist. What you mention does not prove that he was. > The effects of the racism were recently seen in the 1994 Ruanda genocide. > Under the kinds of historical notions that associated Hamitic with Semitic > speakers, as "racially non-Negro" peoples of "superior culture" (including > advanced militarism), the Belgian colonial administration classified a > certain Ruandese group called "Tutsi" (popularly known as the Watusi in > early to mid 20th c Western culture) as of "Hamitic" origin, as evidenced > by their domination of the "Bantu" (= "Negro") Hutu (even though the Tutsi > had adopted the same "Negro" language as the Hutu). This however is not the fault of the Nostraticists. Blame the bicyclists (as in the famous, I hope it IS famous, joke). Note that the spectacular failure of the West to assist the Tutsi (even to the trivial extent that we "assist" the Bosniaks or the Kosovars) means that no one now here considers the Tutsi any less "negro" than the Hutu. [snip] > > My guess is that Pedersen was quite aware of the "Hamitic-Negro" "mixture" > theories, and may even have accepted them, but shunned them for the > pedagogical purposes of his book dedicated to conventional GENETIC > relationships and families. I am sure he was aware them but I think he shunned them because he did not approve of them or at least suspected that they were untenable. He WAS after all one of the best linguists of all time. > > In view of continued interest in historical-cultural interest in the > implications of linguistic classification, it is best to remember the > history of historical linguistics, to probe the motives underlying current > controversies, and to keep trying to establish STRICT CONTROLS on > classificatory/reconstructive METHODOLOGY -- and, of course, on > cultural-historical interpretation of the results. If this is intended to suggest that Nostraticists in general or I in particular are either racists or follow a nonstrict methodology, I would ask for specifics which can be refuted. AMR From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Fri Feb 5 13:54:06 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:54:06 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- AMR writes in reply to Alice Haber's message (which I commented on in my last posting) >This could well be right, but historically Nilo-Saharan was all >but unknown to the pioneers of Nostratic.. What kind of interest have Nostraticists shown in Nilo-Saharan since? To get back to racist theories that were discredited by GREENBERG's establishment of the Nilo-Saharan (and Niger-Congo) families, while AMR is quite right, in pre-Greenbergian times when a Nostratic was conceived that included Semitic and Indo-E, various Nilo-Saharan languages were indeed known to linguists and were classified, along with other languages (which turned out to be Niger-Congo) as "Nilo-HAMITIC" and such. The concept "Hamitic" by itself was applied to languages now classified as (non-Semitic) Afro-Asiatic (since Greenberg). PEDERSEN himself devotes a SINGLE section 5. to "Semitic and Hamitic" in his Chapter (V) on "the study of non-Indo-European languages", and notes the likelihood that Semitic and Hamitic are genetically related (as now accepted). He does not treat "Nilo-Hamitic" and such, so I am not sure how aware he was of them, but contemporaneous with him were such influential Africanists as Carl MEINHOF, who supposed that Nilo-Hamitic was a mixture of "Negro" and "Hamitic", a proposal that expanded among Africanists throughout Europe and remained until Greenberg, who specifically went after Meinhof and bashed the racist basis of his ideas. (With regard to racism, Pedersen's discussion makes a particular point of denying that the Egyptians or EVEN the Nubians were "Negro" (actually he spells it "negro", indicating he is talking about a "racial" classification), but concedes that the same cannot be said of the Hausas -- currently part of the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic.) The effects of the racism were recently seen in the 1994 Ruanda genocide. Under the kinds of historical notions that associated Hamitic with Semitic speakers, as "racially non-Negro" peoples of "superior culture" (including advanced militarism), the Belgian colonial administration classified a certain Ruandese group called "Tutsi" (popularly known as the Watusi in early to mid 20th c Western culture) as of "Hamitic" origin, as evidenced by their domination of the "Bantu" (= "Negro") Hutu (even though the Tutsi had adopted the same "Negro" language as the Hutu). The Belgian authorities reinforced and expanded the caste system that put the "Hamites" above the "Negroes". The eventual genocide (Tutsi victims) was quite comparable in scale and motive to the European Holocaust of the Jews, and sprang from the SAME political framework of racism with the same "ethnolinguistic" intellectualised rationale (and in both cases the majority slaughtered the minority) All of this, of course, has nothing to do with scientific basis of classifying languages (although it does have to do with nationalistic motives that promoted the science in the first place), but it has to do with how certain Nilo-Saharan languages were classified before the Nilo-Saharan family was established (to the extent that it is established) and the HISTORICAL-CULTURAL interpretation (and POLITICAL use) of the earlier classification. By the way, such typological things as having gender (of the m/f variety) were the basis of such concepts as "Nilo-Hamitic" (now esp the Nilotic branch of Nilo-Saharan, inter alia). The idea of language "mixture" was much more often applied to languages, and particularly various African languages, than is now permitted, and allowed a rather free hand in historical cultural interpretation of language relationship, so that it was fairly easy to associate "original" language family with "race" and allow such things as Semitic and IE are GENETICALLY related (with racial implications -- for those who wanted them) without denying linguistic resemblances (due to "mixture", just as "races" can mix) between (Semito-)Hamites and certain "black" Africans. Generally, the assumption (or rationalisation) was that the groups who exhibited the "imperialistic spirit", demonstrated by domination over other African groups, were either linguistically and "racially" "Hamites", related to Semites and superior (more European-like) to other Africans, or by language shift were only (at least partially) racially Hamites -- no longer also linguistically "Hamitic". NB: when the linguistically "Hamitic" speakers dominated other Africans, this was seen as evidence of the (inevitable?) cultural history of the Hamites. When other groups did, they were still assumed to be decendants of Hamites but had shifted languages. With such logic, this theory would not be unduly disturbed by Greenberg's criticism of Meinhof's theory about the Fulani conquering the Hausa. Meinhof assumed that the Fulani were (mixed) "Hamitic" and the Hausa non-Hamitic, whereas Greenberg pointed out that just the opposite was the case, the Hausa were Hamitic, i.e., Afro-Asiatic, and the Fulani were non-Hamitic, i.e., Niger-Congo. Meinhof had already died, supporting Hitler as "good for Germany" (get back the African colonies lost after World War 1?), but he would have had no trouble reinterpreting the results as indicating that the Fulani had shifted from a Hamitic to a "Negro-Bantu" language and vice-versa for the Hausa. (For all his faults, Meinhof was an indefatiguable Africanist, and had deeply studied and extensively written about all these languages -- without seeing what is now obvious.) My guess is that Pedersen was quite aware of the "Hamitic-Negro" "mixture" theories, and may even have accepted them, but shunned them for the pedagogical purposes of his book dedicated to conventional GENETIC relationships and families. (Detractors of Greenberg, in reading Pedersen, will now say that from Hamitic + Semitic to Afro-Asiatic was not so large a step, or intellectual a feat, but it is the vehemence with which G trashed the earlier racist theories of African linguistic-cultural relationships that is really of importance. He showed how twisted and ideologically motivated the earlier logic was, twisted in a way that would be immediately recognised as absurd if applied to Indo-European). Of course, serious attention paid to mixed languages has made a comeback in recent times, with a sounder theoretical basis and undeniable empirical evidence, but the apparent delight with which the reports of BLONDE corpses in the former Tokharian-speaking area were received a few years ago seemed to me to be an echo of an earlier (more naive if you want) age in which "racial mixture" was assumed (or hoped?) to have a shallow history (at least with respect to Indo-European and its implications). Fortunately, we have now rejected racism (though its former influence lingers in various other fields and popular culture), but that's about all. We still seem to have great stakes in who is culturally related to who at what level, and I view Nostratic with deep suspicion as motivated (perhaps often unconsciously) by pet theories of ancient cultural alignments and pedigrees. That's why I started out by asking; now that Nilo-Saharan has been posited for almost half a century, what help have the Nostraticists been doing to help us sort out the data of that messy and potentially highly controversial family? In view of continued interest in historical-cultural interest in the implications of linguistic classification, it is best to remember the history of historical linguistics, to probe the motives underlying current controversies, and to keep trying to establish STRICT CONTROLS on classificatory/reconstructive METHODOLOGY -- and, of course, on cultural-historical interpretation of the results. From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 5 13:54:46 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:54:46 EST Subject: Holger Pedersen and "Race" Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I have just had a chance to look over Pedersen's book The Discovery of Language, and contrary to the (in my view libelous) claims by B. Wald posted on this list, it is immediately apparent (pp. 101, 321) that the late great Indo-Europeanist explicilty and strongly criticizes work (e.g., Mu"ller's) which used racial criteria to classify languages, that he himself refers to purely linguistic criteria as the basis for "Hamitic" and for connecting this to Semitic (p. 122 and passim). I also not see that he is anywhere dwelling on the Egyptians not being "negroes", and the only possible interpretation of the passage about Nubians' and Hausas' racial affiliations is that he is in fact trying to say that even though the former were not supposedly (this is of course nonsense) "negroes" and the latter are, this tells us nothing about whether their languages belong, because we do not (this is Pedersen speaking) know enough of the Nubian language, and the status of Hausa had not yet been sufficiently studied to be certain that it is "Hamitic" (which is true). There is also no hint of any suggestion that the Hamitic languages are "mixed", some kind of mongrel of Semitic and "negro" languages, which apparently many Africanists did believe but which Pedersen clearly did not (good IEnists, of course, as a rule tended, and rightly, to reject the rife speculation about "mixed languages" then as now, Pedersen's French counterpart and rival Meillet of course being the most vocal of the whole of "mixed languages". I really would ask that people be more cautious about posting attacks on the integrity of great (and esp. dead) scholars, esp. in areas as touchy even now as "race", without doing their homework. AMR From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp Sat Feb 6 16:38:40 1999 From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:38:40 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > In any > event, my first priority has been to see if there is any > merit to Nostratic at all and trying to extent it surely > is not the most obvious way to do that. To my mind, you > start out by checking the IE-Uralic-Altaic connection out. > Kartvelian comes next. I have not even done any serious > work on whether AA is likely to be related to these. I am curious about something. This whole thread started with Alexis criticizing me for not paying proper attention to work being done on "Semitic-IE" comparison. But is there in fact anyone who is now working on or arguing for an IE-Afroasiatic grouping (either within or out of Nostratic)? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the Nostratic idea started in the 19th century as a way to link what was then known about language families with the Biblical narrative. There were supposed to be three families corresponding to the three sons of Noah-- Semitic, Hamitic, and Japhetic (IE). Other families were gradually added. Now from what (little) I know of the modern Nostratic work, the best, or at least most obvious argument for a common link are the similarities in the system of pronouns (including the verb conjugation) of IE, Uralic, and Altaic. But AA languages show a radically different system. (The best evidence for AA itself is similarities in this same subsystem). The older arguments for a Semitic-IE relation relied, I believe, on things like presence of a two-gender system and a dual number-- broad typological properties, which are in any case absent from Uralic and Altaic (though I recently heard that old Mongolian had gender). So I suspect that the inclusion of AA in nostratic is purely an accident of history-- a relic of the pre-scientific 19th century roots of the Nostratic proposal-- rather than something that any contemporary linguist who knows the material and the methodology has seriously proposed. I, for one, am very impressed that Greenberg doesn't include AA in Nostratic. So who does argue for an IE-AA link and why? -RR +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Robert R. Ratcliffe Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku Tokyo 114 Japan From manaster at umich.edu Sat Feb 6 16:39:20 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:39:20 EST Subject: Yakhontov Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask recently initiated some discussion of the Yakhontov claims about how a modified Swadesh list can be used to test for language relatedness (based on Starostin 1991, where Starostin refers to a written communication from Yakhontov). However, some of what Larry says is not correct, as I will show. Let's begin at the beginning. Acc. to Starostin, Yakhontov modified the Swadesh list and then divided it into two sublists, a 35-word one and a 65-word one. Larry posted the 35-word one, but not the 65- word one. There are several problems in figuring what Yakhontov actually claimed, since Larry (and I) are getting this not from Yakhontov's work but from Starostin's (1990) book on Altaic and Japanese. Further, there are problems of translation which I note below, by giving the Russian original when the English translation is problematic. Also, Starostin nowhere give the actual 65-word sublist or the whole 100-word list. Rather he lists the 35-word sublist. He then defines the 100-word Yakhontov list by saying that Yakhontov deletes 10 of Swadesh's items and added ten new ones (all of these changes are listed), and then defines the 65-word Yakhontov sublist as what is left from the revised 100-word list when the 35-word sublist is removed. However, there is a problem since one of the words said to have been deleted is given as Russian tech', lit. 'to flow', which is NOT in the Swadesh list. Starostin (p.c.) tells me this was typo for zhech' 'to burn'. So with this in mind it is possible to reconstruct the Yakhontov 100-word list and the 65-word sublist (please see below). Anyway, Larry also relates two claims supposed to have been by Yakhontov about these lists in relation to language relatedness, one of which are: Claim 1. If two languages are genetically related, then the proportion of cognates in the 35-word list will always be greater than the proportion in the 65-word list. The other is, acc. to Larry Trask, but not in reality: Claim 2 acc. to Larry: "If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list is higher than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word list, then this is evidence that the languages are related". Actually, what Starostin (1991) has, though, is something quite different: "But if the percentage of matches (Russian: sovpadenij) is identical [sc. in both sublists--AMR] or the percentage of matches (Russian: sovpadenij) the 35-word list is less than (or equal to) the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word list, then the parallelism (Russian: skhodstvo) between the languages is accidental (i.e., there exists an accidental coincidence [Russian: sovpadenie] or the result of active contacts and borrowings." If I am not mistaken, this means that the second claim is not really separate claim at all. It says the same thing as claim 1, viz., that related languages are supposed to look a certain way, but it is not stated or logically implied that languages that look that way must be related. Moreover, Larry makes an even bigger mistake (or else someone again misinformed him about what Starostin says). Specifically, he claims that the Yakhontov method is to look at superficial phonetic similarities. However, Starostin (p. 25-26) clearly says that he (Starostin) is looking at matches based on sound correspondences and all other claims of the Altaic theory (such as morphological analysis, etymology, etc.), and indeed relates words which LOOK nothing alike, but are cognate under the Altaic theory, e.g., Turkic *yapur-gak : Mongolic *lab-c^in : Middle Korean *nip(h). Since Yakhontov had not published a detailed description of his method, I cannot claim that this is how HE would have used it, but this is certainly how Starostin uses it. This goes to the heart of the whole fight about what role phonetic similarity plays in comparative linguistics (Larry claims none at all. I claim a subordinate but important and indeed probably crucial one). But note that Starostin is not doing anything that Larry could object to on this score. He is NOT using phonetic similarity at all. Swadesh List 1. all 2. ash(es) 3. bark 4. belly 5. big 6. bird 7. bite 8. black 9. blood 10.bone 11.breast (female) 12.burn 13.claw 14.cloud 15.cold 16.come 17.die 18.dog 19.drink 20.dry 21.ear 22.earth 23.eat 24.egg 25.eye 26.feather 27.fire 28.fish 29.fly (vb) 30.foot 31.full 32.give 33.go 34.good 35.grease 36.green 37.hair 38.hand 39.head 40.hear 41.heart 42.horn 43.hot 44.human being 45.I, me 46.kill 47.knee 48.know 49.leaf 50.lie down, recline 51.liver 52.long 53.louse 54.man 55.many 56.meat 57.moon 58.mountain 59.mouth 60.name 61.neck 62.new 63.night 64.nose 65.not 66.one 67.path 68.rain (noun) 69.red 70.root 71.round 72.sand 73.say 74.see 75.seed 76.sit 77.skin 78.sleep(vb) 79.small 80.smoke 81.stand 82.star 83.stone 84.sun 85.swim 86.tail 87.that 88.this 89.tongue 90.tooth 91.tree 92.two 93.water 94.we, us 95.what 96.white 97.who 98.woman 99.yellow 100.you (sg) Yakhontov deletes: all, bark, bite, burn, claw, feather, hot, lie down, seed, we Yakhontov adds: 101. blizkij 'close, near (adj.)' 102. daljokij 'far, distant (adj.)', 103. tjazholyj 'heavy' 104. sol' 'salt' 105. korotkij 'short' 106. zmeja 'snake' 107. tonkij 'thin' 108. veter 'wind' 109. cherv' 'worm' 110. god 'year' Hence, Yakhontov 100-word list must be: 1.-- 2. ash(es) 3. -- 4. belly 5. big 6. bird 7. -- 8. black 9. blood 10.bone 11.breast (female) 12. -- 13.claw 101. close, near (adj.), 14.cloud 15.cold 16.come 17.die 18.dog 19.drink 20.dry 21.ear 22.earth 23.eat 24.egg 26.-- 102. far, distant (adj.) 27.fire 28.fish 29. fly 30.foot 31.full 32.give 33.go 34.good 35.grease 36.green 37. hair 38.hand 39.head 40. hear 41.heart 103. heavy 42.horn 43.-- 44.human being 46.kill 47.knee 48.know 49.leaf 50.-- 51.liver 52.long 53.louse 54.man 55.many 56.meat 57.moon 58.mountain 59.mouth 60.name 61.neck 62.new 63.night 64.nose 65.not 66.one 67.path 68.rain (noun) 69.red 70.root 71.round 104. salt 72.sand 73.say 74.see 75.-- 105. short 76.sit 77.skin 78.sleep(vb) 79.small 80.smoke 106. snake 81.stand 82.star 83.stone 84.sun 85. swim 86.tail 87.that 107.thin 88. this 90.tooth 91.tree 92.two 93.water 94. -- 95.what 96.white 97.who 108. wind 98.woman 109 worm 99.yellow 110 year 100. you (sg) Yakhontov's 35-word sublist (order reflects the alphabetical order of the Russian translations): wind, water, louse, eye, year, give, two, know, tooth, name, stone, bone, blood, who, moon, new, nose, fire, one, full, horn, hand, fish, dog, sun, salt, you (sg.), die, ear, tail, what, this, I, tongue, egg And hence Yakhontov's 65-word sublist is: 1.-- 2. ash(es) 3. -- 4. belly 5. big 6. bird 7. -- 8. black 11.breast (female) 13.claw 101. close, near (adj.), 14.cloud 15.cold 16.come 19.drink 20.dry 22.earth 23.eat 24.egg 26.-- 102. far, distant (adj.) 29. fly 30.foot 33.go 34.good 35.grease 36.green 37.hair 39.head 40. hear 41.heart 103. heavy 43.-- 44.human being 45.I, me 46.kill 47.knee 49.leaf 50.-- 51.liver 52.long 54.man 55.many 56.meat 58.mountain 59.mouth 61.neck 63.night 65.not 67.path 68.rain (noun) 69.red 70.root 71.round 72.sand 73.say 74.see 75.-- 105. short 76.sit 77.skin 78.sleep (vb) 79.small 80.smoke 106. snake 81.stand 82.star 85.swim 87.that 107. thin 89.tongue 91.tree 94. -- 96.white 98.woman 109 worm 99.yellow From manaster at umich.edu Sat Feb 6 16:44:17 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:44:17 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I dont know how much longer this has to go on, but: On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, bwald wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I wrote: > > >> (With regard to racism, Pedersen's discussion makes a particular point of > >> denying that the Egyptians or EVEN the Nubians were "Negro" (actually he > >> spells it "negro", indicating he is talking about a "racial" > >> classification), but concedes that the same cannot be said of the Hausas -- > >> currently part of the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic.) > > AMR replied: > > >I am not sure whether he was or was not a racist. What you mention > >does not prove that he was. > > I am not interested in labelling Pedersen one way or another in this > regard. What he wrote was simply an uncredited report on the opinion of > others, which reflects the ideologically inspired institutional racism of > his time. That is untrue. He was critical (I think you meant "unCRITICAL") on almost every page, and the views he endorses or even those he recognized as merely possible or plausible are in no single instance racist. > I did not think I had to spell out the point. Although he was > relying on the opinion of others, he did a common academic thing of simply > asserting it without characterising it as an opinion or crediting it to > anyone else. That too in untrue. He refers to specific authors repeatedly, e.g., Lepsius. > Even post-colonial work of political analysis still referred > to the Tutsi as being of "Ethiopid origin" (avoiding the antiquated term > "Hamitic") and down-played the role of the German and then Belgian colonial > authorities in promoting the caste system which they exploited in colonial > times. This has nothing to do with Pedersen. >Just to spell out the implications of Pedersen's (no doubt > unthinking) acquiescence to insitutional racism, it is thaty there is a > (natural?) pecking order (Indo-)European over (Semito-)Hamite over "black" > African. He did not state or imply anything of the sort. > In the 19th c there was much concern in institutional racism to > remove the Egyptians from "black" ancestry. Somehow, by Pedersen's time > that had been extended to the Nubians. Again nothing to do with Pedersen. > That is logical according to > institutional racism since the Nubians were literate before the Europeans, > and even had some late pharoahs over Egypt (in the late dynastic times > called "decadent" by Western historians -- having it both ways apparently. > NB: in Western popular culture the Nubians were black and "slaves" of the > Egyptians, cf. the black actor playing a explicitly labelled "NUBIAN" slave > of the "Mummy", played by (white) Boris Karloff in 1933). > No Pedersen here either. > Whatever Pedersen's personal feelings about black people, his acceptance of > the solemn authority of those who distinguished "Nubians" from "negroes" > would certainly preclude it occurring to him that Semitic and Hamitic might > have an African rather than a Eurasian linguistic alignment, andthe > intellectual climate of the times would discourage him from looking to > Africa for the antecedents of Semito-Hamitic (or Hamito-Semitic). > This is completely untrue. He specifically explains his view about the fact that not enough was known to know which languages were "Hamitic" and which not. If he had been using race as a criterion, he could not have said this, because he was (at least acc. to Benji) in no doubt about the racial divisions. I do think that accusations of racism should be based on SOMETHING. Benji's is based on NOTHING. Worse, I have cited specific evidence that Pedersen was NOT using race directly or indirectly to guide his linguistic classifications, and was in fact vociferously condemning those who did. From manaster at umich.edu Sat Feb 6 16:46:41 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:46:41 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan Lives In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Scott DeLancey wrote [in response to my response his response to my originally saying that the state of S-T linguistic was "unsatisfactory". > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > OK, I was just making sure [sc. that I accept S-T as a valid language family--AMR] > I agree with most of what you say. It's > true that we don't have a clear, coherent, generally-agreed-upon > reconstruction scheme for ST, and that is certainly an unsatisfactory > situation. And it's quite true that a lot of Benedict's work (much as > I loved the man, and never denying his substantial contributions to > the field) is not anything you'd want to show your historical linguistics > students as an example of how to do reconstruction. And that people > like Miller (actually, by this date, I think he's the only one left) > are attacking ghosts rather than addressing the overall body of evidence. > And, the overall body of evidence for the genetic unity of Sino-Tibetan, > in my opinion and (with the exception of Sagart) that of everyone I know > of who has looked at it carefully, is overwhelming. > [snip re the name of Mizo alias Lushai] [re the claim that language relatedness can only be established with reference to morphological comparisons, as per Goddard and early Meillet et al.]: > But if you're looking for a clear example of an indisputable > family established without any morphological basis, Tai will > do fine. Actually, I mentioned this to Goddard once when we > were disagreeing about exactly this point, and what I remember > him saying (again, he's not responsible for my memory) was, > essentially, well then, we can never really be sure that the > relationship among these languages is genetic. Since Goddard > hasn't ever looked at Tai, I suppose I can imagine how he might > say such a thing, but really--this is a relationship that is > inspectionally evident. I had forgotten about Tai, thank you for pointing this out. It IS interesting though that for many years many linguists (e.g., Meillet) seemed to think that ALL East/Southeast Asian lgs lack morphology, and actually this seems to be quite restricted in time and space. I mean lgs which lost ALL their old morphology, like Chinese losing finally all S-T morphology, has finally started making some new morphology like the Mandarin -r and other suffixes (I know nothing about any other Chinese language but Mandarin, so I don't know if it generalizes to all of them). BTW, although this is off-topic I think it is important to call attention to the fact that The Economist has just devoted an extensive article to largely accurate coverage of what linguists have discovered about some basic points of Chinese, incl. the fact that it is not one but several languages (though some other things in the article are nonsense). > Realistically, I think you might find some resistance to this [sc. Comecrudan--AMR] > example, as I'm sure you're aware. Tai is better, because there's > no room anywhere for doubt. Take dictionaries of any 2 or 3 Tai > languages and the relationship is obvious. And, surely, no > historical linguist could spend half an hour with Li's _Handbook > of Comparative Tai_ and come away with any doubts at all about > what we're looking at. > Yes I am aware. Thanks again. But if I may beat the drum again, the trouble is that linguists who make methodological claims and are prepared to in effect accuse others (e.g., Greenberg or me) of incompetence in comparative ling because we do not accept these claims apparently do NOT read Li's Handbook or refuse to learn from the reading. Perhaps Dr. Thomason would care to comment. [in response to AMR's praise of Sagart]: > > Laurent Sagart is a gentleman and a scholar, and, as you say, an > able and well-informed linguist. He happens to be dead wrong > about something important. Alas, I rather doubt that that fact > significantly distinguishes him from any of the rest of us. > Of course, I agree. I am only disappointed that you did not comment on my claim that the respectful and scholarly way in which you guys in S-T have conducted yourselves with Laurent and he with y'all is a shining example of how such things ought to be handled and stands in stark contrast to the shabby way in which, for example, Greenberg and the late Illich-Svitych have been treated (not to mention, as an example picked at random, that fellow Monstrous Rumor from Wayne State or whatever his name is). AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sat Feb 6 16:48:55 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:48:55 EST Subject: Nostratic and Nilo-Saharan Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I am an idiot, I confess it. When Alice Faber and Benji Wald attributed to, respectively, a false notion of a "Judeo-Christian cultural tradition" and racism the fact that Nostraticists have sought to connect Afro-Asiatic to Indo- European rather than to Nilo-Saharan, I said many things, especially about the intolerable racism charge, which, while true, missed the point that in fact Nostraticists HAVE looked at Nilo-Saharan. I do not know who precisely but Shevoroshkin (1989:3) and Kaiser and Shevoroshkin (1988:310) include not just Nilo-Saharan but also Niger-Kordofanian (another group of languages spoken by people whom racists call Fblack' rather than Fwhite' or something in between) in Nostratic and allude to work which has established it. As I recall, I objected to including this statement in the paper I coauthored with Shevoroshkin (see below) in 1991 because he could not provide me with a copy of the relevant literature. I suspect it was something never published at all or only samizdated, but I do not know that for a fact. This I think closes the case. But an apology or two would still be nice. And, think, called for even if no such work had ever been by any Nostraticist. Kaiser, Mark; and Shevoroshkin, Vitaly. 1988. "Nostratic". Annual Review of Anthropology 17: 309-329. Shevoroshkin, Vitaly. 1989b. "Methods in Interphyletic Comparison". Ural-Altaische Jahrbu"cher 61: 1-26. Shevoroshkin, Vitaly; and Manaster Ramer, Alexis. 1991. "Some Recent Work on the Remote Relations of Languages". In: Lamb, Sydney M.; and Mitchell, E. Douglas (eds.), Sprung from some common source, 178-199. Stanford: Stanford University Press. From hubeyh at Montclair.edu Sat Feb 6 16:50:07 1999 From: hubeyh at Montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:50:07 EST Subject: Nostratic et al. Part 2: The Challenge Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > (5) Of course, there are many other classification issues that need > work, but most are not easily accessible. > There ARE some simple mathematical issues that have not > been solved and anyone who knows elementary probability > theory and loves linguistics is invited. Since my main interest is methodological and I do not see myself memorizing thousands of words from tens of languages, I am more than happy to find this kind of work collected in one spot so more time can be spent reading instead of driving to libraries. I am happy to volunteer as someone who does do probability theory. > most of the work being done in THIS field suffers from > precisely the methodological problems which are laid by > Trask, Thomason, et al. (usually incorrectly) at the door of > the kind of linguistics that does deal with classification. > The shoe is on the other foot, as I am prepared > to document in detail if asked (and > already have in various articles, notably in > International Jo. of Dravidian Linguistics, IJAL, Georgica, > JIES, etc.). The least that should be done is to follow in the footsteps of those like J. Nichols (and you) who have done work creating objective measures of family relationship possibilities/probabilities so that everyone can at least learn to deal with one or several numbers on strength of classification families so that like sociologists, psychologists, economists and other social scientists historical linguists can also compare these numbers instead of their gut feelings, and other apparently inexplicable ways in which they get such strong feelings about certain things. (I have already done a little in this respect in the History of Language journal and much more in my book.) > This then is theother challenge: let us > educate a new generation to clean u[p > the historical linguistics of well-established > language families even as we try to test > and refine theories that posit more far-flung > families. > One of the ideal candidates for this is, fuzzy logic, which was constructed practically for natural languages by L. Zadeh. There are many things going for it. The first is that logic is easier to learn than probability theory so that the basic meanings of what means what can be learned in logic and then the meanings extended to fuzzy logic. The second is that fuzzy logic sort of sits between probability theory (which is difficult for many) and logic. Furthermore, one can look at a site which says plainly that probability theory is extended logic: http://bayes.wustl.edu. I don't think people exist who will deny that that historical linguistics should be illogical and irrational. All three forms of reasoning, above, then can plainl be seen as about nothing else but logic and reasoning. I hope that soon the age of having gut feelings on family relationships will soon be over. I intend to do my part on this and since I just got a paper accepted (about 2 days ago) to the Journal of the International Quantitative Linguistics Association, even those that only respect authority should not have problems believing the seriousness of my efforts. > Alexis Manaster Ramer > Professor of Computer Science > Wayne State University -- M. Hubey Associate Professor of Computer Science Montclair State University Email: hubeyh at Montclair.edu Backup:hubeyh at alpha.montclair.edu WWW Page: http://www.csam.montclair.edu/Faculty/Hubey.html From w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de Sat Feb 6 16:51:04 1999 From: w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de (WB (in Frankfurt today)) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:51:04 EST Subject: (Fwd) Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear subscribers to HISTLING: Wolfgang Behr has forwarded to me a recent posting by S. DeLancey on your list, in which my ideas on Chinese and Tibeto-Burman (TB) are very seriously misrepresented. Unfortunately DeLancey is completely unfamiliar with my work. Although I am not a member of your group, I hope you will not mind my responding. I am grateful to Wolfgang for posting this for me. I will try to be as brief as possible. Delancey wrote: >As for Sagart, he is indeed convinced that the Chinese-TB link is >a chimaera, but as far as I know he is the only working Sino-Tibetan >linguist who takes that view, and I cannot for the life of me see >what his argument is. That is not, and has never been, my view. I have never claimed that ST is a chimera, does not exist, is an invalid construct, etc. In fact, right from the beginning of my work on on Chinese and Austronesian, I have repeatedly cautioned readers against that interpretation of my views. In the conclusion of my first paper (titled “Chinese and Austronesian are genetically related”), presented in 1990 at a Sino-Tibetan conference in Texas, I wrote (p. 29): “our claim (i.e., of a genetic unity between Chinese and Austronesian), it must be noted, should not be taken to imply that there exists no genetic relationship between Chinese and the TB languages (or, for that matter, between AN and Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, etc.), but simply that, if such a relationship exists, it is in any case less close than that between AN and Chinese (...).” Statements to the same effect can be found in my later work, for instance in my paper “Proto-Austronesian and Old Chinese evidence for Sino-Austronesian”, published in Oceanic Linguitics 33, 2 (1994) p.300. On p. 301-302 of the same paper (Oceanic Linguitics 33, 2, 1994), I discussed the evidence for Sino-Tibetan, concluding p. 302 that “the relationship, though not implausible, is less well demonstrated than is usually assumed”, due to evidence of long-term intimate contact, and poorly understood sound correspondences, this despite evidence of shared basic vocabulary and –limited– shared morphology. In my subsequent work, I have documented several instances of lexical borrowings from Chinese into TB. I have argued that TB, which has been subjected to 3000 years of political and cultural pressure from Chinese, at times intimate, and with long-term bilingualism, cannot but include a thick layer of Chinese loanwords –this does not mean there is no genetic layer !–. I have argued that the loanwords include some basic vocabulary, and even the 1st-person pronoun *nga and the numeral ‘3’. Borrowing of pers. pronouns and numerals is more common in East Asia than in Europe. Some Central Tai and Northern Tai dialects have likewise abandoned their own pers. pronouns and numerals for the Chinese pronouns and numerals. Incredible though it may seem, most accounts of Sino-Tibetan make no provision *at all* for contact between Chinese and TB. The question of the Chinese-TB relationship being for me in doubt, the next question was, of course, whether Tibeto-Burman too was related to Austronesian. In my 1990 paper, on p. 30, I wrote: “A corollary of our claim is that if Chinese and the TB languages are genetically related, then the TB and AN groups must also be related. we have at this point no reason to regard the latter hypothesis as absurd or implausible” In the revised version of this paper, published in Journal of Chinese Linguistics 21, 1 (1993), I remarked that “possible links between Tibeto-Burman and Austronesian have never been investigated” (p. 56). Beginning in 1993, I began investigating such links. In my paper of 1994 in Oceanic Linguistics, I presented on pages 302-303 lexical and morphological evidence relating Chinese, TB and Austronesian, or in some cases *directly* TB and Austronesian. I pointed out (p. 302) that this new evidence actually *strengthened* the case for Chinese-TB relationship: I cited in particular a stative/intransitive prefix (Proto-Austronesian ma-, Chinese N-, TB m-). That evidence was new, even for Chinese-TB. At a symposium held in Hongkong in December 1993 (proceedings still unpublished), I added more elements of shared morphology: in particular TB prefixed s-, OC prefixed s-, PAn prefixed Si- (directive/benefactive); TB suffixed -n, PAn suffixed -en (noun-deriving). These facts have led me to think that the hypothesis of a Chinese-TB-AN unity is valid. I now believe that the ancestor language for these three groups was spoken by the domesticators of millet in the Huang He valley in early neolithic north China. I have held that view since 1994. It is outlined at the end of my paper "Some remarks on the Ancestry of Chinese" published in William S.-Y. Wang (ed.) The Ancestry of the Chinese Language. Journal of Chinese Linguistics monograph series no. 8, pp. 195-223. A complete discussion is in preparation. Since 1994, then, my view has been that Chinese and TB *are* genetically related, but not as closely as most Sino-Tibetanists think (because the genetic layer in the lexicon is thinner than usually assumed), and within a family also including –at least– the Austronesian languages. Various statements to the effect can be found in three papers published in 1995: Some remarks on the Ancestry of Chinese. In: William S.-Y. Wang (ed.) The Ancestry of the Chinese Language. Journal of Chinese Linguistics monograph series no. 8 (1995), pp. 195-223. Comments from Sagart. In: William S.-Y. Wang (ed.) The Ancestry of the Chinese Language. Journal of Chinese Linguistics monograph series no. 8 (1995), pp. 337-372. Questions of method in Chinese-Tibeto-Burman comparison. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale XXIV (1995), 2: 245-255. I hope these precisions are useful. One more thing, DeLancey wrote: >On the >one hand, he (Sagart) has identified some significant Austronesian elements >in the Chinese vocabulary, but this is hardly surprising (or new; >Tsu-lin Mei and Jerry Norman pointed some of that out 30 years ago). Actually, what Mei Tsu-lin and Jerry Norman pointed out were *Austroasiatic* elements in Chinese, not *Austronesian* elements. Regards to all, Laurent Sagart ================================================== Laurent Sagart CRLAO 54 Bd Raspail 75270 Paris cedex 06 France Tel.: +33 1 49 54 24 18 Fax: +33 1 49 54 26 71 From manaster at umich.edu Sat Feb 6 16:51:39 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:51:39 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Sagart is, of course. The Chinese words he cites as evidence of Chinese being related to Austronesian are presumably, for those of us who do not accept his conclusion, not mere coincidences but Austronesian borrowings into Old Chinese. Am I missing something? Is the question whether anyone BESIDES Laurent Sagart is finding such borrowings? I would like to hear if there is. AMR On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Scott DeLancey wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Jim Rader wrote: > > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > In reference to Tsu-Lin Mei and Jerry Norman, I think you mean > > Austroasiatic rather than Austronesian, don't you? The article I have > > a reference to is "The Austroasiatics in ancient south China: some > > lexical evidence" (_Monumenta Serica_ 32 [1976], p. 274-301). > > You're right, of course. But I was sure, when I wrote, and still > am, that I remember someone in those days turning up Austronesian > etymologies as well. Can anybody jog my memory on this? > > Scott DeLancey > Department of Linguistics > University of Oregon > Eugene, OR 97403, USA > > delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu > http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html > From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sat Feb 6 16:54:24 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:54:24 EST Subject: Holger Pedersen and "Race" Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I appreciate that mentioning "(INSTITUTIONAL) racism" can have a discomforting effect on scholars who pursue their interests without recognising the historical cultural motives that have offered them those interests, and that in subtle ways shape their assumptions about what they are doing, or how to go about it. The historiography of linguistics justifies itself by seeking to uncover such things which may affect our views and assumptions in linguisics without us being aware of it. I hasten to add that I have not seen studies in the historiography of linguistics that have examined the issue of 19th and early 20th century historical linguistics in connection with institutional racism (indeed the most influential linguists throughout the 20th century, and ONLY the 20th century -- so far, have been outspoken critics of racism when they have noticed it), but I have my own sensibilities and interests that help me interpret such things, and I think the point I made about Nostratic and Pedersen is interesting and relevant. I also hasten to add that discomfort leads to confusion and misunderstanding, so I need to make a further careful and serious response to AMR's last message, since I think he did not fully understand what I was saying, possibly because of the way I said it. He writes: >I have just had a chance to look over Pedersen's book >The Discovery of Language, and contrary to the (in >my view libelous) claims by B. Wald posted on this >list, it is immediately apparent (pp. 101, 321) BW: amazingly enough, decades ago I underlined the very passages in my copy of Pedersen's book that AMR has in mind. They refer to the utter distinction between language and "race", and making inferences about race from reconstructed language family. Pedersen is among the linguists I referred to parenthetically above who criticise racism WHEN THEY RECOGNISE IT. Institutionalised racism is deeper than that. Back to AMR: >that the late great Indo-Europeanist explicilty >and strongly criticizes work (e.g., Mu"ller's) >which used racial criteria to classify >languages, that he himself refers to purely >linguistic criteria as the basis for "Hamitic" >and for connecting this to Semitic (p. 122 >and passim). I also not see that he is anywhere >dwelling on the Egyptians not being "negroes", >and the only possible interpretation of the >passage about Nubians' and Hausas' racial >affiliations is that he is in fact trying to >say that even though the former were not >supposedly (this is of course nonsense) "negroes" >and the latter are, this tells us nothing >about whether their languages belong, because >we do not (this is Pedersen speaking) know >enough of the Nubian language, and the status >of Hausa had not yet been sufficiently studied >to be certain that it is "Hamitic" (which is true). OK. Here's the passage on p122 in Pedersen: "Nubian is interesting because of its ancient literary monuments. ... There are also Nubian inscriptions dating from imperial Rome, in an alphabet based on Egyptian characters. But we still do not understand much of them. *The Nubians are not negroes; but to the negro *race** belong the Haussa, whose language is also disputed..." Many readers can pass over the implications of this passage as innocuous because they are not aware of the historical-intellectual context of the point that "Nubians are not negroes", and how Pedersen in making this statement is (no doubt) unquestioningly accepting (or being duped by) the institutionalised racism of his time, in fact promoting it with a statement which NOW but NOT THEN seems gratuitous. It seems I must add that it has nothing to do with Pedersen's personal feelings or whether or not he was a racist (who cares?), but with a set of assumptions that had developed by his time which reflect an ideologically motivated and intellectually institutionalised racism, and were not challenged by the intellectual mainstream until much later. I must bring some knowledge of the (beyond simply linguistics) historical development of anthropology and other relevant fields which help me interpret this passage of Pedersen's -- why he said it, and what the implications were, even though he himself might have only been dimly aware of them (as a product of his time, but not having any further interest other than demonstrating that he was up to the general intellectual currents of his time), and nevertheless promoted a point of view and frame of mind that made certain avenues of research *less likely*, e.g., that (Hamito-)Semitic (i.e., Afro-Asiatic) and "negro" languages are more closely related GENETICALLY than the former and Indo-European. It might be enough to say that he stated "the Nubians are not negroes" (without citing authorities to support that view) simply because that was the received intellectual wisdom of that time (and somehow he felt it advantageous for his students to be aware of that), but I will return below to WHY that was the intellectual wisdom of that time. I have already started in this paragraph to explain how that could effect his view on the *likely* wider genetic affiliation of Semitic, so I will cite another passage to amplify that before returning to his racial comment (not necessarily racist -- I seem to have to keep saying -- but emanating from racist motivated theories). p.139, winding up a survey of South and Central African languages in which the term "negro" does not appear -- and I will take on my own the responsibility for saying that it does not appear because it went without saying, and he was IN THIS CASE not interested in making any (more) racial comments: "...The remaining languages, after we have rendered unto the Hamites what is the Hamites', may be mutually related and may be more remotely related to the Bantu group; but these relationships cannot be more than hypothetical until we have further information." The inference to be drawn here is that the "Hamitic" languages, in all probability being most closely related to Semitic cannot be more closely related to these other African languages. Either the latter are remotely related to each other or not; THAT's the direction for further research. Let's now make our way back to Nubian. Same page, prior to the quote I just gave. "...On page 122 above I have pointed out that the boundaries between the Sudan languages proper and the Hamitic family cannot be drawn with certainty, and I have mentioned Nubian, along the Nile, and Haussa [BW: Hausa -- Pedersen follows older German spelling] between the Niger and Lake Tchad, as two of the languages in dispute." "Sudan", in fact, is a geographical reference, while "Hamitic" is an assumed linguistic reference, and he does not refer to the "Sudan" languages on p.122 (even the index gives only p.139 as a reference for "Sudan languages", for what that's worth), but I'm being petty here. The point is that Pedersen recognises, following the debates of his time, that Nubian may turn out not to be "Hamitic" -- and indeed it is currently classified as Nilo-Saharan, a large, diverse and potentially controversial family. This is all fine and well, even admirable, as far as Pedersen's informedness in linguistic concerns. Nevertheless, the genetic affiliation of Nubian does not affect the conventional wisdom of the institutionalised racism of the time, because whatever Nubian turns out to be, the Nubians are not "negro". So back to that issue. Why aren't the Nubians "negro"? The short answer is because they had an ancient LITERATE culture, as Pedersen mentioned back on p.123, and according to the conventional wisdom of that time which formerly was an ingredient in justifying slavery and later colonialism (as "the whiteman's burden") the "negroes" did not. The longer answer is that it would have been inconvenient for institutional racism to accept as "negro" an ancient culture that was so highly developed to even be literate before Western intrusion, and it was easy enough for 19th c physical anthropologists to take advantage of local physical variation (throughout the world) to find physical criteria to classify people racially in whatever way WAS convenient to the societies which supported their work, and/or found it USEFUL. (I can't resist the wry comment here that the "anti-intellectual" Goering who said "when I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my -- pistol", was so impatient with squabbles over criteria for who belongs to what race that he also said "A Jew is who I say is!") Read Stephen J. Gould's book "the Mismeasure of Man" for further insight into 19th c physical anthropology, and indeed even the honesty with which anthropologists of that time did their work, often even unaware of the unquestioned assumptions that guided their measurements (apart from such notorious falsifications as Burt's work on IQ). Then you can see why I appreciate the historiography of linguistics' self-justification as an attempt to understand the historical motives which have led to the linguistic theories of today -- a field that interests me even more than the one I have been compelled to discuss here. For that matter, Chomsky's comments in the late 1960s on the then prevalent interest in comparative IQ testing of blacks and whites in the US is also instructive. He asked: if science is being directed to seriously investigate social stereotypes with transparent sociopolitical motives (in this case that blacks are (even) stupider than whites) then why not also whether Jews are more avaricious than other people or that Italians have a greater talent for criminal organisations, etc etc? OK, let's leave Chomsky. Back to the Nubians and Egyptians. I must admit that in a previous message I conflated two ideas when I made it sound like Pedersen was also EXPLICITLY dissociating the Egyptians from the "negroes". In defense against the charge of libel (in AMR's opinion) I submit that much more than the Nubians the ancient Egyptians and their civilisation have long been admired by intellectual Europe (among others) and their contributions to Western civilisation via the Greeks and various other peoples have been continuously acknowledged throughout "history". Consequently, their "racial" classification was much discussed and debated, even before Darwinism and evolution with its possibilities for institutionalised racism were being explored. An informative book to read here is "The Leopard's Spots" particular for the concern among American scientists both in the South and North, both pre-bellum and ante-bellum. Apart from overt expressions of personal racism which fed into their interests and research questions, the author of this book (I don't want to interrupt myself to look up the author, it's late 60s) concluded much like Gould that many of them were intellectually honest and consciencious in accounting for their research that led to socially acceptable conclusions for their time. Anyway, it was a foregone conclusion that the ancient Egyptian were "not negro" (the unresolved problem was were they "white"?) As for Pedersen, what I conflated was much like what I took it on my own responsbility to interpret for his lack of racial comment on the "Bantus" and other South and Central Africans. It went without saying (for him) that the Egyptians were not "negro" -- one need only look at current artist's illustrations of the ancient Egyptians in recent National Geographics (as opposed to much of the ancient Egyptian portrayal of their rulers and nobles) to see that they do not "look negro". Thus, the history of current popular images of the ancient Egyptians still shows its heritage institutional racism. And I guess I have to make the point again here, that that is not to say that the current illustrators of such articles in the National Geographic are "racists". Finally, with regard to the association between the Nubians and the Egyptians. In 20th century popular culture the Nubians are (only) the SLAVES of the ancient Egyptians (sometimes they were, sometimes in late dynasies they were their Pharoahs -- that's NOT part of popular culture). An example is the "Nubian" slave played by a black ("Negro"?) actor to Boris Karloff's "white" resurrected Ancient Egyptian in the 1933 movie "The Mummy". Pedersen, of course, has no patience with this kind of blatant racist ignorance (based on SELECTIVE reporting); hence, contrary to popular (Western) belief, the Nubians were not only literate (i.e., "highly civilised"), but they're not even "negro". (Now if anybody's "black", the Nubians sure are, but only "ignorant" people classify people on such superficial criteria.) I hope I have made my point, and, at the least, it is that much more can be brought to bear in interpreting the writings of a scholar or the orientation and assumptions of various theories than meets the less informed eye, or enters the less informed mind. There is much more in linguistics, historical linguistics, or any other field that fundamentally studies people (or even other animals, or even ANYTHING) than what any practitioner in any field thinks there is, and that is of some interest to me, and I hope to at least some other readers. I like to know something about the larger motivations for my interests are, how I fit into the currents of human thought, and how that might affect some of the assumptions I make or some of the directions of research I enjoy but ordinarioly take for granted. None of us can know "everything", or let the lack of knowledge interfere with what we think is worth pursuing, of course etc etc, but I am always interested in something that could come from anywhere -- who knows where -- that can help me resolve or dissolve some problem that has gripped my attention. I think most scholars are the same; they just differ in what gives them insight -- and what discomforts them. In view of that, I respond to AMR's following comment: >I really would ask that people be more cautious >about posting attacks on the integrity of great >(and esp. dead) scholars, esp. in areas as touchy >even now as "race", without doing their homework. I stand by what I said about Pedersen, and I stand ready to further discuss any issue that readers find touchy. I invite AMR, or anyone else, to give other interpretations to Pedersen's point in saying that "the Nubians are not negroes" (or to further study the implications). I interpret it as a reflection of institutionalised racism that shows the limits of that GREAT scholar's understanding of the nature of institutionalised racism and its effect on the intellectual climate in which he honestly, competently, and even inspiringly did his work. Back to historical linguistics and its current controversies, and especially to Alice Faber's COUNTER-proposal, I have tried to show in a somewhat profound way how preconceived assumptions, whose motivations we may not even be aware of, can affect the research questions which lead us to try to group language families in one way rather than another (following up on traditional questions inspired by outmoded theories, influenced by outmoded societies and their outmoded myths.) P.S. For those who care, what I said about institutionalised racism can be said of any preconceived taken for granted notion, and, in fact, in the final analysis, the more general observation is a truism in science -- and the history of science. Even after Newton concluded that there was a FORCE of gravity, he remained troubled by the Cartesian criticism that he was invoking "occult forces" into a universe that was supposed to operate on strictly "mechanical" principles, and he spent some time in his later years trying to make gravity more mechanical in papers that are politely ignored by his adorers. From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Feb 6 16:55:53 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:55:53 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- At 8:41 Uhr -0500 05.02.1999, Scott DeLancey wrote: >But if you're looking for a clear example of an indisputable >family established without any morphological basis, Tai will >do fine. Actually, I mentioned this to Goddard once when we >were disagreeing about exactly this point, and what I remember >him saying (again, he's not responsible for my memory) was, >essentially, well then, we can never really be sure that the >relationship among these languages is genetic. Since Goddard >hasn't ever looked at Tai, I suppose I can imagine how he might >say such a thing, but really--this is a relationship that is >inspectionally evident. I think this is important, and the matter of the necessity to have surefire morphological comparisons to secure a relationship is as well, but I think some clarifications are possible. First of all, I may recall (one of) Meillet's famous formulation(s) on the issue, from his 1914 "Le probleme de la parente des langues", Scientia XV (accents omitted): La demonstration de parente est parfaite si l'on peut expliquer par la transformation des memes elements anciens l'ensemble du systeme grammatical de deux langues distinctes" Meillet 1914, 93 The crucial word here is, I think, "parfaite", since it seems to imply that, even for Meillet, "less-than-perfect", but still viable and to a degree acceptable demonstrations of relationship might exist. Meillet was of course the leading I.E.'ist of his time, and his experiences with I.E. are palpably reflected in these words. I think now, the Tai example doesn't really make a point against morphology being important, nor should it be interpreted as - since morphology is so indespensable - that Tai is only a weakly demonstrable language family. It isn't, and I know since I have spent that half an hour with Li's textbook. Scott DeLancey says that the relationship is inspectionally obvious, and this also my impression. Since I unfortunately did no more study of Tai than that half of an hour, I may be allowed to speculate that this being inspectionally obvious of the relationship is comparable to that we find in, say, Slavic or Romance. Both language families actually never did have to be proposed for the first time - there being no Slavic or Romance Jones, Bopp, or Sajnovics - there closeness is so great that even prescientific inspection will reveal that some notion of "relatedness" - without necessarily a clear idea about how this may have come about, of course - to even the superficial observer. Semitic may be added to this. And in fact this notion of relatedness is generally part of the linguistically untrained speaker of those languages - if at all s/he has access to other members of these families. I repeat, I don't know whether this is comparable to the situation in Tai, but I suspect it to be (please, correct me). In such a case, i.e. with such a close degree of relatedness, the question of "proof" simply is next to irrelevant, I'd say, i.e. (again I'm suspecting only that this is the case with Tai) if the amount of sared lexical items is so overwhelmingly great, and, possibly, long pieces of texts from lg. A may be made comprehensible for speakers of related lg. B by pointing out a limited set of sound-laws and some explanations of, say, divergent syntax. The more so, if the languages in question do not possess anything in the way of a large quantity of bound affixes, organized in intricate paradigms. Again, I take it Tai is more like Chinese in this respect than like Kiranti, Chukchee or Abkhaz. The point where morphology does gain some importance, and considerable importance, is where a) the relationship is not close enough to be inspectionally obvious, and b) where the languages in question *do* possess such a morphological system. All I want to say at this stage is that, with languages of this kind, I'd expect any claim of relatedness to tell me at least something (the more the better) about the coming-about of these system, since *explaining* things we see is what making hypotheses is all about. I short: we don't need much morphological arguments for any claim of relatedness if a) the languages are as closely related as, say, Slavic, Romance or maybe Tai (for argument's sake, please overlook here that, in the case of Slavic and -less so - Romace, common morphology is of course present and definitely part of the impression of relatedness it makes for the untrained eye - but I suspect it could do without); just as a whim of the moment (please, don't press me anyone on it) : with Semitic, morphology is so close that we perhaps could do without vocabulary ???? b): a) holds and the languages don't have any morphology worth speaking of anyway BUT: if a) doesn't hold and b) doesn't hold either, morphology should play a more important role, at least in the sense of Meillet's formulation. Otherwise, an inevitable consequence would be to say that, while the relationship seems to be sure, all the bound morphology of the languages has been developed after the split-up of the parent language, which then inevitably has to be dated far back in time. Such a scenario is certainly not impossible, one may at times be forced to say this, and believe it, too. But such a demonstration of relationship would be - no, not wrong, misguided, or nonsensical - it would only not so perfect as in other cases. This may even mean that proper reconstruction of the parent language may be so difficult as to border on being impossible (though I don't want to verdict this); S-T may, just may, be an example for this. While languages may be related *closely* or *distantly* ( as Slavic lgs. are surely closer related that I.E. lgs.), a notion of being *more* or *less* rlated seems to make no sense. What does seem to make sense, though, is a notion of *more* or *le* *transparently* related, and for the determination of the latter, morphology - if present in the languages - does play an important role. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 7 17:41:35 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:41:35 EST Subject: Yakhontov In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Just a clarification about what I said about Yakhontov. Yakhontov's work was brought to my attention by Sergei Starostin, replying to me in the pages of Mother Tongue. Sergei affirmed Yakhontov's principle in terms of known cognates in languages known to be related, but then went on to adduce a further version involving nothing but perceived resemblances, and to use this against me. He seemed to present this second version as though it were the same thing as the first version, something for which I took him to task at the time. I then went looking for a published source for Yakhontov's principle, and discovered there was none: Yakhontov had never published it. But Sergei did publish a summary in his book on Altaic and Japanese, and somebody who had this book kindly mailed me the relevant passage. From this passage, which I did not find totally explicit, I gathered the impression that Starostin was imputing *both* versions to Yakhontov, and that's what I said in my posting. I was then contacted by another Russian linguist who knows Yakhontov personally, and who assured me that the second version was not Yakhontov's. At present, then, I conclude that the second version, involving only perceived resemblances, is Starostin's own idea, and not Yakhontov's. My apologies if I've misled anybody, but I was doing my best to find out the truth. That's not easy when the originator doesn't publish his work and the only published source is both unavailable to me in Brighton and not very clear anyway. But I think I've got an accurate account into my dictionary. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 7 17:42:19 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:42:19 EST Subject: Yakhontov In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > Moreover, Larry makes an even bigger mistake (or else someone again > misinformed him about what Starostin says). Specifically, he claims > that the Yakhontov method is to look at superficial phonetic > similarities. However, Starostin (p. 25-26) clearly says that he > (Starostin) is looking at matches based on sound correspondences and > all other claims of the Altaic theory (such as morphological > analysis, etymology, etc.), and indeed relates words which LOOK > nothing alike, but are cognate under the Altaic theory, e.g., Turkic > *yapur-gak : Mongolic *lab-c^in : Middle Korean *nip(h). Since > Yakhontov had not published a detailed description of his method, I > cannot claim that this is how HE would have used it, but this is > certainly how Starostin uses it. > This goes to the heart of the whole fight about what role phonetic > similarity plays in comparative linguistics (Larry claims none at > all. I claim a subordinate but important and indeed probably crucial > one). But note that Starostin is not doing anything that Larry could > object to on this score. He is NOT using phonetic similarity at > all. Starostin in his book may well be doing exactly what Alexis says. I haven't seen the book, only one paragraph of it. However, in the Mother Tongue exchange, Sergei was most certainly working with mere perceived phonological and semantic resemblances, and with nothing else at all. That is obvious to anyone who reads the relevant passage, and that is what got me confused about what Yakhontov was saying in the first place. Not guilty. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From faber at haskins.yale.edu Sun Feb 7 17:43:23 1999 From: faber at haskins.yale.edu (Alice Faber) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:43:23 EST Subject: Nostratic and Nilo-Saharan Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I am an idiot, I confess it. When Alice Faber and Benji Wald attributed > to, respectively, a false notion of a > "Judeo-Christian cultural tradition" and racism the fact that > Nostraticists have sought to connect Afro-Asiatic to Indo- European rather > than to Nilo-Saharan, I said many things, especially about the intolerable > racism charge, which, while true, missed the point that in fact > Nostraticists HAVE looked at Nilo-Saharan. I do not know who precisely > but Shevoroshkin (1989:3) and Kaiser and Shevoroshkin (1988:310) include > not just Nilo-Saharan but also Niger-Kordofanian (another group of > languages spoken by people whom racists call Fblack' rather than Fwhite' > or something in between) in Nostratic and allude to work which has > established it. As I recall, I objected to including this statement in the > paper I coauthored with Shevoroshkin (see below) in 1991 because he could > not provide me with a copy of the relevant literature. I suspect it was > something never published at all or only samizdated, but I do not know > that for a fact. I'm glad to find that I had been mistaken in my impression that Nilo-Saharan and other language families had been ignored in long-range language comparison. I've undergone enough of a career shift since 1988 that I haven't been able to follow the literature as well as I might have earlier. As for my assertion that some of those who search out a link between Semitic and Indo-European being in part motivated by a perspective involving the Judeo-Christian tradition, I'd like to make clear that I'm not including any modern investigators of Nostratic here. I'm thinking of folks who simply don't care (or perhaps don't know) that Hebrew is part of Semitic is part of Afro- Asiatic, but simply look for superficial similarities between Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. There's a big difference between saying that Hebrew and Latin are related and saying that Hebrew and Latin are related because Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European are part of Nostratic. Both are hypotheses that can be discussed, and perhaps refuted, but only the latter is consistent with a wide body of published literature. Many folks who work on the history of Semitic languages are quite sensitive, perhaps over sensitive to the difference. Alice Faber From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Sun Feb 7 17:47:02 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:47:02 EST Subject: Yakhontov Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > > Anyway, Larry also relates two claims supposed to have been by Yakhontov > about these lists in relation to language relatedness, one of which are: > > Claim 1. > If two languages are genetically related, then the proportion of cognates > in the 35-word list will always be greater than the proportion in the > 65-word list. I think it is easy to straighten out this problem. Let's define two variables; P := the proportion in the 35 list is greater than or equal to the proportion in the 65-list R:= The languages are related (genetically) Then claim 1 is R => P where => is the implication sign of logic. > Claim 2 acc. to Larry: > "If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list is higher > than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word list, then > this is evidence that the languages are related". This makes the claim that; P => R Obviously this is not equivalent to claim 1 above. > Actually, what Starostin (1991) has, though, is something quite different: > > "But if the percentage of matches (Russian: sovpadenij) is identical [sc. > in both sublists--AMR] or the percentage of matches (Russian: sovpadenij) > the 35-word list is less than (or equal to) the proportion of phonetic > resemblances in the 65-word list, then the parallelism (Russian: > skhodstvo) between the languages is accidental (i.e., there exists an > accidental coincidence [Russian: sovpadenie] or the result of active > contacts and borrowings." This makes the claim P' => R' This statement via the contrapositive is equivalent to R => P which is claim 1. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From faber at haskins.yale.edu Sun Feb 7 17:48:34 1999 From: faber at haskins.yale.edu (Alice Faber) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:48:34 EST Subject: Holger Pedersen and "Race" Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Benji Wald: > >I have just had a chance to look over Pedersen's book > >The Discovery of Language, and contrary to the (in > >my view libelous) claims by B. Wald posted on this > >list, it is immediately apparent (pp. 101, 321) > > BW: amazingly enough, decades ago I underlined the very passages in my copy of > Pedersen's book that AMR has in mind. They refer to the utter distinction > between > language and "race", and making inferences about race from reconstructed > language > family. Pedersen is among the linguists I referred to parenthetically > above who > criticise racism WHEN THEY RECOGNISE IT. Institutionalised racism is > deeper than > that. I'm having a little trouble following the above, because I'm reading from my paperback English translation (copyright 1931). I think it's important when committing exegesis, which is, after all, what we're doing with this close textual reading, to bear in mind that this is a *translated* work. > Back to AMR: > > >that the late great Indo-Europeanist explicilty > >and strongly criticizes work (e.g., Mu"ller's) > >which used racial criteria to classify > >languages, that he himself refers to purely > >linguistic criteria as the basis for "Hamitic" > >and for connecting this to Semitic (p. 122 I don't see Pedersen's criticism of M"uller's racial criteria as strong, though he does criticize it (p. 117, for those scoring at home). And he does refer to linguistic criteria for Hamitic and Semitic. Given the state of knowledge at his time (he lists three subgroups of Hamitic, Egyptian, Berber, and "South Hamitic" [=Cushitic, roughly], but no Chadic). He correctly raises the question of whether Hamitic and Semitic are co-ordinate branches. > I hope I have made my point, and, at the least, it is that much more can be > brought to bear in interpreting the writings of a scholar or the > orientation and assumptions of various theories than meets the less > informed eye, or enters the less informed mind. There is much more in > linguistics, historical linguistics, or any other field that fundamentally > studies people (or even other animals, or even ANYTHING) than what any > practitioner in any field thinks there is, and that is of some interest to > me, and I hope to at least some other readers. I like to know something > about the larger motivations for my interests are, how I fit into the > currents of human thought, and how that might affect some of the > assumptions I make or some of the directions of research I enjoy but > ordinarioly take for granted. None of us can know "everything", or let the > lack of knowledge interfere with what we think is worth pursuing, of course > etc etc, but I am always interested in something that could come from > anywhere -- who knows where -- that can help me resolve or dissolve some > problem that has gripped my attention. I think most scholars are the same; > they just differ in what gives them insight -- and what discomforts them. I agree here...I'm bringing something different to Pedersen than either Alexis or Benji is. In the section on Semitic and Hamitic, I find many gratuitous references to Christianity (and some non-gratuitous references, as well). This is, of course, partly Pedersen and partly me, and others might disagree about how gratuitous these references are. The questions Benji is encouraging us to ask are whether these references would have been perceived as gratuitous in the mid 1920s when Pedersen wrote, and if not what cultural presuppositions might have motivated Pedersen to make these references. I'm really out of my depth when it comes to this kind of analysis, so I'll leave it at that. I think it's worth saying that Pedersen's work is an admirable state of the art description of historical and comparative linguistic knowledge for its era. There is little of substance that is inconsistent with the knowledge of its day, beyond the simplification that is inevitable in an introductory survey. There are many prescient remarks. However, much in it is outdated. We have, after all, made progress in the past 60 years. What bothers me in some instances is the *tone*, a tone that reflects cultural assumptions that I find objectionable. This is not to say that Pedersen knew that his work would have such an impact 60 years down the road, or that he would have written differently, if he had known. Alice Faber From Georg at home.ivm.de Sun Feb 7 17:52:44 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:52:44 EST Subject: Yakhontov Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 22:01:56 +0100 >To: manaster at umich.edu >From: Ralf-Stefan Georg >Subject: Re: Yakhontov >Cc: >Bcc: >X-Attachments: > > > >>Actually, what Starostin (1991) has, though, is something quite different: >> >>"But if the percentage of matches (Russian: sovpadenij) is identical [sc. >>in both sublists--AMR] or the percentage of matches (Russian: sovpadenij) >>the 35-word list is less than (or equal to) the proportion of phonetic >>resemblances in the 65-word list, then the parallelism (Russian: >>skhodstvo) between the languages is accidental (i.e., there exists an >>accidental coincidence [Russian: sovpadenie] or the result of active >>contacts and borrowings." >> >>If I am not mistaken, this means that the second claim is not really >>separate claim at all. It says the same thing as claim 1, viz., that >>related >>languages are supposed to look a certain way, but it is not stated or >>logically implied that languages that look that way must be related. >> >> >>Moreover, Larry makes an even bigger mistake (or else someone again >>misinformed him about what Starostin says). Specifically, he claims that >>the Yakhontov method is to look at superficial phonetic similarities. >>However, Starostin (p. 25-26) clearly says that he (Starostin) is looking >>at matches based on sound correspondences and all other claims of the >>Altaic theory (such as morphological analysis, etymology, etc.) > I'm the misinformer. My translation of the crucial passage was : " If two languages are indeed related, the number ("procent") of matches in the 35-words-list has to be higher than in the rest of the 100-words-list. If the number of matches is equal (or higher in the 65-l. than in the 35-l.) the resemblance of the two languages is fortuitous (i.e. either completely fortuitous or the result of active contacts and borrowing)." > >I translated "sovpadenie" by "match" and, towards the end of the sentence, >"skhodstvo mezhdu jazykami" as "resemblance of the languages", since that >is obviously to be understood here. It is not defined in this passage what >a "sovpadenie" means, so "match" is the fairest of translations. If the >test reveals nagative results, then the languages show some "skhodstvo", >but it is not significant, according to Yakhontov, consequently the >translation "resemblance" is warranted. > >That Starostin works within a framework where "resemblances" don't count, >but is looking for regular correspondances is clear from the rest of the >book and, I thought, was well-known. Whether this attempt was successful >is a different question (but, please, don't forget that the book does >*not* contain any morphology, since Starostin says a) that it has been >done elsewhere (although in a framework completely different from his own, >by Baskakov) and b) in a somewhat difficult and possibly garbled passage, >he says that typology is not useful for classification "*and therefore* >I'm not going to treat morphology"; though I could have misunderstood this >passage). > > >I stay out of the discussion of the Yakhontov test, but please note that >his formulation implies what seems to be a method of asserting >non-relatedness, as is quite clear from both your and my translation. If >the percentages work out a certain way, then the languages look similar >fortuitously or due to contact. I'd not subscribe to either part of this >principle, but the stage is yours. > > Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de Sun Feb 7 17:56:17 1999 From: w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de (WB (in Frankfurt today)) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:56:17 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I will not get into the various comments on the quality of Laurent Sagart's work on SIno-Austronesian which have been floating around on this list during the last few days, since most of them were so superficial and based upon hearsay and faint recollections to such an astonishing degree, that I do not consider it worthwhile. Instead, I have forwarded the exchange on ST and AN to Sagart, who, I am sure, is qualified much better than me to reply to the issues raised in the various postings by Alexis, Scott et al. Let me just stress, however, since it is _very_ easy on a general discussion list like HISTLING, which deals with so many different language families and genetic theories, to generate wrong, and possibly, longlived impressions to the effect that the work of Sagart belongs into the cate- gory of "weird speculations", that he is somehow involun- tarily stuck with a "dead-wrong" idea which he fears to withdraw, that he does not know the langugaes he is working on etc. etc., that nothing could be further from the truth (see Sagart's own posting on Sino-Austronesian). As far as the Old Chinese side of the comparison is con- cerned, it should be pointed out that Sagart has written the _only_ serious comment on Baxter's _Handbook_ (_Dia- chronica_ X [1993] 2: 237-260; with the exception of EG Pulleyblank, who does not accept the six-vowel system at all and argues from a totally different perspective), that he is now certainly the most active scholar working on Old Chinese morphology and root-theory (watch out for his forthcoming book, J. Benjamins), and that he has pu- blished widely on a variety of crucial issues in Old Chinese reconstruction (for a list of his publications cf. http:// www.ehess.fr/centres/crlao/crlao.html), which are extremely important, irrespective of what your favorite position on the external relationships of OC might be. I believe to be entitled to say this, since I among the very few people who have ever tried to take Sagart's criticisms of some of the details of Baxter's reconstruction seriously by testing them against a corpus of uncorrupted bronze inscriptional sources, rather than edited texts (for an online-abstract of my dissertation see , for a more extended version cf. _Cahiers de Linguistique — Asie Orientale_ 26 [1997] 1), and since Sagart's observations have been by and large corroborated by these data. My own views on ST and ST-AN notwithstanding (for which see my review of the volume by WSY Wang, quoted by Alexis, in one of the last issues of _Language_), I would appreciate it if those who think that Sagart's AN -- ST com- parisons are wrong, or who criticize his reassinging certain "classical" ST reconstructions to the layer of TB -- OC borrowings, should present some evidence to substantiate their criticisms. This said, here are a few more impressionistic comments (sorry if this is in a wrong chronological order --- HISTLING messages have reached me in a totally chaotic succession recently): At 16:58 04.02.99 EST, Alexis wrote AMR| [...] so too I think AMR| that the few critics of ST are really reaction to the AMR| unsatisfactory state of the actual work on ST (and AMR| again just as in Altaic to some extent I suspect that AMR| Miller is reacting to ST as it was some decades ago AMR| esp. to Benedict's work much as the anti-Altaicists AMR| are still really responding to the errors of Ramstedt AMR| in the 50s and Poppe in the 60s). True up to a certain degree (Miller's reviews of Benedicts's _Conspectus_, Shafer's _Introduction to Sino-Tibetan_, and Sedlaachek's _Das Gemein-Sino-Tibetische_ etc. are certainly among the harshest specimens of that genre in the whole post- war sinological literature). But Miller's famous article on the subject ("The Sino-Tibetan Hypothesis", _Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology_ 59 [1988] 2: 509-540) does _not_ refer to the work on ST during the 60ies and 70ies, it is in fact nothing more than an extended review article on W. South Coblin's _A Sino- logist's Handlist of Sino-Tibetan Lexical Comparisons_ (Monumenta Serica Monograph Series; 18, Nettetal: Steyler Verlag 1988). Notice that Coblin, the author of many important works and articles on Old and Medieval Chinese as well as Tibetan, has been reported by Victor Mair recently to have joined the ranks of those who believe that there is no such thing as ST, or at least, it can not be recon- structed in any meaningful sense of the word. Ditto for recent advances in the reconstruction of Old Chinese, which are described as "endless rehashing of the same old data", the hermeneutics and general feasability of which have been attacked by Coblin, Norman and some of his students all over the place, so that the climate within OC phonology, is, unfortunately, sometimes not quite as pleasant as Alexis would have it. Anyway, I wonder what a review of Peiros' & Starostins, _ETymological Dictionary of Five Sino- Tibetan Languages_ (5fasc., Canberra, 1997?) would look like ... Alexis continues: AMR| More legitimately, I've heard the argument made (by Chris Beckwith, AMR| I think, among others, though he shouldn't be held hostage to my AMR| imperfect memory) that ST can't be considered *proven* because the AMR| lack of morphology in Chinese makes it impossible to find the kind AMR| of nice syntagmatic and paradigmatic morphological correspondences AMR| that make us so confident of Indo-European or Semitic or Algic. Possible, although Beckwith' position is more along the lines that some of the morphological parallels quoted in favour of ST are depen- dent on seriously flawed Tibetan data (cf. i.e., contra Pulleyblank, "The morphological argument for the existence of Sino-Tibetan", in: _Pan-Asiatic Linguistics; Proceedings of the Fourth Int’l. Symp. on Languages & Linguistics_, vol. 3: 812-26, Bangkok [:Mahidol UP] 1996), that Tibetan has genetic links with IE (cf. an article, co-authored with M. Walter, published in the proceedings of the Graz meeting on Tibetology, the exact bibliographical references of which I cannot check here at home), and that Old Chinese might be genealogically related to Old Japanese (cf. his contribution at the last SIno- Tibetan Conference in Lund, October 1998)! The other anti-Sino-Tibetan scholar who has been quoted widely in the literature surrounding the Xinjiang mummy-findings is Tsung-tung Chang (Frankfurt). Contrary to Pulleyblank, who thinks that PIE is remotely related to OC _as part of ST_, Chang totally rejects the validity of ST (cf. "Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese. A New Thesis on the Emergence of Chinese Language and Civilization in the Late Neolithic Age", _Sino-Platonic Papers_ 7 [1988]: 1-56). Since the controversy around remote connections with IE has been covered in a massive (and in parts rather violent!) exchange between EG Pul- leyblank and Victor Mair in the inaugural issue of _The Int'l. Review of CHinese Linguistics_ (1996, pp. 1-50, including valuable comments by Kortlandt, Sagart, Keightley, Fitzgerald-Huber, WSY Wang; still heavier rejoinders & surrejoinders still forthcoming in the next issue!), I will limit myself to say that Pulleyblank is barely exaggerating when he writes that "[Chang's] ... speculations are, if anything, less soundly based than those of Edkins (1871) and Schlegel (1872) in the middle of the last century. [...] He seems innocent of the principle of regularity of sound change and feels free to reconstruct Old CHinese forms to match his supposed Indo- European cognates without any of the troublesome constraints that respect for that principle would impose ...". At 11:51 06.02.99 EST, Alexis wrote about AMR| ... Austronesian borrowings into Old Chinese. AMR| Am I missing something? Is the question whether anyone AMR| BESIDES Laurent Sagart is finding such borrowings? AMR| I would like to hear if there is. Well, first of all, Sagart is of course not the first scholar who has written about early AN-OC lexical contacts (be they genetical or borrowings), cf. i.e. the early work of August COnrady (1916, 1923) and Konrad Wulff (1942). Secondly, Zheng-Zhang Shangfang (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Pan Wuyun (Shanghai) and some other PRC scholars who are arguing for a Sino-Austric (+- Hmong-Mienic) superfamily have produced & published lists of Sino- Austric comparanda (of _very_ varying quality). There is also an article "A comparison of reconstructed Austronesian, Old Chinese and Austronesian" by Lee C. Hogan, _Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area_ 16 (1993) 2: 1-55. But these are, as far as I can see, essen- tially lists of lookalikes without anything like a serious compara- tive framework behind them. Finally a short historical note re: origins of the debate that shared morphology is crucial for the demonstration of genetical relatedness, Meillet's position on East Asian languages etc. --- The discussion, as far as concerned with Old Chinese and its presumably "isolating" root structure, goes back much further, at least to the middle of the 19th century and Georg von der Gabe- lentz', "Sur la possibilité de prouver l’existence d’une affinité généalogique entre les langues dites indochinoises" (_Atti del IV congresso internazionale degli Orientalisti_, vol. 2: 283-95, Florence 1881). Here, the great grammarian of Classical Chinese tries to rebut the widespread misconception of his time (and, indeed, much of the 20th century as well), that the alleged _mono- syllabism_ of Old CHinese and the general "aversion du chinois pour les éléments formels" associated with it would somehow preclude the possibility of internal reconstruction and external copmpari- sons. (On the notion of "monosyllabism", inextricably linked with "isolating" during this period cf. also G. Ineichen, "Historisches zum Begriff des Monosyllabismus im Chinesischen", _Historiographia Linguistica_ 14 [1987] 3: 265-282 and my forthcoming rev. article on J. PAckard ed., _New approaches to CHinese word formation_, Am- sterdam 1998), to be published in the _Int'l. Review for CHinese Linguistics_ (Hong Kong) 1999). Von der Gabelentz shows, how the Old Chinese pronoun system encapsulates certain elements of in- flexion (an idea later inherited by Karlgren), and how these could be possibly matched with similar systems in TB, before concluding, categorically: "Le monosyllabisme, nous l’avons vu, ne prouve rien". Cheers, Wolfgang ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Wolfgang Behr, Lecturer in Chinese History & Philosophy Dept. of East Asian Studies, Ruhr-University Bochum, FRG mail: OAW, Universitaetsstr. 150, UB-5, 44780 Bochum, FRG Fax +49-234-709-4449; ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Feb 7 17:56:55 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:56:55 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <36BC6AE2.95956C15@fs.tufs.ac.jp> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- "Robert R. Ratcliffe" wrote: >Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the Nostratic idea started in >the 19th century as a way to link what was then known about language >families with the Biblical narrative. There were supposed to be three >families corresponding to the three sons of Noah-- Semitic, Hamitic, and >Japhetic (IE). Other families were gradually added. I believe Pedersen coined the term "Nostratic" in the twentieth century, but I'll leave Pedersen aside for two reasons: I have not read him on Nostratic, and I don't think the modern work on Nostratic (Illich-Svitych, Dolgopol'skij, Bomhard) owes very much to Pedersen except for the name. >Now from what (little) I know of the modern Nostratic work, the best, or >at least most obvious argument for a common link are the similarities in >the system of pronouns (including the verb conjugation) of IE, Uralic, >and Altaic. But AA languages show a radically different system. > >[..] > >So who does argue for an IE-AA link and why? Illich-Svitych, Dolgopol'skij, Bomhard, to name a few. Illich-Svitych's and Bomhard/Kerns' Nostratic dictionaries list a large number of proposed Nostratic etymologies including IE and AA reflexes (Illich-Svitych includes only roots that he has recognized in more than two families, so there are none involving *only* IE and AA; Bomhard/Kerns if I remember correctly, does include a number of IE-AA-only proposals). Each of these etymologies (and there are many) should be evaluated on its own merits. I believe a number of them are quite convincing. I don't think it's justified to say that there exist *no* similarities between the verb conjugations of IE and AA. The stative/perfective endings (as found in Semitic, Egyptian, Berber) are readily comparable to the IE perfect and the Hittite hi-conjugation (as well as the related medio-passive forms). The only sound-law that is required is that (pre-)PIE at some stage changed absolute final *-k (which does not occur in PIE at all) to *-H2. We have: Proto-Semitic Egyptian Hittite Indo-European (Lipin'ski) (Loprieno) 1. *-ku -kj -hi *-H2e 2. *-ka ~ *-ta -tj -ti (-*tHi) *-tH2e *-ki ~ *-ti 3. *-0 -j -i *-e *-at 1. *-na -wjn -weni *-me(n) 2. *-kanu ~ *-tanu -twjn -teni *-t(H)e *-kina ~ *-tina 3. *-u: -wj -nzi (*-nti) *-e:r (*-ent) *-a: -tj We can reconstruct Proto-Nostratic *-k, *-tk, *-0; *-wen, *-tkwen, ? (Note that *(s1)tkwen- is the Kartvelian 2p.pl. pronoun). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 17:58:54 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:58:54 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <36BC6AE2.95956C15@fs.tufs.ac.jp> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I am curious about something. This whole thread started with Alexis > criticizing me for not paying proper attention to work being done on > "Semitic-IE" comparison. But is there in fact anyone who is now working > on or arguing for an IE-Afroasiatic grouping (either within or out of > Nostratic)? First, I want to thank Robert for taking my criticism seriously enough to pursue the questions it raises. I also want to be careful in responding. The way it is framed I am not sure if it asking whether anyone wants to group IE and AA together as a proper subfamily of Nostratic or whether Nostratic or other scholars are pursuing the idea of IE and AA being related. As to the former, I don't think so, although I myself keep thinking that some of the specific proposals that have been made with Nostratic about the connections between IE and AA verbal affixes for example may point to a closer connection than is normally assumed. Mostly though I am really trying to point out that, even if Nostratic is valid, we really know nothing much about its branching. Overall, it seems as though the lexical comparisons are particularly strong between IE, Uralic, and Altaic, whereas grammatical ones seem to be especially strong between IE, Uralic, and AA. The question I like to pose nowadays in the form I did in my earlier posting: Could it be that IE together with Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber form a proper subfamily of AA itself (which at first sounds absurd until we realize just how different Cushitic and Chadic are from the above) is intended to (a) show just how little we do know and (b) challenge the few of us who work on Nostratic at all to do something substantive about the classification issues. I am not making any claims at all, only asking questions. As to the other part of the question, there are very few people actually working on Nostratic. In fact "Nostraticist" is a very misleading term. Most "Nostraticists" are linguist who strongly support Nostratic but do not at all or at best rarely work on it. This applies to almost all of the Moscow scholars who are usually caled by this term. On the other hand, the people who actually work on Nostratic do not necessarily support it, funny though that they may sound. I myself have proposed several revisions to Nostratic w/o being committed to the theory. In my view, it is wrong to adopt a theory before you know how good it is and before you have worked on it yourself in most cases. Rather you decide that it is good ENOUGH to spend time on and then spend the time. This in my view is the one central problem we face in both theoretical and historiacl linguistics today that people have been taught to sign on before doing any work and contrariwise to refuse to do any work before signing on--where by 'sign on' I mean become a devotee, a followed, an adherent, a supporter--whatever the term is. Finally, there are of course people who ignore Nostratic and work on comparing IE and Semitic, but this strikes as no more scholarly today than it was in the 1920's or even earlier when Pedersen and others pointed out you cannot talk about Semitic and IE w/o talking about AA. > > Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the Nostratic idea started in > the 19th century as a way to link what was then known about language > families with the Biblical narrative. There were supposed to be three > families corresponding to the three sons of Noah-- Semitic, Hamitic, and > Japhetic (IE). Other families were gradually added. > This is in fact incorrect. Nothing could be further from the truth. The man who gave us the idea of Nostratic and the term, Holger Pedersen, in fact spent an inordinate amount of time just trying to show how misleading the term 'Semitic' is precisely because the Biblical assocaitions have nothing to do with the case. The work on Nostratic actually goes back to work, the best and most abundant of which was done by several Scandinavian linguists like Mo/ller, Anderson, Wiklund, etc., on connecting IE to on the one hand Semitic and on the other Uralic (or Uralic and Altaic). Pedersen as far as I know was the first to propose that these efforts point to a far bigger unity which he called Nostratic in or around 1903. He himself did little work on the theory himself, atlhough at the 1933 congress of linguists he did advance some arguments for Nostratic and engaged in a lively debate with such skeptics as Trubetzkoy and others. No, there is no more of a Biblical connection here than there is with Alice Faber's imaginary "Judeo-Christian" or Benji Wald's even more imaginary racist ideas. But I would very much appreciate hearing where you think you picked this up, There are many vicious rumors circulating about Nostratic and the scholars who worked on it, and I try from time to time to deal with some of them in print. So any references would be apprecaited or even any hints as to who spreads this disinformation. BTW, Holger Pedersen's The Discovery of Language (a title imposed by an American publisher, not his own), which was once one of the most widely known basic books in our field, deals with the state of comparative ling generally and hence includes what little as known or thought of Nostratic in the early period, It is in any case a very fine book and an irreplaceable one for anyone with an interest in the history of linguistics. For more recent work on Nostratic, I posted some basic references earlier. > Now from what (little) I know of the modern Nostratic work, the best, or > at least most obvious argument for a common link are the similarities in > the system of pronouns (including the verb conjugation) of IE, Uralic, > and Altaic. Not entirely. IE and Uralic yes but Altaic not so much. And there have been proposals linking IE verb morphology quite intimately with AA and also Kartvelian. > But AA languages show a radically different system. (The > best evidence for AA itself is similarities in this same subsystem). Not necessarily. Dolgopolsky and perhaps others independently have argued that what they take the most archaic parts of the verbal inflectional system in IE and AA are quite strikingly related. I am not endorsing this at least not fully. I am just pointing that this is a point addressed at reasonable length in the literature. Also, re AA, it is true that the relationship of Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, and some but not all of Cushitic (languages like Somali) was noticed early on and argued above on the basis of obvious pronominal and verb-inflectional parallels (Pedersen's op. cit. book, p. 121 is a good quick reference for nonspecialists), there are other groups of Cushitic lgs where this is not the case. And one of the groups often assigned to AA, Omotic, is extremely divergent in this regard, and in fact its AA status still (or agai?) controversial > The > older arguments for a Semitic-IE relation relied, I believe, on things > like presence of a two-gender system and a dual number-- This has nothing whatever to do with Nostratic scholarship of any stripe. There have been and I think still are people who say such things, some of whom are academics with impressive resumes, but not among Nostratic comparativists, not now, not a hundred years ago. > broad > typological properties, Which as you know have nothing to do with language relatedness, a point Pedersen, Greenberg, and so many other fine linguists have had to repeat so much and so often. > which are in any case absent from Uralic and > Altaic (though I recently heard that old Mongolian had gender). > Doerfer talks about gender as an argument against the validity of Altaic, I believe. > So I suspect that the inclusion of AA in nostratic is purely an accident > of history-- a relic of the pre-scientific 19th century roots of the > Nostratic proposal-- That is just not so. And you have to distinguish two kinds of thought about language in the 19th cent AND today (scientific vs. nonscientific rather than prescientific). The scientific comp. linguists who linked AA with IE (or Nostratic generally) were some of the finest scientific comp linguists of the time and I would argue the same is true today. > rather than something that any contemporary > linguist who knows the material and the methodology has seriously > proposed. Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky, who created modern Nostratic studiesin the 1960's and Bomhard, who came up with a similar though distinct approach independently a little later, all did/do. To the extent that I accept Nostratic, I find the AA connection no less compelling than Kartvelian and more than Dravidian, for example. Starostin is the one major Nostraticist (although he actually has done little published work on Nostratic) who has argued that AA is a sister of Nostratic and not a daughter, but this is an issue of branching rather than saying that there is no relationship. > I, for one, am very impressed that Greenberg doesn't include > AA in Nostratic. I did not think he had published his work on the topic, so I cannot judge whether his reasons are something to praise or otherwise. All I know is that he excludes AA from what he calls Eurasiatic, which is similar to Nostratic, but I am rather sure that he, like Starostin, does not reject a relationship but merely thinks it is a more distant one. >So who does argue for an IE-AA link and why? On the basis of the numerous lexical and grammatical forms which are argued to be cognate, to be found in works by Illich-Svitych, Dolgopolsky, Bomhard, above all, and some others. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 17:59:24 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:59:24 EST Subject: Yakhontov In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > Just a clarification about what I said about Yakhontov. > > Yakhontov's work was brought to my attention by Sergei Starostin, > replying to me in the pages of Mother Tongue. Sergei affirmed > Yakhontov's principle in terms of known cognates in languages known to > be related, but then went on to adduce a further version involving > nothing but perceived resemblances, and to use this against me. He > seemed to present this second version as though it were the same thing > as the first version, something for which I took him to task at the > time. Starostin denies that he presented such a second version. But if he did or if anybody did, your critique if absolutely compelling and lucidly presented and I recall criticizing Starostin and the editors of MT in a posting to the list for not acknowledging just how right you were--much as I more recently criticize you for not being fairer to them. > > I then went looking for a published source for Yakhontov's principle, > and discovered there was none: Yakhontov had never published it. But > Sergei did publish a summary in his book on Altaic and Japanese, and > somebody who had this book kindly mailed me the relevant passage. From > this passage, which I did not find totally explicit, I gathered the > impression that Starostin was imputing *both* versions to Yakhontov, and > that's what I said in my posting. But in fact you misread or misinterpreted what he says there. I think Mark Hubey explained the difference quite well in his posting, by the way. > > I was then contacted by another Russian linguist who knows Yakhontov > personally, and who assured me that the second version was not > Yakhontov's. At present, then, I conclude that the second version, > involving only perceived resemblances, is Starostin's own idea, and not > Yakhontov's. But where do we find a clear statement by Starostin of this second version? Certainly not in the 1991 book on Altaic. > My apologies if I've misled anybody, but I was doing my best to find out > the truth. That's not easy when the originator doesn't publish his work > and the only published source is both unavailable to me in Brighton and > not very clear anyway. Starostin's book is entirely clear. Anybody can judge by reading the passage which I have e-distributed. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 18:00:08 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 13:00:08 EST Subject: Yakhontov In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > > Moreover, Larry makes an even bigger mistake (or else someone again > > misinformed him about what Starostin says). Specifically, he claims > > that the Yakhontov method is to look at superficial phonetic > > similarities. However, Starostin (p. 25-26) clearly says that he > > (Starostin) is looking at matches based on sound correspondences and > > all other claims of the Altaic theory (such as morphological > > analysis, etymology, etc.), and indeed relates words which LOOK > > nothing alike, but are cognate under the Altaic theory, e.g., Turkic > > *yapur-gak : Mongolic *lab-c^in : Middle Korean *nip(h). Since > > Yakhontov had not published a detailed description of his method, I > > cannot claim that this is how HE would have used it, but this is > > certainly how Starostin uses it. > > > This goes to the heart of the whole fight about what role phonetic > > similarity plays in comparative linguistics (Larry claims none at > > all. I claim a subordinate but important and indeed probably crucial > > one). But note that Starostin is not doing anything that Larry could > > object to on this score. He is NOT using phonetic similarity at > > all. > > Starostin in his book may well be doing exactly what Alexis says. > I haven't seen the book, only one paragraph of it. Not "may well have", did. I don't see why even on a simple matter of reading a few pages of a Russian text, what I say has to be doubted. > > However, in the Mother Tongue exchange, Sergei was most certainly > working with mere perceived phonological and semantic resemblances, and > with nothing else at all. That is obvious to anyone who reads the > relevant passage, and that is what got me confused about what Yakhontov > was saying in the first place. I think it is rather a case of Starostin trying to say that Bengtson's comparisons, which you are right are based on similarity not rules of correspondence, have a considerable degree of plausibility. He does not seem to go further than that. In fact, does he not say something about the need for correspondences to be worked out before we could say more? I know he has said this to me but I dont have the MT articles at hand. > Not guilty. > Yeah, but one could be a heck of lot MORE innocent. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 18:01:00 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 13:01:00 EST Subject: Wald's continuing accusations of racism Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I have received two versions, one long, the other even longer, of a diatribe from Wald accusing me of ignorance about the history of linguistics, and both Pedersen and by implication me of "institutional racism", though not (necessarily) of being racists at a persona level (something which Wald seems to say he does not care about). I consider these to be very serious charges indeed, both as to ignorance and especially as to racism. Fortunately, in the case before us we are dealing with specifics. Wald's charge is based on a specific book of Pedersen's, which is widely available (The Discovery of Language) and I think it is easy, as I do below, to show that Wald misunderstands the passages at issue and that these passages show precisely the opposite of what Wald claims. As for me, his attacks seem to be based on (a) the fact that I defend Pedersen and (b) that I am associated loosely with work on the Nostratic theory and that all Nostraticists are racists because we do not (supposedly) allow the possibility that the Afro-Asiatic languages are related to Nilo-Saharan ones. As to (a), if I am right about Pedersen, and I am, then that is that. As to (b), the charge is ludicrous because in fact (as I posted earlier) some Nostraticists do in fact claim that Nilo-Saharan is PART of Nostratic. But even if that were not the case, I do not see that it makes sense to say that it is racist to propose a language family including some languages of Africa together with some languages of Eurasia but without other languages of Africa. Finally, it appears to me that it is Wald who is operating with racial categories in a way I find unscientific and immoral, because he appears to ne saying: (a) Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken by members of race A (so-called Black or Negro), (b) Nostraticists do not want to admit that languages spoken by members of race A can be related to languages spoken by members of race B (spo-called White or Caucasian), and THIS is why Nostraticists never have and do not admit that Nilo-Saharan languages are related to Afro-Asiatic languages (which we do put in Nostratic). And this is what makes us racists. Without assuming that the categories Black and White are meaningful, I don't even see how one can formulate the charge of racism against us that Wald lays. Yet it is clearly a matter of scientific consensus among biologists that the human species cannot be meaningful divided into such "races", and given how much harm the insistence on race has done historically, it also immoral in my view to operate with these categories. Further, I dont see how the argument of Wald's can be made without presupposing that Nilo-Saharan is in fact related to AA. For if it is not (or even if we merely do not yet know that it is), then there exists another reason why Nostraticists have (with the exceptions noted in my posting on this, with complete references) not related AA to Nilo-Saharan, which has nothing to do with racism, namely, because we are right. As I noted some time ago, there is another explanation which is that most of the Nostratic work was done when the Nilo-Saharan and even the AA situation was not very well understood and the Nilo-Saharan were not as well known to the few scholars who did the seminal work on Nostratic as were for example Altaic or Afro-Asiatic. I for example do not know almost anything abotu Nilo-Saharan. Does this make me a racist? But then why do I know something about AA? or about Dravidian? Does Wald have in mind some new form of racism which treats AA speakers (e.g., Hausas) or Dravidian speakers as "White" but Nilo-Saharan speakers as "Black"? But that is inconsistent with the racist underpinning of his argument as stated. So it turns out that to make sense of the reality of what various Nostraticists have done Wald would have not only believe in a racist taxonomy of humankind but indeed in at least two distinct and mutually exclusive such taxonomies. Finally, what do we do with those Nostraticists who loudly proclaim that ALL the world's languages are related, like Shevoroshkin? In what way is this racist? Is it because he has failed to consider the further relationship to the languages of extraterrestrial "races"? Seriously, I can think of few charges against a body of scholarship more serious in our society than that of racism (although in other societies sexism, ageism, and others could be equallyu or more serious, of course). The charge of ignorance is of course no laughing matter either. Wald's charges are false and contemptible. His insistence on repeating them over and over, and on attributing to person X the views of entirely other persons, is something very familiar to us but none the less dangerous for that. It is certainly true and well-known to those who have studied the history of our and other sciences that scientific racism has been a very major force in the 19th and 20th cent. It is certainly also true that the Nostratic theory has always been (as recognized by Pedersen) a major argument against, and not for, the linguistic racism which has existed in this period, inasmuch as it is precisely this theory which shows the linguistic and hence historical and cultural unity of peoples whom Wald no less than the old-fashioned racists apparently regards as belonging to different "races". As for me, I prefer to classify people according to their moral and intellectual characteristics, among which elementary honesty and attention to facts I count very highly. I hope Wald does too and will take it back and apologize. Below I address in painful detail the tortured misinterpretations of Pedersen by Wald. On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, bwald wrote: [snip] > > Pedersen, p.122: > > "Nubian is interesting because of its ancient literary monuments. ... > There are also Nubian inscriptions dating from imperial Rome, in an > alphabet based on Egyptian characters. But we still do not understand much > of them. *The Nubians are not negroes; but to the negro *race** belong the > Haussa, who language is also disputed..." > [snip] > OK?! What's a "negro"? How does Pedersen KNOW that Nubians aren't negro? I dont know how he knows that (because many people who operate with racial categories do consider Nubians "black"). But you are missing the whole point of what he is saying. Which is that (and this in the very same paragraph) even though the Hausa PEOPLE are "negroes", he accepts as possible though not yet proven the theory that they speak a Hamitic language. This demonstrates that he does not associate race with linguistic classification, since otherwise "negroes" would not be speaking a Hamitic language. How much plainer can he speak? He is saying that race in this case is not relevant. And the reason he says that IN THIS CASE is because throughout he argues against the use of race as a criterion for linguistic classification. That is one of his main methodological points throughout the book. > What's his POINT in mentioning any of this RACE stuff anyway? Precisely what I said just now--and before. Pedersen's point is to underline that the racial criterion (which a reader in his age would likely have immediately grasped at) is NOT relevant to linguistic classification. > I gave my > interpretation, based on my knowledge. AMR, DO SOME WORK on the history of > your discipline and the intellectual climate which fed it, and give an > alternative opinion. My work on the history of comparative linguistics is on the record, in the Journal de la Societe finno-ougrienne, Anthropological Linguistics, Ural-altaische Jahrbu"cher, etc. > Explain why his comment is not gratuitous, Because as I just said he KNEW that contemporary readers would assume that the linguistic distinction between Hamitic and non- Hamitic languages (I think he called the latter 'Sudan' languages or some variation on that) was to be determined by racial criteria, and he was emphasizing that this was not a valid way to proceed. > and how it > is critical of the institutionalised racism of his time. It was critical of the common view that linguistic classification correlates with race, a point he states in general terms and by way of example over and over. But I do not see that he addressed racism, institutionalised or private, at all. He may have been a racist or an opponent of racism, I do not know. I do know that he staunchly, emphatically, categorically, and consistently opposed LINGUISTIC racism, i.e., the belief that people of different "races" spoke different and unrelated languages. > Don't just give me an "I-don't- know". > I can say what I know but not what I donot. I do know he opposed linguistic racism. I know nothing of his views on race in any other context. > Also, about the Egyptians. I did not mean to imply that Pedersen > explicitly said that the Egyptians weren't "negro". You did not imply it, you said it. I quote what you said: "(With regard to racism, Pedersen's discussion makes a particular point of > denying that the Egyptians or EVEN the Nubians were "Negro"..." Now, this is a list is by and for linguists. Can anyone tell me that this sentence does not say that Pedersen was explicitly denying that the Egyptians were "negroes"? That is most clearly what it does say. > That had already been > established to the staisfaction of the conventional wisdom in the 19th > century. So it went without saying -- as opposed to the NUBIANS. This is like saying that just because conventional wisdom TODAY says that the Nostratic theory is bunk you should be free to say that I think Nostratic is bunk and make a partciualr point of this, even though I have never said anything of the sort. Mind you, I do not deny that Pedersenmn probably did think that Egyptians were other than "negroes". But he did not say anywhere in the book in which you said he said it. And it makes no difference to his views on the classifiction of the langauges of Africa. > You can > tell the Egyptians aren't Negro, just look at the illustrations of Ancient > Egyptians in the National Geographic. > I myself don't operate with racial categories at all, so I canNOT tell that. All I can tell is that of the people who have operated with categories of human beings based on skin color it was not only 19th century Europeans who classified the Ancient Egyptians differently from most other native Africans. But I personally accept the results of molecular biology (not to mention common sense) to the effect that "races" do not exist within out species (Pan sapiens). Unlike some other species, we do not have SUBspecies. Hence, words like "negro" or "Negro" or "Black" have only relevance as sociological constructs. Pedersen almost certainly did believe in "races" but he did a fantastic job of arguing aganst the linguistic relevance thereof. > P.S. I sent my last message to the list, because it is part of the argument > I was making (which has to do with institutionalised racism and the > intellectual climate in Pedersen's times, not with his personal feelings.) Yes, but Pedersen is not guilty anyway,as just discussed. He was on YOUR side, the was Greenberg before Greenberg was in college probably. > Don't you see how pervasive institutional racism was? Sure, still is, though it is quite diferent now. But this has nothing to do with Pedersen's view of linguistic classification. > The same person can > give the usual (Boasian) high-minded homily about dissociating language and > race and yet pass on ideas with racist implications without recognising it > (they come from another source, anthropometry, cf. phrenology; the Nubians > are not "negro" because it is not ideologically convenient for them to be, > so we take advantage of local physical variation to define them out of > "negro" while leaving presumed non/ "pre"-literate black people in. Goering > made it even simpler, "A Jew is who *I* say is.") > This is certainly possible, but in Pedersen's case it obviously is not the case. > I suppose the least you can say is that Pedersen is illustrating the > homily by indicating that some "Hamitic" speakers ARE "negro" (e.g., the > Haus(s)a). But what did they WRITE (in ancient times)? Nubian, of course, > is NOT Hamitic/Afro-Asiatic, but Nilo-Saharan (according to current > classification). But Pedersen did say that he did not know whether Nubian was or was not Hamitic. Hence what you say once again is not true. Since he knew that Nubian had been an ancient written language, Pedersen is again on YOUR side of the argument, sayng that for all he knows this ancient written language may be a Sudan (i.e., Nilo-Saharan) rather than a Hamitic language. > And, you and Pedersen can say, so what? No, Pedersen and I do not say so what. We say that this is very important as precisely an argument that the racial categories "negro" vs. "hamite" (even if they WERE valid in some other context) would have NOTHING to do with linguistic classification OR with ancient written languages. > If Nubian is > Nilo-Saharan that doesn't mean their speakers are "negroes". I'm not gonna > argue that way. One more time from the top. Pedersen is arguing precisely the opposite, viz., that even though they are (acc. to contemporary views) racially "Hamites" rather than "negroes", this does not tell us whether their language is "Hamitic" (our AA) or "Sudan" (our Nilo-Saharan). > > Now, don't get all indignant (instead of looking deeper into the historical > forces that propel our interests). I take it this is offlist discussion. > So I don't expect to see your last message on the list. If it is, then > this has to go there too (except this PS), and we'll continue. Too late. I did read this in time. But I did look into it and I have now answered all your arguments. What you have to realize is that you are attributing to Pedersen the views of the contemporary Africanists that you justly like to criticize, and that his real views were the opposite!! But I still don't know what he thought of race in any other context. AMR From martha_ratliff at wayne.edu Sun Feb 7 18:01:45 1999 From: martha_ratliff at wayne.edu (Martha Ratliff) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 13:01:45 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > You're right, of course. But I was sure, when I wrote, and still > am, that I remember someone in those days turning up Austronesian > etymologies as well. Can anybody jog my memory on this? > Scott DeLancey >Sagart is, of course. The Chinese words he cites as evidence >of Chinese being related to Austronesian are presumably, for >those of us who do not accept his conclusion, not mere >coincidences but Austronesian borrowings into Old Chinese. >Am I missing something? Is the question whether anyone >BESIDES Laurent Sagart is finding such borrowings? >I would like to hear if there is. >AMR The first thing that comes to mind is the section in Benedict's 1975 _Austro-Thai Language and Culture_ on "Austro-Thai and Chinese") pp. 75-133, which first appeared as an article in Behavior Science Notes. You don't have to buy A-T to appreciate (some of the) data here. Then Sagart gives references to two others who wrote about the Chinese- Austronesian connection before him: 1) Conrady, A. 1923. Neue austrich-indochinesische Parallelen. Hirth anniversary volume (Asia Major introductory volume), 23-66. 2) Wulff, K. 1942. Ueber das Verhaeltnis des Malayo-Polynesischen zum Indochinesischen. Det Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab. Historisk-filologiske Meddelser XXVII, 2. Kobenhavn: Ejnar Munksgaard. 157 pp. I second Sagart's recommendation of his articles to you. They are careful, scholarly papers which provide a reasonable interpretation of correspondence patterns that emerge from the close study of massive amounts of language data. I can't see how anyone could fault him on methodological grounds. Whether the patterns he reveals are due to inheritance or contact, he has certainly made a discovery of historical significance. Martha Ratliff Wayne State University martha_ratliff at wayne.edu From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Sun Feb 7 22:29:43 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 17:29:43 EST Subject: Phonetic Resemblance, Birthday Prob. Regular Sound change and Yakhontov Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > > This goes to the heart of the whole fight about what role phonetic > > similarity plays in comparative linguistics (Larry claims none at > > all. I claim a subordinate but important and indeed probably crucial > > one). But note that Starostin is not doing anything that Larry could > > object to on this score. He is NOT using phonetic similarity at > > all. > However, in the Mother Tongue exchange, Sergei was most certainly > working with mere perceived phonological and semantic resemblances, and > with nothing else at all. That is obvious to anyone who reads the > relevant passage, and that is what got me confused about what Yakhontov > was saying in the first place. I would like to point out some quick facts; 1. The so-called Birthday Problem is about showing why quick guesses are wrong in prob problems. Computations show that for 23 persons selected at random, the odds that at least two have the same birthday is 50-50. 2. Suppose we are comparing two languages A and B; and we have a batch of candidate words. For simplicity let A and B have about 20 consonants each and let our comparison be a simple one of matching up consonants. There are 380 possible sound changes (ignoring the no-change). Naturally, we are looking for regular sound correspondence/change (RSC) 2.i) In the worst possible case, if we find 380 words with sound changes, each one could be unique and hence there is no sign of regularity. Thefore even in this worst case if we find 381 sound changes, according to the Pigeonhole Principle of counting, there will be at least one sound change that is repeated and hence "regular" in this restricted sense. 2.ii) However this worst-case scenario is very unlikely to happen. Its probability is near zero. What is more likely to happen is something similar to the Birthday problem. IF we find ~25 words which seem to correspond, the odds are 50-50 that at least one sound change will be repeated. As the number of matches increases to about 100 or so more and more sound changes will be repeated. IT is not difficult to compute the distributions of the sound changes. I have done some of these. So we can always subtract out this baseline due to chance. The first conclusion we can draw is that what really counts (especially in languages like IE and AA for which plenty of samples exist going back thousands of years) is really "quantity" because if we find quantity we will find due to laws of probability "regular sound change". This means that even established families, with say 400 RSC should be tested rigorously by substracting out the baseline RSC that could occur purely due to chance. IT is easy enough to do this via simulation. Linguists who try this kind of simulation as evidence against proto-worlders forget to apply this criteria to their own language families. When "regular sound correspondance" (RSC) is really important is if we find it for small samples. AFter all, we get RSC with large numbers even due to chance because it cannot be avoided. Then again, most linguists ignore small number of correspondences even if the sound changes are "regular" because they claim that the numbers are too small, but this is exactly when RSC is significant. That means that if we found only 5-6 words and saw regular sound change then it is really significant because the laws of chance dictate that for small numbers of correspondences the odds of repetetion (RSC) is small. So Yakhontov is apparently trying to do something like this. I say "like this" because I do not see any clear reasoning that this is being done. OF course, after this, since the justification for RSC is probabilistic anyway, there is no reason to attack the use of statistics which is based on probability laws. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 22:30:58 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 17:30:58 EST Subject: Nostratic and Nilo-Saharan In-Reply-To: <99020612112549@haskins.yale.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, Alice Faber wrote: > > I'm glad to find that I had been mistaken in my impression that Nilo-Saharan > and other language families had been ignored in long-range language > comparison. I've undergone enough of a career shift since 1988 that I haven't > been able to follow the literature as well as I might have earlier. But we need you back! > > As for my assertion that some of those who search out a link between Semitic > and Indo-European being in part motivated by a perspective involving the > Judeo-Christian tradition, I'd like to make clear that I'm not including any > modern investigators of Nostratic here. Thank you. I am assuming that you are including Pedersen, Collinder et al. under 'modern'. > I'm thinking of folks who simply don't > care (or perhaps don't know) that Hebrew is part of Semitic is part of Afro- > Asiatic, but simply look for superficial similarities between Hebrew, Latin, > and Greek. There's a big difference between saying that Hebrew and Latin are > related and saying that Hebrew and Latin are related because Afro-Asiatic and > Indo-European are part of Nostratic. Both are hypotheses that can be > discussed, and perhaps refuted, but only the latter is consistent with a wide > body of published literature. Yes indeed and I am sorry if I gave the impression of anything else. > Many folks who work on the history of Semitic > languages are quite sensitive, perhaps over sensitive to the difference. > I can see why. They do have to put up with a lot of silly misconceptions among the (as Michael Silverstein would say) "ignoranti". Since those of us who work on Nostratic (and ipso facto have to deal with Semitic too) have to put up with a similar burden, I think we can all agree to empathize. But the bigger question is how do we fight the misconceptions that seem to be SO darn prevalent? AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 22:32:50 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 17:32:50 EST Subject: Holger Pedersen and "Race" In-Reply-To: <99020612355815@haskins.yale.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, Alice Faber wrote: [inter alia] > > I'm having a little trouble following the above, because I'm reading from my > paperback English translation (copyright 1931). I think it's important when > committing exegesis, which is, after all, what we're doing with this close > textual reading, to bear in mind that this is a *translated* work. Yes, I would love to be able to brave the snow and get the Danish out of the library but am not allowed to by my doctors. Still, Pedersen is supposed to have vetted the English translation. But there ARE a few places where I definitely need to see the Danish for myself. If anybody out there reading this has the Danish version with them and would not mind helping out, please let me know by email to my address above. > I don't see Pedersen's criticism of M"uller's racial criteria as strong, > though he does criticize it (p. 117, for those scoring at home). Good enough. I won't quibble about "strong" on this page. Would you agree that elsewhere in the book, esp. the last chapter he does use rather emphatic language about the invalidity of using such racial criteria? > And he does > refer to linguistic criteria for Hamitic and Semitic. Thank you. But let us go further: do you agree he uses no OTHER criteria for Semitic and Hamitic but linguistic ones? > Given the state of > knowledge at his time (he lists three subgroups of Hamitic, Egyptian, Berber, > and "South Hamitic" [=Cushitic, roughly], but no Chadic). Not quite. He mentions "Haussa" twice and refers to Lepsius's work on Hausa as a Hamitic language, which he regards as a possible but still unproven thesis. But Hausa is a Chadic lg and as far as I know the only reasonably well-known one at the time. > He correctly raises > the question of whether Hamitic and Semitic are co-ordinate branches. > He does more, doesn't he? He raises the question of whether Hamitic is a branch, i.e., a valid taxon at all, thus anticipating Greenberg by a half-century. This is particular important because it show just how far Pedersen was from accepting ANY version, even a purely linguistic one, of the theory of a "Hamitic" language group. This bears directly on the racism issue raised by Wald,for obvious reasons, and shows yet again how wrong he is. [snip] > I'm bringing something different to Pedersen than either Alexis > or Benji is. In the section on Semitic and Hamitic, I find many gratuitous > references to Christianity (and some non-gratuitous references, as well). This > is, of course, partly Pedersen and partly me, and others might disagree about > how gratuitous these references are. The questions Benji is encouraging us to > ask are whether these references would have been perceived as gratuitous in > the mid 1920s when Pedersen wrote, and if not what cultural presuppositions > might have motivated Pedersen to make these references. I'm really out of my > depth when it comes to this kind of analysis, so I'll leave it at that. > The answer is obvious: Pedersen is addressing conceptions and ideas which he expected his readers to have, but he is NOT endorsing them. On the contrary, he seeks throughout to refute any ideas about any connections between language and race much less religion. > I think it's worth saying that Pedersen's work is an admirable state of the > art description of historical and comparative linguistic knowledge for its > era. There is little of substance that is inconsistent with the knowledge of > its day, beyond the simplification that is inevitable in an introductory > survey. There are many prescient remarks. Ah, how nice to hear that someone agrees. Indeed, I can see how anyone could disagree. > However, much in it is outdated. We > have, after all, made progress in the past 60 years. What bothers me in some > instances is the *tone*, a tone that reflects cultural assumptions that I find > objectionable. I don't say there are not. But what do you have in mind? And would you not agree that he does a brave and masterful job of combatting many (though not all) of these cultural assumptions, a half century before most Africanists and other linguists, historians, etc., were forced kicking and screaming to give them up by the combined forces of Greenber, other scholars, and the growing disguist with racism and a priorism that swept through many social/human sciences decades AFTER Pedersen's book was written? > This is not to say that Pedersen knew that his work would have > such an impact 60 years down the road, or that he would have written > differently, if he had known. > I am sure he assumed that comparative linguistics would progress much more smoothly than has been the case and so like Jefferson re the American Constitution I am sure he thought he would quickly be supplanted. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 22:33:55 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 17:33:55 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, WB (in Frankfurt today) wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- [snip] > Let me just stress, however, since it is _very_ easy > on a general discussion list like HISTLING, which deals > with so many different language families and genetic theories, > to generate wrong, and possibly, longlived impressions to > the effect that the work of Sagart belongs into the cate- > gory of "weird speculations", that he is somehow involun- > tarily stuck with a "dead-wrong" idea which he fears to > withdraw, that he does not know the langugaes he is working > on etc. etc., that nothing could be further from the truth > (see Sagart's own posting on Sino-Austronesian). > I emphatically said how much I admire him and his work, and I suggested nothing of the sort. I dont think Scott Delancey did either. It is merely that we do not agree that he is right. > As far as the Old Chinese side of the comparison is con- > cerned, it should be pointed out that Sagart has written > the _only_ serious comment on Baxter's _Handbook_ (_Dia- > chronica_ X [1993] 2: 237-260; with the exception of EG > Pulleyblank, who does not accept the six-vowel system > at all and argues from a totally different perspective), > that he is now certainly the most active scholar working > on Old Chinese morphology and root-theory (watch out for > his forthcoming book, J. Benjamins), and that he has pu- > blished widely on a variety of crucial issues in Old Chinese > reconstruction (for a list of his publications cf. http:// > www.ehess.fr/centres/crlao/crlao.html), which are extremely > important, irrespective of what your favorite position on > the external relationships of OC might be. I believe to > be entitled to say this, since I among the very few people > who have ever tried to take Sagart's criticisms of some of > the details of Baxter's reconstruction seriously by testing > them against a corpus of uncorrupted bronze inscriptional > sources, rather than edited texts (for an online-abstract > of my dissertation see html/17534.html>, for a more extended version cf. _Cahiers > de Linguistique � Asie Orientale_ 26 [1997] 1), and since > Sagart's observations have been by and large corroborated > by these data. My own views on ST and ST-AN notwithstanding > (for which see my review of the volume by WSY Wang, quoted > by Alexis, in one of the last issues of _Language_), I would > appreciate it if those who think that Sagart's AN -- ST com- > parisons are wrong, or who criticize his reassinging certain > "classical" ST reconstructions to the layer of TB -- OC > borrowings, should present some evidence to substantiate > their criticisms. > I refer you to Baxter's and Starostin's responses to Sagart. Heck, you know the relevant literature far better than I do. I am NOT claiming to have any NEW arguments against Sagart. If you think that there is need for such, I could try to think about the issue. > This said, here are a few more impressionistic comments > (sorry if this is in a wrong chronological order --- HISTLING > messages have reached me in a totally chaotic succession > recently): > > > At 16:58 04.02.99 EST, Alexis wrote > > AMR| [...] so too I think > AMR| that the few critics of ST are really reaction to the > AMR| unsatisfactory state of the actual work on ST (and > AMR| again just as in Altaic to some extent I suspect that > AMR| Miller is reacting to ST as it was some decades ago > AMR| esp. to Benedict's work much as the anti-Altaicists > AMR| are still really responding to the errors of Ramstedt > AMR| in the 50s and Poppe in the 60s). > > True up to a certain degree (Miller's reviews of Benedicts's > _Conspectus_, Shafer's _Introduction to Sino-Tibetan_, and > Sedlaachek's _Das Gemein-Sino-Tibetische_ etc. are certainly > among the harshest specimens of that genre in the whole post- > war sinological literature). That is no more than I am claiming. [snip] > the climate > within O[ld] C[hinese] > phonology, is, unfortunately, sometimes not quite > as pleasant as Alexis would have it. [snip] I meant only that it is far far better than the way that the way in which Greenberg's proposals or Illich-Svitych's or even mine are treated. I don't recall anyone saying the kind of things that Delancey and I said about Sagart, about Greenberg or I-S or me. As I recall, Dr. Thomason could not bring herself to admit that Greenberg's work the classification of American Indian languages is historical linguistics, even. The contrast is very stark. > Alexis continues: [No that was Scott Delancey, not me.] > > AMR| More legitimately, I've heard the argument made (by Chris Beckwith, > AMR| I think, among others, though he shouldn't be held hostage to my > AMR| imperfect memory) that ST can't be considered *proven* because the > AMR| lack of morphology in Chinese makes it impossible to find the kind > AMR| of nice syntagmatic and paradigmatic morphological correspondences > AMR| that make us so confident of Indo-European or Semitic or Algic. > [snip] > Finally a short historical note re: origins of the debate that > shared morphology is crucial for the demonstration of genetical > relatedness, Meillet's position on East Asian languages etc. --- > The discussion, as far as concerned with Old Chinese and its > presumably "isolating" root structure, goes back much further, > at least to the middle of the 19th century and Georg von der Gabe- > lentz', "Sur la possibilit� de prouver l�existence d�une affinit� > g�n�alogique entre les langues dites indochinoises" (_Atti del IV > congresso internazionale degli Orientalisti_, vol. 2: 283-95, > Florence 1881). I know a fair amount of Gabelentz's work but this is something I didnot know. Thanks a lot. However, this appears to deal with the question of typology vs. classification. But that is not Meillet's problem. His problem was the idea that only morphology can be used to demosntrate linguistic relationship. As I pointed out in Anthro Lx in 1996, his own later work shows that he did not any longer accept this as an absolute rule. THIS idea about the role of morphology also has an earlier history, going back to Pott and his critique of Bopp's comparisons of Austronesian and Kartvelian with IE. So there are two separate issues here, each with its own history, although there may have been some interpenetration of ideas at some points. AMR From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu Sun Feb 7 22:35:29 1999 From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 17:35:29 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) Message-ID: Prof. Sagart apparently takes exception to my very brief representation of his views on Sino-Tibetan. I confess I don't understand why. Sagart (indirectly) writes: > That is not, and has never been, my view. I have never claimed that ST is a > chimera, does not exist, is an invalid construct, etc. In fact, right from > the beginning of my work on on Chinese and Austronesian, I have repeatedly > cautioned readers against that interpretation of my views. In the conclusion > of my first paper (titled =93Chinese and Austronesian are genetically > related=94), presented in 1990 at a Sino-Tibetan conference in Texas, I wrote (p. 29): > > our claim (i.e., of a genetic unity between Chinese and Austronesian), it > must be noted, should not be taken to imply that there exists no genetic > relationship between Chinese and the TB languages (or, for that matter, > between AN and Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, etc.), but simply that, if such > relationship exists, it is in any case less close than that between AN and > Chinese (...). This problem--which should be just a rhetorical one, but doesn't always seem to be--keeps coming up in one form or another, on this list and elsewhere. As has just been discussed on the list, if someone asserts that Semitic is more closely related to Indo-European than to Chadic or Cushitic, they are denying the reality of Afro-Asiatic, and acknowledging that all four groups may be (or, even, asserting that they certainly are) related at some higher level doesn't change that. Likewise, the claim that Chinese is more closely related to Austronesian than to Tibeto-Burman denies the reality of Sino-Tibetan. Sino-Tibetan refers to the hypothesis that Sinitic, Tibeto-Burman, and Karen (for those who aren't sure that Karen is T-B proper) form a genetic unit: S-T | ------------------ | | T-B Sinitic If T-B and Sinitic are not each other's closest relative, then there is no such genetic unit as Sino-Tibetan. To argue that the genetic position of Chinese is: ?? | --------------------------------- | | | ---------------- | | | T-B Sinitic Austronesian is to deny the reality of Sino-Tibetan, pure and simple. Surely this must be obvious to everybody--why do we need to keep arguing about it? Then further: > On p. 301-302 of the same paper (Oceanic Linguitics 33, 2, 1994), I > discussed the evidence for Sino-Tibetan, concluding p. 302 that the > relationship, though not implausible, is less well demonstrated than is > usually assumed, due to evidence of long-term intimate contact, and >poorly > understood sound correspondences, this despite evidence of shared basic > vocabulary and limited shared morphology. and > Since 1994, then, my view has been that Chinese and TB *are* genetically > related, but not as closely as most Sino-Tibetanists think (because the > genetic layer in the lexicon is thinner than usually assumed), That is, as of this week, Sagart's claim is a) that there is no genetic unit corresponding to Sino-Tibetan, and b) that a significant part of what the rest of the field regards as evidence for S-T as a genetic unit, when correctly understood, is not evidence for it. Obviously it was careless of me, in my first posting, to write "the Chinese-TB link" rather than "Sino-Tibetan", though in the context of the discussion, and with the definite article, that still does not seem to me to admit of the interpretation which Sagart apparently wants to put on it. Still, I should have been more careful in my choice of words. To be sure, Sagart has never argued that Chinese and TB are not related at all. But he is very explicitly arguing, in his published work and in his communication to HISTLING, that Sino-Tibetan is a chimaera--which is in fact the issue that we were discussing. Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From BMScott at stratos.net Mon Feb 8 12:37:35 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 07:37:35 EST Subject: Phonetic Resemblance, Birthday Prob. Regular Sound change and Yakhontov Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- H. Mark Hubey wrote: [snipped, and reformatted for legibility] > 2. Suppose we are comparing two languages A and B; and we have a batch > of candidate words. For simplicity let A and B have about 20 consonants > each and let our comparison be a simple one of matching up consonants. There > are 380 possible sound changes (ignoring the no-change). Naturally, we are > looking for regular sound correspondence/change (RSC) > 2.i) In the worst possible case, if we find 380 words with sound > changes, each one could be unique and hence there is no sign of > regularity. Thefore even in this worst case if we find 381 sound > changes, according to the Pigeonhole Principle of counting, there > will be at least one sound change that is repeated and hence > "regular" in this restricted sense. It's a *repeated* sound change; it isn't regular in the linguistic sense. Indeed, the extreme situation that you describe can hardly fail to be a clear example of lack of regularity, since each consonant will be associated with every other consonant. > The first conclusion we can draw is that what really counts (especially > in languages like IE and AA for which plenty of samples exist going back > thousands of years) is really "quantity" because if we find quantity we > will find due to laws of probability "regular sound change". Here again you're confusing repetition with regularity. Brian M. Scott Dept. of Mathematics Cleveland State Univ. From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 8 12:49:34 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 07:49:34 EST Subject: Pedersen's role in Nostratic studies In-Reply-To: <379ce630.2337307914@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I believe Pedersen coined the term "Nostratic" in the twentieth > century, but I'll leave Pedersen aside for two reasons: I have > not read him on Nostratic, and I don't think the modern work on > Nostratic (Illich-Svitych, Dolgopol'skij, Bomhard) owes very much > to Pedersen except for the name. > [snip] He did coin it in this century, but the rest I don't think is quite accurate. It is true that he did very little substantive work on Nostratic (while doin incredible amounts of work on IE, of course). But his role was important for more than one reason. (1) He made it clear that if there is going to be Nostratic work done, it should NOT merely compare IE in a pairwise (binary) fashion to AA or to Uralic or to Altaic or whatever, but to all of them, something which I-S and Dolgopolsky were the first to take to heart. (2) He was such an influential IEnist in his time (and he lived a VERY long time) that his support of Nostratic helped to keep it alive. His debates with Trubetzkoy and other naysayers at the 1933 Congress were an important occasion, since lesser or younger' scholars who did more Nostratic would not have been able to stand up the way he did to largely obscurantist and a prioristic rhetoric from the other side. (3) He was quite cautious in what Nostratic comparisons he accepted and he helped to set a standard which was largely adopted by I-S and Dolgopolsky which, while as I have argued in many places not nearly stringent enough, did make them much more selective than other authors who like to compare these languages. I would trace I-S's emphasis on disitnguishing borrowings from one Nostratic lg into another, on the one hand, and presumed cognates, on the other, in particular to the benign influence of Pedersen's views. However, I have done no careful study of the history of these issues, and I could be shown wrong by such a study. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 8 12:51:30 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 07:51:30 EST Subject: On some distinctions not to be conflated, in comp lx Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It occurs to me that it might be useful to review some elementary distinctions (based on a paper of mine which has been languishing for some time) which have a tendency to be conflated. First, it is a simple thing to verify (by looking at the relevant literature) that different linguistic families (I now include only ones which are almost universally accepted) were established in very different ways. For example, the fact that Celtic is part of IE was established on the basis of a comparison involving a rather specific rule of correspondence between certain morphological elements. The unity of the Niger-Kordofanian languages was also established by a comparison involving (sets of) morphological elements but without the need for rules of correspondence (some simple notion of similarity was enough). The unity of the Comecrudan languages was established, as I have discussed earlier, by a comparison of lexical and not morphological elements and without the statement of a single explicit regular rule of correspondence (so once again similarity was deemed sufficient to make what Goddard called a "strong case"). And I believe that the unity of Tai was established on the basis of lexical comparisons but using rules of correspondence and not merely notions of similarity. Hence we can see that there are (at least) two features (morphological vs. lexical and correspondence-based vs. similarity-based) which are entirely independent of each other (orthogonal alias cross-classifying in more technical lingo), yielding (at least) four different methods that have been used successfully and w/o any objection on record (e.g., no one has ever objected to the Comecrudan comparison on methodological grounds). Keeping these distinctions straight may help unconfuse some of the recent (and not-so-recent) confusions. For example, Stefan Georg says that the method of looking at phonetic similarities only works correctly in the case of languages which are "obviously" related, which he takes to be the case of the Tai languages to be. But he fails to make the crucial distinction between WHAT it is we are looking at to find similarities, lists of words or rather morphological paradigms. But as I said you can apply the method of looking for phonetic similarities to morphology, and then you find language families which certainly have not been historically obvious and which in fact have only been recognized within living memory. This not to say that I accept his assertion that comparing lexical items by the same method only works in obvious cases. I mean you can make this circular by saying that any language relationship established in this way is by definition "obvious". This will not do. 'Obvious' has to mean something that has always been recognized and never rejected by people working on language classification. And I think that by this criterion Stefan is wrong. Of course, the case of lexical comparison using rules of correspondence is one where almost by definition he canNOT be right. Simply because if the relationship was obvious why would anyone bother establishing the correspondences. At any rate it seems to me that Ken Hale's magisterial demonstration that the Pama-Nyungan (did I spell this right?) languages are related to the other languages of Australia relied on the discovery of an amazing set of rules of correspondence which made the two groups of language LOOK totally different in places where in fact historically the relationship was a close one. Clearly no one can say that morphology was crucial in this work (though grammatical morphemes may have been mentioned), only the rules of correspondence. Nor will anyone say it was obvious. It was to my mind one of the greatest single feats of comparative linguistics of any age and one which some still do not quite seem to get. So we have at least four different methods, and I would argue that actually there are additional distinctions that have to be made, e.g., ones having to do with quantitative issues (with a nod here to Johanna Nichols), such as how many comparisons (in relative OR absolute terms) are actually being made. A lot of people seem to forget that there are many cases of, especially extinct and poorly attested, languages whose classification rests on a handful of items. There are certainly Australian languages known to us only from brief word lists which no one doubts are Australian. There are, yes Virginia, there are Indo-European languages whose Indo-Europeanness was discovered on the basis of a handful word and/or morphemes simply because that's all there was. I don't how many IE-origin items we NOW know for Messapic or Lydian or Lycian, but when they were recognized (and I do not mean by one or two visionarieis but by the whole field) as IE, the number was trivial (se the index to Pokorny's IE etym. dict., for an easy and instructive demonstration of this, though of course he does not deal with most grammatical elements). The poorly attested Comecrudan languages are thus NOT an exception. On the other hand, the relationship between Greek and Sanskrit involves thousands of lexical AND morphological comparisons of incredible intricacy and beauty. But this does not make Sanskrit MORE of an IE language than the much less well attested and more divergent Lycian, say. There is yet another set of distinctions that needs to be observed in any serious discussion of this whole topic. Namely, we must recognize that just saying "I have here a rule of correspondence" does mean that you really have one. Many of the correspondences (and reconstructions implied by them) in many diferent areas of comp lx (I would single out Kartvelian, Dravidian, Newman's Zuni-Penutian work, much of the work on Uto-Aztecan, etc.) are not really so. They are merely described as rules of correspondence but are not treated as such in actual work, in which the "rules" are ignored. On the other hand, in addition to making more and more distinctions, we must also recognize that the distinctions are not always absolute. For example, the distinction between a rule of correspondence and a "mere" observation of similarity is (or at least often is) one of degree. Sometimes the rules of correspondence are so obvious that one does not bother stating them. When Goddard compares the form kem 'woman' across two or three Comecrudan languages, he obviously assumes that k : k : k, m : m : m, etc. At other times, the similarities so-called are simply patterns of correspondence which are not fully specified. That is, if phoneme X in language 1 can correspond to phonemes Y and Z in language 2 and we cannot tell (yet) when Y and when Z is to be expected, that is not a sign of the moral turpitude of the linguist who nevertheless related the two languages. After all, we know of precisely such cases in all well-established language families, with the best-known examples being from IE. But whether we say that this a case where we would LIKE to know the rule or whether we say that we are simply observing a similarity, the fact remains that we do not know when Y and when Z are to be expected and yet we CAN know that the relationship is valid. Which brings up two more points. One, "similarity" is a misleading term, since sometimes the "similarities" do not involve segments that are phonetically all that similar. The so-called similarities are rather patterns which one notices which are not necessarily more superficial but which are rather less precise (and less easy to articulate) than the regular rules of correspondence which we would prefer but cannot always have. Two, as Eric Hamp pointed out twenty years ago, and was right to point out, rules of correspondence are often (usually, maybe even always) easier to discover if there is some obvious superficial pattern (including but not restricted to phonetic similarity). The relation of Armenian berem to Skt. bhara:mi 'I carry' was noted long before that of Armenian erku to Skt. dva was, and of course Armenian had long been recognized as IE before the etymology of erku was established. So, in practice, there are relationships between methods that LOOK in theory quite distinct. The moral? Simply that there is not a single comparative method but a whole complex bunch of methodS and that it would (if I may quote myself) behoove people to study the methods and the history of the discipline before trying to read other people out of the discipline, ruin their careers and reputations, and stifle the serious examination of their proposals. For which one of us can be free in our intellectual quest and safe in our chosen life if even someone of the standing of Joseph Greenberg can openly, and without any challenge from the audience, have most of his life's work peremptorily dismissed as "not historical linguistics" by people in positions of considerable influence and sometime power who appoint themselves censor and whom we as a profession confirm in that position? AMR From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Feb 8 12:53:04 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 07:53:04 EST Subject: Yakhontov In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: [on the "second version" of Yakhontov's principle, the one depending on miscellaneous resemblances] > But where do we find a clear statement by Starostin of this > second version? Certainly not in the 1991 book on Altaic. OK. I quote from Starostin's letter, published in Mother Tongue. Sergei states Yakhontov's principle, quite properly, in terms of cognates, and asserts that he knows of no counterexamples among established language families. He then dismisses my joke Basque-English comparisons because they apparently fail to satisfy Yakhontov's principle. I might query this, but I'm not interested in it here. He then turns to Bengtson's Basque-Caucasian comparisons, and I quote: "Let us take Bengtson's Basque-Caucasian list again. Here we have, out of 19 items on the 100-word list, 13 items belonging to the 35-word list [snip list], which gives us 37%, and leaves us with only 9% matches within the 65-word list. This certainly seems like a significant result to me." Now, recall Yakhontov's principle, which is based upon Yakhontov's division of a modified version of the Swadesh 100-word list into a 35-word sublist and a 65-word list: When two languages are genetically related, the proportion of cognates in the 35-word list is always greater than the proportion of cognates in the 65-word list." OK? This is part of Yakhontov's efforts to identify those vocabulary items which are maximally resistant to replacement. But now see what Starostin has done. First, Basque is not known to be related to any version of Caucasian, and not a single cognate pair is known to exist in Basque and Caucasian. Therefore, Yakhontov's principle, apud Yakhontov, has *nothing whatever* to say about Basque and Caucasian. Second, what Bengtson presents is no more than a collection of *miscellaneous resemblances* between Basque and Caucasian. Starostin, by attempting to apply Yakhontov's principle to Bengtson's comparisons, is therefore silently replacing the crucial word `cognates' with the entirely different term `miscellaneous resemblances'. This is clearly illegitimate. Third, having done this, Starostin is turning the (now altered) Yakhontov's principle on its head. In effect, he is arguing as follows: if the proportion of miscellaneous resemblances in the 35-word list is greater than the proportion of miscellaneous resemblances in the 65-word list, that constitutes evidence that the languages are related. But Yakhontov himself apparently never said any such thing. And this is why I took Starostin to task in my response, and this is why I got confused about Yakhontov himself was claiming. I find it impossible to make the slightest sense out of Starostin's remarks here without concluding that he is appealing to a principle which is very different from what Yakhontov himself proposed. Moreover, there is yet another flaw in Sergei's reasoning. Whatever Sergei is trying to claim, he is claiming it in terms of Yakhontov's 35-word list and his 65-word list. *But Bengtson has not presented these 100 words.* By Starostin's count, Bengtson has presented only 13 words from the 35-word list and an unknown number of words from the 65-word list. If we have only a modest subset of each of the two lists, then *no version* of Yakhontov's principle can even be contemplated. All we have to look at is Bengtson's *self-selected* data. Therefore, the final version of what I will now call "Starostin's principle" is this: If the proportion of miscellaneous resemblances in a modest subset of the 35-word list selected by John Bengtson for his own purposes is greater than the proportion of miscellaneous resemblances in a modest subset of the 65-word list selected by John Bengtson for his own purposes, then this constitutes evidence that the languages are related. Anybody want to defend this position? Anybody still want to maintain that Starostin is proceeding entirely according to Yakhontov's principle? > Starostin's book is entirely clear. Anybody can judge by > reading the passage which I have e-distributed. Maybe it is, but I have never seen that book. All I had was Sergei's remarks in Mother Tongue -- and those remarks show clearly that Sergei was doing something entirely different from Yakhontov. The prosecution rests. ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From oldgh at hum.aau.dk Mon Feb 8 14:59:46 1999 From: oldgh at hum.aau.dk (George Hinge) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 09:59:46 EST Subject: Holger Pedersen and "Race" Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The passage about Nubian and Hausa which Benji Wald is referring to is in the Danish version (p. 111): "... Dette giver en lille forestilling om, hvor fjærnt de forskellige hamitiske sprog står hinanden, og hvor vanskelig den sammenlignende behandling må være. Den er da heller ikke endnu gennemført, og man må derfor ikke undre sig altfor meget over, at der ikke er enighed om, hvor den hamitiske æts grænse går. Et av de omstridte sprog er nubisk. Det stilles i reglen udenfor den hamitiske æt, men den udmærkede kender av de sydhamitiske sprog Leo Reinisch har i 1911 med stor styrke hævdet, at det er hamitisk (nubisk er iövrigt interessant ved sine gamle sprogmindesmærker; man har i beg. av 20. årh. fundet nubiske tekster av kristeligt indhold, som er 1000 år gamle; der eksisterer også indskrifter fra Nubien fra den romerske kejsertid, skrevne med en bogstavskrift, som er bygget på ægyptiske tegn; vi forstår dog endnu ikke meget av disse indskrifter). Nubierne er ikke negre; det er derimod en anden stamme, hvis sprog ligeledes er omstridt, stammen Havsa mellem Nigerfloden og Tsadsøen. Havsa-sproget (det mest udbredte av alle Afrikas negersprog, brugt som handelssprog i Sudan langt ud over sin egen hjemstavn) blev allerede av ægyptologen Lepsius erklæret for hamitisk, og det kan ikke nægtes, at et eller andet virkelig synes at tale derfor. Men spörgsmålet må indtil videre stå hen både for nubisk og for havsaisk." Having stated that the Hamitic language family has a huge variation, Pedersen first presents a non-Negro (so he thought) language, Nubian, which was traditionally *not* considered Hamitic, but has lately been suggested to be so, then a Negro language, Hausa, that has for a long time been considered Hamitic. He is sympathetic to including both dialects in the Hamitic family ("har med stor styrke hævdet" and "det kan ikke nægtes, at et eller andet virkelig taler derfor"), but he finds neither case sufficiently proven. I do not see any racism in this passage. Pedersen does not make the point that Nubian is likelier to be Hamitic because it is spoken by non-Negroes, and that Hausa is likelier not to be because it is a Negro language; on the opposite he considers both likely but unproven candidates. The (now rejected) fact that the Nubians are not Negroes are *not* connected with their ancient literacy as Wald suggests. The remark about the inscriptions are parenthesised and can not be seen as an argument for their race. The race issue is introduced to make a transition to the other disputed language, Hausa, and to strengthen the point of the high variation of the region. B. Wald comments on the spelling 'Haussa': >Pedersen follows older German spelling but Pedersen has consequently 'Havsa' and 'havsaisk' in the Danish version. Furthermore, Wald criticises the term 'Sudan languages' for being >geographical reference, while "Hamitic" is an assumed linguistic > reference, but that is exactly the point of Pedersen: "Nord for den klare og vel avgrænsede bantuiske sprogæt strækker der sig mellem ækvator og Sahara fra Afrikas vestkyst helt over til Nilen et bredt bælte av sprog, som kan sammenfattes under den geografiske betegnelse Sudan-sprogene. At finde rede i slægtskabsforbindelserne i dette meget brogede bælte er en yderst vanskelig opgave, som endnu aldeles ikke er løst. Vi har ovenfor s. 111 omtalt, at grænsen mellem Sudansprogene i snæver betydning og den hamitiske æt ingenlunde kan trækkes med sikkerhed, og vi har nævnet nubisk (ved Nilen) og havsaisk (mellem Niger og Tsadsøen) som to av de omstridte sprog. At de sprog, der bliver tilbage, når man har givet Hamiterne, hvad Hamiternes er, indbyrdes er beslægtede og måske endnu længere ude er beslægtede med Bantu-ætten, er indtil videre ikke andet end en hypotese." Pedersen's point is exactly that the socalled Sudan-languages are not necessarily genetically related, and he has not found convincing arguments for the hypothesis that the non-Hamitic dialectes of that region should be related to one another or to the Bantu family. Thus he does not conclude from racial affinity to linguistic relations. George Hinge From manaster at umich.edu Tue Feb 9 18:13:20 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 13:13:20 EST Subject: Deja vu In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I have more than once referred to Pedersen's talk at the 1933 Congress of linguists, but it now occurs to me that, aside from its historical interest, it (and the discussion that followed and some of the other discussions at that congress) actually were very much like what we face today, esp. on the negative, anti-Nostratic, side, whose views came out in the discussions (the same a prioristic, uninformed, and pretentious posturing, combined with a staunch refusal to actually look at the relevant literature, data, arguments, etc.), whereas the Nostratic side (represented by Pedersen and Collinder) was not nearly as advanced as it has been since the 1960's. Except for the IE-Uralic comparison, the Nostraticists in 1933 did not have much to say for themselves. This does not mean that Nostratic is therefore right. But I think it helps to place our modern discussions in context. To me, the main thing is precisely that the nay-sayers have not progressed much (in some ways they have regressed actually) whereas the proponents have advanced enormously, both with regard to data and theory. This STILL does not mean Nostratic is right, of course. Reference: Atti del III Congresso Internazionale dei Linguisti (Roma, 19-26 settembre 1933-XI), Florence: Le Monnier (1935). Reprinted (1972) Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus. See papers by Pedersen and Collinder and the comments from the audience on each. From harry.perridon at hum.uva.nl Tue Feb 9 14:19:06 1999 From: harry.perridon at hum.uva.nl (Harry Perridon) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 09:19:06 EST Subject: Pedersen's alleged racism Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Re: Benji Wald's comments on Pedersen's alleged racism. The Danish text was published in 1924, and copied in 1978 (with an introduction by Jens Juhl Jensen): Holger Pedersen Videnskaben om sproget. Historisk sprogvidenskab i det 19. århundrede , reprinted in 1978 (Aarhus: Arkona). The relevant passage about Nubian and Hausa (actually spelled with a single s in the Danish version) is on p. 111. Specially interesting for the current discussion on this list is the following passage on p. 92: "Herav må man ikke slutte, at der er nogen inderlig sammenhæng mellem sprog og rase. Det er tvertimod en av de forste iagttagelser, man ved en gennemgang av sprogene vil göre, at sprog og rase ikke har de samme grænselinjer." etc. Pedersen exposes time and again nationalistic and possibly racist ideology in linguistics, e.g. when describing the finno-ugric language family: "Men Ungarerne fölte sig ikke just smigrede over slægtskabet med Lapperne: det lugtede dem for meget av tran. De ville megete hellere være i slægt med Tyrkerne, særlig med de berömte Hunner," etc. Probably Pedersen believed in 'races', but I don't think he can be called a racist for that reason. In fact, he actually demolishes part of the foundation of racist theory by showing that there is no connection between "race" and language-type. Harry Perridon Scandinavische talen Universiteit van Amsterdam Harry.Perridon at hum.uva.nl From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp Tue Feb 9 13:47:28 1999 From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 08:47:28 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- manaster at umich.edu wrote: > The question I like to pose > nowadays in the form I did in my earlier posting: Could it be > that IE together with Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber form a > proper subfamily of AA itself (which at first sounds absurd > until we realize just how different Cushitic and Chadic are > from the above) As long as we are in the business of dispelling myths, we should also dispel this one. The notion that the sub-saharan Cushitic and Chadic languages are radically different from the Afroasiatic languages to the north and east is a widely held received idea. But it is not widely held by those who have done comparative work on these languages. As you should know several different sub-classifications of AA have been proposed, none has won general acceptance, and probably several others could be proposed depending on what criteria you base your classification on. I am inclined to see Egyptian (along with Omotic, if it really is a separate branch) as the most divergent of the branches, because so many of the characteristic Afroasiatic features are lacking (the prefix-conjugation, object-clitic pronouns, quantitative stem ablaut as a marker of verbal aspect) or are found only in ambiguous traces (the system of marking verb valence with the prefixes or suffixes s (causative), t(reflexive) and n/m (passive), and quantitative stem ablaut as marker of noun plural). +++++++++++++ Robert R. Ratcliffe Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku Tokyo 114 Japan From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Tue Feb 9 13:30:14 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 08:30:14 EST Subject: Which is more important? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I already wrote that I am interested mostly in methodology, and the latest exchanges involving what comparative linguistics has given me yet another opportunity to learn how "real linguists" do it. One of the reason I do this is because I am doing research on AI and the second is because I also do linguistics. I know that over the years many kinds of AI programs have been written to do many kinds of things. ONe of the biggest problems in many fields is that many "experts" don't know how they do things. I mean that they are not clear enough to produce an algorithm which is expected; after all they are not computer scienists. One of the biggest problems in this field is that nobody ever wants to admit that what they do can be written up as an algorithm (except those that already know it is so). Even after evidence is given that even such allegedly nonalgorithmic and creative processes as painting and composing music are algorithmic and that computer programs can be written to mimic humans, there is still a very strong human tendency to deny the obvious. The reason I write this so I don't have to say it later. The latest exchanges involving how comparative linguistics is apparently done has given me a chance to surreptitiously observe how real linguists would have done it by reading writings of real linguists. Since the best way is to observe people actually doing things instead of asking them what they would do in such and such a case, I am posting something at the end of these few lines. What I want to know is how important is what part of language in the determination of genetic relationships and why. IT does not matter that I already think I know how linguists do it, at least how some, or most do it. The discussion of this list below, should teach me many times more than what I have learned reading books. This list, I hope, is enough to create real problems for this mailing list. It should be. After all, there are so many different versions of how comparative linguistics should be done, according to so many authors and practitioners, that it is natural that this fight should exist. Here it is: Please read the whole thing before cursing me out :-) ==============================start========================== 1. Meroitic -k, Barea -ge: Fenno-Urgic -k 'to' (e.g. Ingrelian ala-k 'down'. 2. Meroitic -te, Nubian -do locative suffix 'in': Old Turkish -ta, -da 'in' Finnish -ta 'in' 3. Meroitic -k feminine suffix: Mongolian -k-chin feminine of adjectives; Meroitic kdi 'woman': Turkish kari 'woman' (correspondence d:r looks better than d:ss but to make the matter even more surprising, there is one Eastern Turkish language, where the word for woman is kissi!) 4. Meroitic t demonstrative, Nubian ter 'he' etc. Mongolian tere 'he' 'that', Finnish 'te' 'this one' (I used te instead of ta-unlaut) 5. Old Nubian -ka accusative suffix: Old Turkish -g, -ig, Mongolian -g, -gi accusative suffix. 6. Old Nubian -ka dative suffix: Old Turkish -qa, -ke dative suffix 7. Old Nubian -n(a) genitive suffix: Mongolian -in, -n, Fenno-Ugric -n genetive suffix. 8. Old Nubian -r 'intentive' verbal suffix; Old Turkish -r, Finno-Ugric -r factitive verbal suffix. 9. Meroitic tar 'give' causative verbal affix (according to Dr. Priese) Old Nubian tir 'give' causative verbal affix: Old Turkish -tur 'give' causative verbal affix 10. Old Nubian -a participle, conjunctive converb: Old Turkish -a conjunctive converb 11. Old Nubian -ra predicative converb: Mongolian -ra final converb 12. Old Nubian -sa verbal participle praeteriti: Mongolian -san participle praeteriti 13. Old Nubian -s verbal suffix, praeteritum: Fenno-Ugric -s verbal suffix, praeteritum (cf. Old Nubian ki-s-in 'you came' with Wogulian min-s-en 'you came') 14. Old Nubian -men (-m-en) negation of verbs: Old Turkish -ma negation of verbs 15. Old Nubian -in,-en verbal suffix, 'you' 2 sg: Wogulian -en verbal suffix 'you' 2. sg. 16. Old Nubian possessive pronoun=genetive of personal pronoun (ir 'you', in-na 'your'): Old Turkish the same ('sen' 'you', san-ing 'your'), Mongolian the same (chi 'you', chinu 'your') 17. Old Nubian -t, -it deverbal nouns: Old Turkish -t, -it,-id deverbal nouns 18. Old Nubian -ki deverbal nouns: Turkish -ki abstract nouns, Finno-Ugric -k deverbal nouns 19. Old Nubian min 'what', Mongolian men 'what': Wogulian men 'what', Hungarian mi 'what'; 20. Old Nubian -guria 'because of': Turkish -gore 'because of' ========================end======================================== This connects Eastern-Sudanic (Old Nubian) with Uralo-Altaic. OK. I spill the beans: these are from Fritz Hintze's article. That is the reason for the strange spellings. And in this article, according to some, Hintze wanted to show that one should not pay attention to morphemes. I read the article, after having looked for it for months, and then having waited for weeks after having found where it was. I think Hintze, contrary to what others say, in this article shows how intelligent he is by writing in a completely bland manner and letting the chips fall where they may in the future. As one joke has it, a rational person believes in God. If he does not exist he has lost nothing, but what if he does exist? That is probably how Hintze wrote this, but some think otherwise. PS. Notice old Turkish tur (give) and Etruscan tur (give). -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From oldgh at hum.aau.dk Wed Feb 10 12:20:30 1999 From: oldgh at hum.aau.dk (George Hinge) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 07:20:30 EST Subject: Pedersen's alleged racism Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Harry Perridon wrote 10 February 1999 >The relevant passage about Nubian and Hausa (actually spelled >with a single >s in the Danish version) is on p. 111. cf. my letter of 9 February >Pedersen exposes time and again nationalistic and possibly >racist ideology in linguistics, e.g. when describing the finno-ugric >language family: >"Men Ungarerne fölte sig ikke just smigrede over slægtskabet >med Lapperne: det lugtede dem for meget av tran. De ville >megete hellere være i slægt med Tyrkerne, særlig med de >berömte Hunner," etc. When you say 'exposes', do you mean that he shares those feelings? It is obvious to me that Pedersen accuses the Hungarians of rejecting the Lapps with racist (or chauvinistic) motives. Pedersen himself believes that the Hungarians are closer related to the humble Laplanders than to the glorious Turks. > Probably Pedersen believed in 'races', but I don't think he can >be called a racist for that reason. In fact, he actually demolishes >part of the foundation of racist theory by showing that there is >no connection between "race" and language-type. It would have been quite extraordinary for a scientist of the early 20th c. not to believe in races. If race it is relieved for its socially and historically conditioned burden and is understood only as the recurring of some typical features, I am ready to accept the term, too (without being a racist, I hope). [Indications such as "the black race" or "the white race" are however nonsense, at least from an anthropological point of view.] I don't believe we'll get rid of racism by banishing words describing human differences. Mr. Perridon is right in emphasising Pedersen's arguments rather than his terminology. George Hinge From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Thu Feb 11 04:00:17 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 23:00:17 EST Subject: Which is more important? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mark Hubey writes: >As one joke has it, a rational person believes in God. If he does not exist he has lost nothing, but what if he does exist? It's not a joke to everyone. It was proposed in all seriousness by the (great) 17th c French mathemetician, computer scientist, and Janesenist philosopher Blaise Pascal, who called it a "bet" (pari) you can't lose. We see why Pascal is celebrated for his work on probability theory. Now the stuff about resemblances among various languages. Seems relevant to Pascal's probability theory. You're finding out that you can spend your life collecting such things (or collecting previous collections of such things), and you'll never live long enough to collect them all. Probability theorists, recycle your messages. From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Thu Feb 11 23:33:13 1999 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 18:33:13 EST Subject: announcement Message-ID: Return-Path: Received: from UNIVSCVM (NJE origin SMTP at UNIVSCVM) by VM.SC.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 5224; Thu, 11 Feb 1999 14:06:49 -0500 Received: from *unknown [137.73.66.6] by VM.SC.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R4a) via TCP with SMTP ; Thu, 11 Feb 1999 14:06:28 EST X-Warning: VM.SC.EDU: Could not confirm that host [137.73.66.6] is mail.kcl.ac.uk Received: from pc107.eng.kcl.ac.uk (pc107.eng.kcl.ac.uk [137.73.108.107]) by mail.kcl.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id SAA16089; Thu, 11 Feb 1999 18:26:22 GMT From: "jane.roberts" Sender: jane.roberts at kcl.ac.uk Fontes Anglo-Saxonici=20 A Register of Written Sources Used by Authors in Anglo-Saxon England=20 Fifteenth Open Meeting=20 Tuesday, 30th March 1999=20 Programme=20 10:30 a.m. =09Coffee in the Council Room of King's College London=20 11:15 a.m.=09Welcome by Professor Joyce Hill, Chairman of the Management = =09=09=09Committee of Fontes Anglo-Saxonici, and report on the year's work= =20 11:30 a.m. =09 =91The Sermons of St Augustine in SASLC and Fontes=92: Profe= ssor F. M. =09=09Biggs (University of Connecticut) 12:00=09=09=91Some remarks on the sources of =C6lfric=92s Preface to Genesi= s=92: Dr =09=09=09Mark Griffith (New College, Oxford) 12:30 p.m. =09Discussion=20 12:55 p.m. =09Buffet lunch=20 2:15 p.m. =09"A Welter of Orientals": Katharine Scarfe Beckett (Gonville = & Caius =09=09College, Cambridge)=20 =09=09 =91Diagrams and sources in Byrhtferth=92s Enchiridion: Dr Philippa = =09=09=09Semper (University College Dublin) =09=09=91Vergilian Commentaries and the Anglo-Saxonist: Well Worth the =09= =09=09Trouble=92: Dr. Helen Conrad-O'Briain (Trinity College Dublin) 3:45 p.m. =09The seminar ends with tea. *********************************************************************** Reply Slip I shall attend the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici Open Meeting on Tuesday 30th March= 1999, and I enclose a cheque for =A313, made out to King's College London.= (Please note if vegetarian food is required.) Name Address:=20 Please send replies to: Jane Roberts, Department of English, King's College= London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS.=09Email: jane.roberts at kcl.ac.uk ---------------------- Jane Roberts Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature King's College London From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp Fri Feb 12 13:27:55 1999 From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 08:27:55 EST Subject: Arabic and IE(subdivisions in AA) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- manaster at umich.edu wrote: > On Tue, 9 Feb 1999, Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote: > > > As long as we are in the business of dispelling myths, we should > also > > dispel this one. The notion that the sub-saharan Cushitic and > Chadic > > languages are radically different from the Afroasiatic languages to > the > > north and east is a widely held received idea. But it is not widely > held > > by those who have done comparative work on these languages. As you > > should know several different sub-classifications of AA have been > > proposed, none has won general acceptance, and probably several > others > > could be proposed depending on what criteria you base your > > classification on. > > > Yet but I don't see why you have to assume that I don't know this. > But the view I am referring to is not one that I mentione merely > because > I picked it from some obsolete reference work as you seem to be > suggesting. Well, then, what is the basis for your the claim that Berber, Egyptian, and Semitic are particularly close within AA? > As you say yourself, there are a number of different classifications > that have been or can be proposed. But ultimately the only thing > that matters is that the classification reflect historical reality. This is really the nub of the issue as I see it. And it is why you can't have classification without reconstruction of language history. Similarities among languages within an established family may be due to retention, shared innovation, subsequent contact, or commn drift. You can't get a reliable classification if you can't sort these things out. You can't sort these out if you don't have some idea of what the situation of the proto-language was, some idea of what the drift patterns in the family are, and ideally some idea of when and where contact may have occurred. Since there is still a lot of disagreement about these issues in AA, there is also a lot of room for disagreement on subclassification. > It is by no means obvious that we can in fact arrive at that goal. > What you say about "criteria" suggests that you do not share this > goal, i.e., that you view classification as having no obejctive > historical reality. No nothing so drastic. I wasn't talking about the goal, so much as the way things are. Different scholars may find different subclassifications, depending on what kind of reconstruction they adopt, that is on what features they regard as innovative. > > I am inclined to see Egyptian (along with Omotic, if it really is a > > > separate branch) as the most divergent of the branches, because so > many > > of the characteristic Afroasiatic features are lacking (the > > prefix-conjugation, object-clitic pronouns, quantitative stem ablaut > as > > a marker of verbal aspect) or are found only in ambiguous traces > (the > > system of marking verb valence with the prefixes or suffixes s > > (causative), t(reflexive) and n/m (passive), and quantitative stem > > ablaut as marker of noun plural). > > > This is not methodologically sound. Sure it is. I am not proposing an Egyptian/non-Egyptian primary split within AA. I am just taking issue with the viewpoint, also expressed by Miquel Carrasquer Vidal, that Egyptian, Semitic, and Berber look similar to each other, while Chadic and Cushitic look quite different. Similarity is in the eye of the beholder, of course. So I thought it would be best for me to lay out the reasons why for me Semitic, Berber, Chadic, and Cushitic (i.e, Beja, Agaw, Afar-Saho, and Somali, at least) look similar and it is Egyptian which looks quite different. It is still open for debate, by the way, whether all of what I am calling "characteristic features" really are conservative features. Egyptian seems to me to pose the same kind of problem within AA as Hittite does within IE. It's the oldest language by attestation, but it seems to be surprisingly innovative. Of course maybe it is all the others which are innovative, in which case we would have to propose a primary split. -- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Robert R. Ratcliffe Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku Tokyo 114 Japan From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Feb 15 17:02:29 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 12:02:29 EST Subject: Arabic and IE(subdivisions in AA) In-Reply-To: <36C499BC.183C0EE7@fs.tufs.ac.jp> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- "Robert R. Ratcliffe" wrote: >Sure it is. I am not proposing an Egyptian/non-Egyptian primary split >within AA. I am just taking issue with the viewpoint, also expressed by >Miquel Carrasquer Vidal, that Egyptian, Semitic, and Berber look similar >to each other, while Chadic and Cushitic look quite different. Did I say that? I know Ehret does ("Boreafrasian"), but I have never taken such a position, mainly because I tend to trust Newman when it comes to Chadic, and he links Chadic with Berber. I *am* on record for proposing the following branching tree: PAA / \ Omotic "Erythraic" / | | \ S. E. C. Beja-Northern Cushitic / | Beja Northern __________/|\________ | | | Berber-Chadic Egyptian Semitic ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From Paula.Fikkert at uni-konstanz.de Tue Feb 16 01:06:41 1999 From: Paula.Fikkert at uni-konstanz.de (Paula Fikkert) Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 20:06:41 EST Subject: Conference announcement Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Conference Announcement DGfS99 The 21st annual meeting of the German Society of Linguistics/ 21. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft University of Konstanz, Germany February 24-26, 1999 Theme: Language change/Sprachwandel Invited speakers: Bernard Comrie (MPI Leipzig) Morris Halle (MIT) Paul Kiparsky (Stanford University) Ilse Lehiste (Ohio State University) The meeting hosts the following workshops/Arbeitsgruppe: AG1 Bedeutungswandel - Bedeutungsvariation AG2 Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction AG3 Change in Prosodic Systems AG4 Morphologischer Wandel AG5 Kontinuitaet, Wandel und Reform von Schriftsystemen/Orthographie AG6 Werden Sprachen besser? Praeferenzen, Optimalitaet und Output-Orientierung in Sprachwandel AG7 Varietaetenwandel AG8 Adding and Omitting AG9 Klitika/Clitics AG10 Korpora als Verifikationsmittel linguistischer Analysen AG11 Pragmatische Schlussverfahren AG12 Competition in Syntax More information on the Meeting and on the individual workshops can be found on the conference website (http://dgfs99.uni-konstanz.de/). Dr. Paula Fikkert Job: FG Sprachwissenschaft, Universitaet Konstanz, Fach D 186, D 78457 Konstanz Deutschland Tel: +49-7531-882622 Fax: +49-7531-883095 Privat: Alte Bergstrasse 14, CH 8280 Kreuzlingen, Schweiz Tel: +41-71-6722387 Fax: +41-71-6722740 From manaster at umich.edu Tue Feb 16 13:21:59 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1999 08:21:59 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Before we got sidetracked, I thought we had seen the beginning of a really interesting and useful (and indeed potentially revolutionary) debate about how languages really get classified. And since it is impossible to talk about these things in a vacuum, I had suggested that, contrary to what some have said, it IS perfectly easy to find cases of (proposed) language families where all the data and all the issues can be posted and discussed electronically. And in response to my posting the entire Goddard (1979) argument for a Comecrudan language family, together with all the known data from two of the three languages, several people did seem interested in pursuing the substantive issues, incl. Larry Trask, Stefan Georg, Sally Thomason, and Johanna Nichols. But as I say we then got sidetracked. I don't know how many people are interested in this, so I will not pursue this any further here if there is no interest, of course. But, for now, I think three issues have been raised in response to my posting: (a) Sally Thomason tried to minimize the contradiction between the views on "Comecrudan" of Goddard, who proposed "Comecrudan", and Campbell, who discusses it in his recent book as an established and uncontroversial language family, and these same two authors' criticism of other proposed language families, for which the evidence is much stronger than for "Comecrudan". So let me cite specifics. Campbell (1997:107) begins his chapter 4 by saying that in this chapter "Only well-established and generally uncontested families are treated...", and on pp. 144-145 in this same chapter he lists Comecrudan and offers some discussion of why the "Recognition of the Comecrudan family is important" and specifically cites Goddard as well as a paper by another Campbell, T. Campbell, for the fact that "the Comecrudan relationship ... is now recognized". As for Goddard, it is true that he does explicitly say that "Comecrudan" HAS to be accepted merely that he has a "strong case", but his conclusion reads (1979:380): "The available data from South Texas and the Lower Rio Grande point to the existence of seven at present unrelatable languages or small families: Tonkawa, Coahuilteco, Karankawa, Comecrudan, Cotoname, Solano, and Aranama". OF COURSE, Goddard is a cautious scholar and expresses himself cautiously, BUT first of all in fact of the seven all are single languages EXCEPT "Comecrudan", so he is putting "Comecrudan" in the same list with individual languages, which to me is saying that he is taking as established, and, second, supposing I, for example, used the same language about "The available data from X point to the existence of Y ... families" and then listed families which are NOT to Campbell's or Thomason's liking. They would immediately denounce for proposing something methodologically untenable, some of them would say that I am not a historical linguist, etc.. In fact, this is what Campbell does with regard to my Pakawan (= Comecrudan + Cotoname + Coahuilteco) proposal. Or, they would take a cautious formulation, such as Goddard's, but on my part as an indication that, since I am asserting but merely proposing, they can simply ignore my proposal (as Campbell does with my Coahuiltecan (= Pakawa-Karankawan) proposal, again in the same book). So it seems clear to me that the opinion-makers in our field are simply applying a double standard, in addition to contradicting themselves about what is and what is not acceptable methodology. Larry and Stefan apparently concede that I am right about the contradiction between the methodological stance of Goddard, Campbell, et al., and their acceptance of "Comecrudan", but raise another issue. (b) They say in effect that while I am right all this means is that Goddard, Campbell, et al. are wrong about accepting "Comecrudan" (and hence can still be right about methodology). I don't want to dwell on this, but to me the points here are two. One, as I know Stefan agrees and is clear to any historian of comparative (especially Indo- European) linguistics, methodology has always come second in our field to the actual linguistics. The methods we use emerged and were tested in the course of work on actual languages. If there is to be a discussion of methodologies, then we should look at language families that have proposed on the basis of specific methodologies and see what we find, not start out by a priori accepting some completely arbitrary methodological assertion made up from whole cloth and then rejecting any language family whose recognition would force us to abandon that assertion. I am referring of course to the two assertions: (I) Language relatedness can only be shown by reference to morphology (falsified by the history of how Tai, Comecrudan, and (an example I forgot to cite earlier) how Uto-Aztecan was discovered), (II) Language relatedness can only be shown by establishing a system of sound laws (falsified by the history of how Niger-Kordofanian, Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and indeed probably most of the currently accepted language families were established). But even more important is the fact that, as I maintain, it is NOT reasonable to take a quick look at some proposed linguistic family and immediately take either a negative or a positive stand and then hold on to it for dear life. Rather, a new theory, if correct, will over time undergo considerable refinement and, crucially, find more and more evidence to support it--and will explain more and more data. My position on "Comecrudan" when I saw it was neither yes nor no, but rather "Maybe, let's see what we can do with this", and I have since then (in work published already as well as forthcoming work) assembled more and more evidence for and found no evidence against. It helps that more data have become available to me when I got a hold of an unpublished ms. which Goddard had used but failed to exploit at all fully. And it helps even more that "Comecrudan" is, as I hold, a part of a bigger family, Pakawan, about which much more is known simply because we have more data. So that the "Comecrudan" problem becomes more or less like the problem of showing that some very poorly attested IE lg, like Messapic, is indeed Indo-European. Even though "Comecrudan" is smaller than Pakawan, it is easier to argue for the latter than for the former, in effect. But to see if this is really so, people must be willing to examine the data and the arguments without prejudging the case. (c) I agree with Johanna Nichols, pace what Larry and Stefan seem to say, that, when dealing with languages of which we know only a small number of words, it matters not just that we can only, therefore, only find at best a small number of cognates with other languages but also it matters how percentage of the attested forms we can explain. This is why I posted the entire Garza and Mamulique corpus, to see whether she (and others) would agree with me that the Comecrudan hypothesis (which links these two with Comecrudo) is a reasonable one. I say Freasonable' because as stated I think the proof of "Comecrudan" lies in the broader Pakawan comparison. AMR Campbell, Lyle 1997 American Indian Languages. Oxford Univ. Press. Goddard, Ives 1979 The Languages of South Texas and the Lower Rio Grande. _In_ The Languages of North America: Historical and Comparative Assessment, edited by Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, 355-389. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. Manaster Ramer, Alexis 1996 Sapir's classifications: Coahuiltecan. Anthropological Linguistics 38:1-37. From wolfskil at MIT.EDU Wed Feb 17 02:06:31 1999 From: wolfskil at MIT.EDU (Jud Wolfskill) Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1999 21:06:31 EST Subject: Book Announcement Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1511 bytes Desc: not available URL: From compling at juno.com Wed Feb 17 16:48:25 1999 From: compling at juno.com (Christopher Hogan) Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 11:48:25 EST Subject: likeness of Modern Polish to that of 12th c. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I received the following request from a friend. Would anyone be willing to comment on the degree to which Polish has changed since the 12th c.? In message <01BE59BE.40C58F60 at Bluegrass3> "Marion K. Bryant" writes: > >Recently I read a novel about a modern day Polish man who was >transported to 12th century Poland. According to the author, the >language spoken by modern day Poles is basically the same as that >spoken by Poles in the 12th century. The modern day guy had >no trouble understanding the locals or they him. This situation >was contrasted with English, which has changed dramatically over >the same time period. > > Does anyone know if this is true about the Polish language? Is >it true of other languages? I read somewhere that in a northern >country (Iceland? Norway? Finland?) the people could read the sagas >written centuries ago without any trouble. What about Italian or French? >Could a Frenchman of today understand the French spoken in the 12th century? > > Marion --chris ___________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 17 13:46:42 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 08:46:42 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Comecrudo) is a reasonable one. I say Freasonable' because as stated I > think the proof of "Comecrudan" lies in the broader Pakawan comparison. > In this brief final remark I think Alexis draws attention to an important methodological point which has not figured at all prominently during the discussion of method in comparative linguistics over the last few months. There is ideally some feedback relationship between hypotheses of subgrouping and hypotheses of broader comparison. Thus the (or a) Nostratic hypothesis, if true, might be expected to throw light on the problem of Afroasiatic subgrouping which has been raised recently. It would do this by making clearer what is an archaism and what is an innovation, a distinction which may not often be possible just by looking at the lower level. Is it the case...? or should it be the case, that the fruitfulness of a hypothesis carries more weight than the reliability or generality of the sound correspondences it is based on? I take it that this is in line with Alexis's argument. Max Wheeler ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From hubeyh at Montclair.edu Thu Feb 18 21:03:46 1999 From: hubeyh at Montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 16:03:46 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Before we got sidetracked, I thought we had seen the beginning > of a really interesting and useful (and indeed potentially > revolutionary) debate about how languages really get classified. > I don't know how many people are interested in this, so I will not pursue > this any further here if there is no interest, of course. I am interested in this, so here are my $0.02. > > work on actual languages. If there is to be a discussion of > methodologies, then we should look at language families that have proposed > on the basis of specific methodologies and see what we find, not start out > by a priori accepting some completely arbitrary methodological assertion > made up from whole cloth and then rejecting any language family whose > recognition would force us to abandon that assertion. I am referring of > course to the two assertions: > > (I) Language relatedness can only be shown by reference to morphology > (falsified by the history of how Tai, Comecrudan, and (an example I forgot > to cite earlier) how Uto-Aztecan was discovered), > > (II) Language relatedness can only be shown by establishing a system of > sound laws (falsified by the history of how Niger-Kordofanian, > Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and indeed probably most of the currently > accepted language families were established). Some comments here. 1. In order to do (I) they have to have morphology. 2. In order to do (II) there are two issues to be settled. 2.1) If data is plentiful, then finding sound laws is easy. 2.2) If data is scarce, then one may still find sound laws even if doing nothing else but brute-force methods using computers. 2.3) if we do use brute-force methods, we still have to compare them against some baseline effects due to chance. 3. Executing (I) still requires some kind of sound-laws. If that were not the case, then languages could be said to be related for having the same kind of morphology but not having sound laws among bound morphemes. 4. So, in both cases, we are still working with morphemes (whether they are free or bound). The bound-morpheme method will only work on languages that have morphology, but again sound-laws are required. 5. In both cases, we are attempting to determine if probability of the existing situation can be attributable to chance. If the answer is no, then we go to the next step. 6. If the existing situation cannot be easily attributable to chance, then can it be borrowing? In order to remedy this situation, we put other rules into action: 6.1) The morphemes in which we see the realization of sound laws must be those that cannot be attributable to copying/borrowing. The heuristic that is employed here is that some special set of words are resistant to exactly this kind of borrowing/copying. The formalization of this concept first attempted by Swadesh is in the so-called Swadesh list. 6.2) The rules in (6.1) are further modified by not allowing words that are phonetically similar to a specific set of word {ata, ana,ama,...} Now, we have to justify these laws. The attempt to justify certain words that are apparently resistant to copying/borrowing/diffusion has to be backed up by some kind of evidence that is not circular. It can't be only IE languages. The circularity can be seen in the fact that these words are among the first that would exist in any language and can thus point to Protoworld. Therefore, (6.2) has to be fully justified and justifiable from empirical evidence that is not circular but independent of historical linguistics, especially of the IE-kind. Other problems: i)We need a measure of complexity. ii) We need a measure of semantic distance. ii) We need a measure of phonological/phonetic distance. A. (i) is necessar in cases like this: Does Kabardian have 1 or two vowels? If some brute-force computer program changed all the known words of some language (say Etruscan, or some other language with only a few known words) by using regular changes to some other language, then how many of these regular sound changes are we willing to tolerate. If the rules become very convoluted, do we throw up the towel and disallow it, or do we continue to insist on regular sound change, no matter how complex? B. (ii) is neeeded because we have to be able to determine if two words are cognates. We can't allow 'foot' and 'wagon' to become cognates, in general unless we can trace the word accross time extremely accurately. This could only occur if we had writings from the language stretching back thousands of years. Lacking that we have to guess, as we always do. And this guessing has to have some validity so that we can compare guesses against other guesses and be consistent. C. (iii) is the easiest thing to do and has been done. There are many such distance metrics (in my book), but we have to clearly define what is meant by phonetic, acoustic, perceptive and phonemic distances. There is a lot of utter confusion in the literature. There is no way, except to produce some number in some normalized interval like [0,1] even if the first attempt is not good, to be able to create a consistent comparison of attempts of linguists to create 'genetic' trees. Eventually, even this concept can be more clearly explained, after we've taken the bugs out of the simpler constituent concepts. > > (c) I agree with Johanna Nichols, pace what Larry and Stefan seem to say, > that, when dealing with languages of which we know only a small number of > words, it matters not just that we can only, therefore, only find at best > a small number of cognates with other languages but also it matters how > percentage of the attested forms we can explain. This is why I posted the > entire Garza and Mamulique corpus, to see whether she (and others) would > agree with me that the Comecrudan hypothesis (which links these two with > Comecrudo) is a reasonable one. I say Freasonable' because as stated I > think the proof of "Comecrudan" lies in the broader Pakawan comparison. And that is why I posted the material from Hintze on Meroitic, Altaic and Uralic. There has to be a consistent way to evaluate all such data. Historical linguistics has to be taken out of the realm of gut feelings. It is almost 21st century, and that kind of gut feeling will not hold up. There are computer programs that "compose music like Bach" and that paint. It is not believable to claim that historical linguistics is less structured than music or art, or that it has to stay at the level of intuition and black magic expertise. It is not. -- M. Hubey Email: hubeyh at Montclair.edu Backup:hubeyh at alpha.montclair.edu WWW Page: http://www.csam.montclair.edu/Faculty/Hubey.html From DSCOOPE at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Thu Feb 18 16:48:02 1999 From: DSCOOPE at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Donald S. Cooper) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 11:48:02 EST Subject: Polish In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 18 Feb 99 09:47:59 EST Message-ID: The inquiry about Old Polish raises interesting general questions about mutual intelligibility of related dialects of a given language. First, one may address the question on a practical level. A modern Pole transported into 12th century Poland would find a language partly intelligible, from which his own speech differed approximately to the same extent as modern Ukrainian from Modern Great Russian, or a Scots rural dialect does from the informal speech of South Carolina. The modern Pole would have to learn a number of phonological/phonetic correspondences, he would have to learn some vocabula ry which differed from modern Polish, and he would find some forms rather baffl ing, because they are not retained in Modern Polish, such as finite past verb forms. These he would have to learn with a certain degree of real labor, and initially they would be quite unintelligible. His position would be similar to that of a Russian-speaker set down in a Ukrainian village - at first he would understand a certain amount, he would improve rapidly as he learned sound correspondences, and it would take a year or two for him to learn to converse fluently with his interlocutors. The situation of English is quite different because of the flood of foreign words, mostly French and Latin, which followed the Norman invasion. The modern speaker would have no way of dealing with earlier Germanic lexicon which has been replaced, apart from the moderate degree of phonological change which has taken place in English since the 12th century. The author of your novel has made his life easier because actually we have only fragments of the Polish of the 12th century, such as the glosses and proper names contained in the "Golden Bull" (Polish: zlota bulla) issued by Pope Innocent II in 1136. We do not have a Polish text until the 13th century, if I recall correctly. A good deal can be learned from the study of Polish form s in Latin manuscripts,as was done quite early by the great Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay in his master's thesis published in Leipzig in 1870 (in Russian) "On the Old Polish Language up to the 14th century". Of course, such work is not very much in style now, and even Baudouin de Courtenay later commented about this meritorious thesis that he "wondered that such an occupation did not damage a young mind". The broader context of the degree of mutual interaction between speakers of different dialects, and possibility of spread of linguistic changes across other existing major isoglosses, of course, relates to broader questions regarding the assumptions of comparative linguistics. The Slavic written tradition began with the creation of translations into the Macedonian Slavic dialect called Old Church Slavonic in the 9th. c. One of my teachers, Horace Lunt, author of the first major modern linguistic study of modern Macedonian, commented after a couple of glasses of sherry once "It's really Bulgarian"; wars have been fought over these issues. The Old Church Slavonic texts were intelligible to the residents of Moravia in the mid-9th century, to the extent that OCS was adapted as a literary language of which we have traces, such as the Kiev and Prague Folia; this is described in a classic form in the monograph of Milos Weingart "The Czechoslovak Type of Church Slavonic" (in Slovak). Traces of such linguistic usage are found in the broader set of Old Church Slavonic manuscripts whiich reflect primarily the dialectal forms of Macedonia (e.g. Codex Zographensis and Marianus, Assemanianus, etc.) and those of Bulgaria (the Savvina kniga, Codex Suprasliensis). In the modern period the degree of mutual intelligibility of Slavic languages can be startling. At a medical meeting in Prague in 1989, I listened to a Serbian physician describe her hospital work on electrophysiology in Serbo-Croatian, to Czech speakers who did not know Serbo-Coatian. A couple of years later, at a medical meeting in Kiev, I listened at one point when a Bulgarian physician from Sophia was discussing modern Balkan history with another physician from Belgrade. Each spoke his own language, with good understanding. Neither, of course, was a linguist or professional polyglot; they simply followed a path of least resistance. Of course political factors may intervene; at a medical meeting in Cairo, the present writer noted that a Polish physician in converse with a Czech one preferred to speak German, the common cultural language of Central Europe. Without extending this discussion, such practical phenomena illustrate the complexity which may lie behind the lines demarking linguistic change, both in the modern world and in earlier reconstructed stages of language. Speakers of different closely related forms of language do learn to communicate fluently, although the process may differ in its nature and complexity in different situations. Sincerely, Donald S. Cooper Dept. of Speech/Language Pathology and Audiology University of South Carolina From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Thu Feb 18 14:20:23 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 09:20:23 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Only because of recent exchanges, I feel the need to disclaim that I have appointed myself AMR's nemesis in commenting on an argument he made about language-relatedness. In fact, my comments repeat things I have already said on this list in responding to other scholars. The point that interests me starts where AMR wrote: ".... If there is to be a discussion of methodologies, then we should look at language families that have proposed on the basis of specific methodologies and see what we find, " That's an excellent idea, but the sentence continues: "not start out by a priori accepting some completely arbitrary methodological assertion made up from whole cloth and then rejecting any language family whose recognition would force us to abandon that assertion". The part about "some completely arbitrary methodological assertion" has to be defended, since there is a traditional consensus view that has been accepted over time, and, because of the tests it has passed in its development and its successes, does not appear to the field as a whole to be arbitrary. To be sure, not all languages are thought to have single ancestors, but the notion of "language family" does seem to rest on the notion of the related languages having a single common ancestor, and a demonstration of reconstruction of that ancestor and diversification of its descendents is the consensus that banishes skeptics to the sidelines. The continuation is: "...I am referring of course to the two assertions:(I) Language relatedness can only be shown by reference to morphology (falsified by the history of how Tai, Comecrudan, and (an example I forgot to cite earlier) how Uto-Aztecan was discovered), (II) Language relatedness can only be shown by establishing a system of sound laws (falsified by the history of how Niger-Kordofanian, Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and indeed probably most of the currently accepted language families were established)." The two assertions are opposed to each other, when I think they should be presented as cooperative properties of the consensus view. Of course, morphology is vulnerable to phonological erosion and syntactic reorganisation, but demonstration of relationship should eventually be able to account for the grammatical structure of the ancestor -- otherwise, what's the point of assuming a single gramatical ancestor whose properties are unknown?. Apart from that, the "falsification" referred to has to do with the first HUNCHES that these were families -- of the same kind as those families that no one would dispute, -- not how SUBSEQUENTLY they came to be "established" as families. In this context, I want to comment on AMR's claim that Niger-Kordofanian (and probably various other families) falsifies the traditional claim of how language-relatedness is ESTABLISHED. These statements remind me of what I wrote in reference to Merritt Ruhlen's argument that language-relatedness is "established" prior to such things as the above; he was pushing mass comparison as sufficient to "establish" relationship. He argued speciously that if relatedness was not already being "accepted", what would be the point of further mining the data for sound correspondences, etc.? I think we all agree that the way we understand (genetic) relatedness, if languages are indeed related then we expect systems of sound laws, and diversification of syntax and morphology to eventually be demonstrable. In view of that, I objected to Merritt's obscuring the "acceptance" (if you will) of a HYPOTHESIS (that mass comparisons, including some grammatical morphemes, suggest that a set of languages are related) and a METHOD OF DEMONSTRATION to TEST the hypothesis (which involves sound correspondences and whatever else). My scare-quotes above call attention to tricky words like "establish" and "accept". Further repeating comments I think I have already made on this list, let's take the case of Niger-Kordofanian (which generally reverted to the earlier label Niger-Congo, NC, in a manner similar to the way "Indo-Hittite" reverted to "Indo-European".) It is absolutely true that concerned scholars "accept" the notion of an NC family as the most reasonable HYPOTHESIS (yet offered, and over the dead bodies of previous hypotheses) for the massive similarities among various NC languages. However, in the absence of DEMONSTRATION by classical methods, there is disagreement about membership in that family -- and the skepticism is JUSTIFIED until such demonstration is forthcoming. The greatest victory in the establishment of the NC family was the "acceptance" that Bantu is a sub-sub...branch of NC, i.e., that it is related to numerous West African languages. Demonstration has proceeded quite easily with respect to Bantu and its nearest relatives in Cameroon and Nigeria, and by linkage, between various Nigerian languages and many (but not all) more eastern and northern NC languages. The situation is not so clear for some hypothesised branches of NC. Mukarovsky in Vienna has doubted the Northern Atlantic (?sub-)branch and the Mande branch. While I, for one, find it quite likely that both these groups will turn out to be bona fide NC ( most NC-ists seem to agree), I look on with great interest to the demonstration that will relieve the doubts of critics like Mukarovsky. I am particularly interested because NC-ists tend to consider Mande to be among one of the earliest separations from NC as a whole, and if demonstration of relatedness is successful, I want to see what it indicates about the nature of NC at that stage in its history. Indeed I am more interested in that than the "fact" of relatedness itself. (Actually, I suspect that the commonalities of the less problematic NC branches might already tell us more about early versions of NC, and that Mande has diverged from those commonalities more than most languages -- but that's just a suspicion, not even a hypothesis, and still of great interest to me: how and why has Mande diverged so much?) I think I have already mentioned in earlier discussions that Kordofanian also has problematic aspects, and that is involved in general reversion to the label "Niger-Congo". It was originally assumed that the Kordofanian languages were all related. On the basis of the evidence in SOME of these languages, it was hypothesised that it was also related to NC, as a sister. Some of the Kordofanian languages, however, showed more striking apparent resemblance to Nilo-Saharan than to Niger-Congo. On the basis of mass comparisons it was hypothesised that Kordofanian was a link between Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan. Gregersen, in particular, published a paper with this proposal (he was a student and admirer of Greenberg, a teacher of mine at Columbiaand highly knwoledgeable, as he would have to be, to argue for such a proposal). On closer inspection, however, esp. by Schadeberg, it turned out that this proposal was not sustainable, and that the similarities among the Kordofanian languages were the result of convergence. Some of them (the ones mainly used as the NC-NS link) turned out to be more likely to be Nilo-Saharan languages, while others still seemed most likely to be Niger-Congo. Hence the backoff on "Niger-Kordofanian", and reversion to "Niger-Congo". "Mainstream" opinion is still hesitant about whether Mande or "Kordofanian" split off first. All of these things are HYPOTHESES guiding and propelling further research. Terms like "accepted" (NC is an "accepted" family) must be understood in this context. Terms like "established" (NC is an "established" family) is open to misinterpretation, because of the blurring of "hypothesis" and "demonstration". AMR immediately continues: "But even more important is the fact that, as I maintain, it is NOT reasonable to take a quick look at some proposed linguistic family and immediately take either a negative or a positive stand and then hold on to it for dear life. Rather, a new theory, if correct, will over time undergo considerable refinement and, crucially, find more and more evidence to support it--and will explain more and more data." There is nothing I disagree with there. I do not object to AMR arguing that there may be sufficient reason to further consider the possibility that certain languages are related, for which the standard statement is "further research is needed". I only object to blurring the lines between a hypothesis (which may be "accepted" due to "opinion-makers" -- and turn out to be wrong) and a methodically acceptable demonstration (which "establishes" the relatedness beyond reasonable skepticism/criticism). On the basis of earlier friendly conversations with AMR I do not think he will disagree. I think I am doing more than mincing words to bring to attention the need for an argument in defense of more speculative relationships to be more carefully and precisely laid out, esp what makes a speculative relationship more or less promising (for eventual demonstration). If that is all that is being proposed -- great! Leave out the part about the consensus view being "arbitrary" or "made up from whole cloth", or defend it. -- Benji From manaster at umich.edu Thu Feb 18 14:10:56 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 09:10:56 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Max is exactly right about what I intended by saying that "the proof of "Comecrudan" lies in the broader Pakawan comparison". I think quite generally that one of the reasons the debates over language classification have not been as fruitful as they might have been is that people on one side insist that whatever evidence they have published for a given language family should be enough and no further discussion should be required, while people on the other side insist that if they can find any flaw, no matter how small, in the other guys' work, that suffices to refute the work in question. Neither side wants to look beyond what has already been done and ask whet MORE can and should be done. My approach here is based on the example of what Edward Sapir did when he decided that the preexisting arguments for Uto-Aztecan were inadequate: without dwelling on all the problems with the earlier work, he simply did his own work and established the reality of Uto-Aztecan to everybody's satisfaction. Nor is it necessary, or even desirable, for an individual scholar to make a definite commitment for or against a given theory before making an honest effort to studying and perhaps improving on it. What little I have been able to do with regard to Nostratic was done not because I had ALREADY decided that Nostratic is right but rather as part of the process of trying to see for myself WHETHER it is right, a process which I am still dedicated to pursuing. I simply cannot understand the people who declare that Nostratic, say, is an established fact any more than I can those who pronounce it dead. AMR On Wed, 17 Feb 1999, Max W Wheeler wrote: > In [his] brief final remark I think Alexis draws attention to an > important methodological point which has not figured at all prominently > during the discussion of method in comparative linguistics over the last > few months. There is ideally some feedback relationship between > hypotheses of subgrouping and hypotheses of broader comparison. Thus the > (or a) Nostratic hypothesis, if true, might be expected to throw light > on the problem of Afroasiatic subgrouping which has been raised > recently. It would do this by making clearer what is an archaism and > what is an innovation, a distinction which may not often be possible > just by looking at the lower level. > > Is it the case...? or should it be the case, that the fruitfulness of a > hypothesis carries more weight than the reliability or generality of the > sound correspondences it is based on? > > I take it that this is in line with Alexis's argument. From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Thu Feb 18 13:53:17 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 08:53:17 EST Subject: Wald's continuing... Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Unfortunately, I feel compelled to respond to AMR's ad hominem posting of 7 Feb, 1999. I would have preferred to remain silent, but that runs the risk of some onlookers thinking that unrestrained emotion is an acceptable or effective substitute for rational argument in our field. Behind AMR's posting, I have come to realise, was a great deal of personal pain. I did not foresee that my criticism of some of Pedersen's statements would be taken by AMR as a personal insult to himself, and a direct threat to a line of inquiry he holds dear. So, recognising all the sensitivities engendered in any issue remains a human problem that we can only continue to work on without expecting that a solution is just around the corner. Fortunately, Dorothy intervened, though a little late, when it came to her attention that AMR's posting was threatening to transform the list into the moral and "intellectual" equivalent of the "Jerry Springer Show", with AMR doing the verbal equivalent of throwing a chair at me. She wrote to me: >>> .... I should have >>been more careful about vetting submitted postings and should not have >>distributed that one from AMR. In addition, I'm trying to keep postings >>shorter -- this is one of the reasons some things that shouldn't be posted >>slip by me. ....Would you be willing to shorten this and reduce the >>>level of your outrage? Then I'll post it. In return, I sympathised with her plight, in view of the work that would have to be done to vet the irrepressible barrage of often lengthy (and often equally worthwhile) messages that AMR submits to the list. I also noted that my immediate reply to AMR's posting, which she suppressed, was as long as it was, because I analysed the posting in considerable detail and quoted lengthy portions of that posting as evidence for my analyses. In any case, writing the suppressed message and the time that has passed since has absorbed some of the emotion AMR's posting inspired in me -- which is no doubt a good thing -- so I approach the task of shortening my reply with less -- enthusiasm and spontaenity. And even with some embarassment for AMR for the way his posting exhibited a self-inflicted but undoubtedly ephemeral distortion of his usually keener thinking and judgment. Given that, I hope it can be clear that my following points are addressed to AMR's TEXT, and not to the person of AMR, who most often produces texts which earn our respect. At an early point AMR wrote: >>>I have received two versions, one long, the other even longer, >>>of a diatribe from Wald accusing me of ignorance >>>about the history of linguistics, and both Pedersen and >>>by implication me of "institutional racism", >>>though not (necessarily) of being racists at a persona level >>>(something which Wald seems to say he does not care >>>about). I had a lot to say about that, but for present purposes my reply to the last point was that discussion of expressions of (witting or unwitting) institutionalised racism *in scientific discourse* is all that is relevant. If one wants to attack the proposition that "2+2 = 4", it is irrelevant to allege that the author of the proposition is a "racist". Similarly, the comparative method of reconstruction developed by the 19th c IE-ists does not stand or fall on the religious, or nationalistic or later nstitutionalised racist motives that may have encouraged their work (whether or not they were aware of such forces inside or outside of themselves). Similarly, for Nostraticists and anyone else. Certainly my understanding of the historical context in which the IEists forged their principles of reconstruction and fundamental vision of linguistic change does not diminish in the slightest my admiration and USE of their basic methods, without which this very list would hardly be of any interest to any of us. With regard to well-intentioned statements against blatant racism, the arguments adduced by early 20th c American dialectologists against the notion that the nature of African American English had any historical connection with anything but English offers an interesting and complex example. A common position in that period was that African American English was nothing but an accretion of non-standardisms of "Anglo-Saxon" pedigree. The point was used to assail the blatant racist assumption that African American English reflected the inability of African Americans to acquire "English" due to some congenital mental defect (an empirically falsifiable assumption). The motive of the dialectologists was "good", but the details of the argument were "bad". One was that even Southern "whites" use the same linguistic features as African Americans (only partially true). This, of course, was criticised by the non-racist argument that pointed out that there was an unexamined assumption by the dialectologists that "whites" would not pick up linguistic features from African Americans, the direction of influence was unsoundly assumed to go only the other way. And so on, e.g., for the "cafeteria" principle that any dialect feature found somewhere in the British Isles that superficially resembled an African American English feature had to be evidence for the European origin of that feature, regardless of socio-historical plausibility. (Note, at least, that the cafeteria principle could be aimed at diffusing the "defect" interpretation of whatever AAE feature was at issue).The overarching assumption was that African cultures were such flimsy things that transport and exposure to "Western" culture had effectively eliminated any traces of it from African American culture (except, contradictorily, music and dance, which had become America's most admired cultural import to Europe, and which the Europeans did not interpret as "derivative" of their own cultures.) I find Pedersen's comments on distinguishing language and race no less well-intentioned (and, of course, they are sound) than those of the early 20th c American dialectologists, though list discussion has shown that he also made them with situations closer to (his) home in mind, but that does not make his uncritical conveyance (and thus endorsement) of a larger spurious framework of racial classification less objectionable as a matter for scientific discourse. Later in the posting, AMR wrote: >>>Finally, it appears to me that it is Wald who is >>>operating with racial categories in a way I find >>>unscientific and immoral, because he appears to ne >>>saying: >>>(a) Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken by >>>members of race A (so-called Black or Negro), I saw this as part of an ill-considered and not-entirely-serious attempt to turn the tables on me; "reverse racism"? I was, of course, discussing and criticising what I see as the motivation lurking behind the racial classification referred to by Pesersen (not that he realised it). I cannot discuss and criticise the motives for the racial classification without mentioning the framework. That does not mean I accept it (and was only arguing about its details) -- and I don't. It is distasteful to me to even have to respond to such a silly argument. If AMR's point is taken seriously, then it leads to the conclusion that we must ignore such constructs, rather than mention them in order to criticise them and expose their historical motives, i.e., that what he was fundamentally saying was "SHUT UP!" He went on at great lengths about this, and I quoted him at length in my suppressed response, but I think what I have just said is sufficient. Later, he states: >>Wald's charges are false and contemptible. >>His insistence on repeating them over and over, >>and on attributing to person X the views of >>entirely other persons, is something very >>familiar to us but none the less dangerous for that. I had much to say about this too, but here I will only single out the "to US" portion. This looks like posturing and playing to an audience, in the hopes of engaging their sympathy and support, instead of more straightforwardly standing on one's own in responding to an imagined personal insult. Evidently, as I said earlier, AMR chose to personally identify more closely with the entire issue than I would have expected him to. Finally (I mean it), AMR takes advantage of my attempt at sarcastic humour in the following exchange: I wrote: >>>> You can >>>> tell the Egyptians aren't Negro, just look at the illustrations of Ancient >>>> Egyptians in the National Geographic. AMR responded: >>>I myself don't operate with racial categories at all, so I canNOT >>>tell that.... Well, humour is a matter of taste. We all take chances when we display it in public, but we all do it nevertheless. I take the response as an example of petulant posturing, but I concede that it can be interpreted at another level, where it is a legitimate retort. That is, if we dismiss the outmoded physical construct in which the term "Negro" was meaningful, and the social construct to which it was applied as a label, we can refuse to acknowledge my point. Incidentally, the whole discussion of "Nubians" and "Negroes" gives much insight into why African Americans in the 60s objected on political grounds to the term "Negro", so that it was eventually removed from even ordinary social discourse. Similarly, though less completely, the same happened with its cognates in other European languages -- except the Romance sources, in which it simply means "black", and does not masquerade as a "technical" term. It was a much more significant step in exposing and dismantling "scientific" racism and its contribution to social racism than most people at the time (the late 60s) realised. Interestingly, in an exchange I had with Harry Perridon, he pointed out to me that Norwegian authorities decided to retain cognate "Neger" as a standardised ethnic term, maybe in deliberate contrast to Swedish authority, which adopted the same position as the ex-colonialist West -- to replace the term; the Norwegian decision may be an indication of the local political transformation of a broader international political issue as symbolised in a WORD. In closing, I think it is appropriate to quote, with his permission, the following passage I received from George Hinge, in an exchange I had with him about Pedersen's original passage ""Nubierne er ikke negre": >>>Basically, we agree - and Alexis Manaster Ramer, too. The difference lies in >>>how to use a text, philologically or heuristically; AMR and I hold Holger >>>Pedersen in a high veneration (and AMR nostraticsm, too), whereas you are >>>primarily interested in showing how racist axioms can be deeply rooted in >>>the scientific discussion. But even if the root is sick, the trunk and the >>>branches may be healthy and strong. George stated it better than I could. It stands in marked contrast to AMR's indignant comments to the effect that "how DARE I raise the issue of "racism" in connection with criticising anything that Pedersen wrote?" Once again, I regret the pain that the entire discussion from beginning to end caused AMR personally; it was beyond anything I could have imagined beforehand. Nevertheless, in my opinion, it was a perfectly legitimate issue to raise, and it did precipitate some interesting and scientifically relevant responses. I was even informed that some Nostratic theories did or do indeed consider Nilo-Saharan as a candidate for membership (interesting since it is not yet clear that it is a coherent family -- but that's how that line of research works at present). So maybe in the end, "Nostratic" will become the Latinate substitute for "proto-WORLD". Similarly, I felt I had to respond to AMR's unfortunate posting, at least as a text directed ad hominem against me. End of discussion! --- Benji Wald From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 19 16:40:00 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 11:40:00 EST Subject: Help with References Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I would appreciate any help with references to recent published work which cites with approval Don Ringe's "probabilistic" critiques of Nostratic. Please send those to me not to the list. Thank you. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 19 16:39:50 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 11:39:50 EST Subject: Mark Hubey's comments on lg classification Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I don't have much to say (for once), except re Mark's comment on lgs with no (historically significant) morphology. Mark appears to be saying that the mere existence of such lgs suffices to refute the claim that it is only by comparing morphologies that we can establish lg families. But this is not so: the alternative would be to say that for such languages we cannot ever determine what families they belong to. Some linguists at the turn of the century and later held precisely this view--or something very close to it. From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 19 16:39:32 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 11:39:32 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, bwald wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- [snip] [quotes me as rejecting the following:] >> (I) Language relatedness can only be shown by >> reference to morphology (falsified by the history of how Tai, >> Comecrudan, >> and (an example I forgot to cite earlier) how Uto-Aztecan was >> discovered), >> >> (II) Language relatedness can only be shown by establishing a system of >> sound laws (falsified by the history of how Niger-Kordofanian, >> Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and indeed probably most of the currently >> accepted language families were established)." > > The two assertions are opposed to each other, when I think they should be > presented as > cooperative properties of the consensus view. What I dispute is that (I) and (II) represent "the consensus view". They are widespread misconceptions, and they have become something that a lot of people who typically do not know much about the subject proclaim loudly AS THOUGH they WERE the consensus view. But that is a different matter. > In this context, I want to comment on AMR's claim that Niger-Kordofanian > (and probably various other families) falsifies the traditional claim of > how language-relatedness is ESTABLISHED. > > These statements remind me of what I wrote in reference to Merritt > Ruhlen's argument that language-relatedness is "established" prior to such > things as the above; he was pushing mass comparison as sufficient to > "establish" relationship. [snip] I object to guilt-by-association arguments. My view is simply that to establish the validity of a language family, e.g., Indo-European, requires far less work than does the correct reconstruction of the corresponding proto-language. That is all. > > Further repeating comments I think I have already made on this list, let's > take the case of Niger-Kordofanian (which generally reverted to the earlier > label Niger-Congo, NC, in a manner similar to the way "Indo-Hittite" > reverted to "Indo-European".) > > It is absolutely true that concerned scholars "accept" the notion of an NC > family as the most reasonable HYPOTHESIS (yet offered, and over the dead > bodies of previous hypotheses) for the massive similarities among various > NC languages. However, in the absence of DEMONSTRATION by classical > methods, there is disagreement about membership in that family -- and the > skepticism is JUSTIFIED until such demonstration is forthcoming. I don't know what "classical methods" here refers to, unless it is again the imaginary consensus view. The point I am making is that the relatedness of Bantu (together with its most obvious relations) with (at least some of) the Kordofanian languages, based on the congruence of the nominal class prefix markers, is not something that, to my somewhat limited knowledge, is questioned by any sane person. If I am wrong, please provide me with the relevant references. On the other hand, the fact that there may be disagreements about SOME lgs is not surprising or interesting. Even after Hittite was accepted as IE, many IEnists continued to doubt that some other Anatolian lgs (Hittite's closest relaitons) are IE. [snip] > > I think I am doing more than mincing words to bring to attention > the need for an argument in defense of more speculative relationships to be > more carefully and precisely laid out, esp what makes a speculative > relationship more or less promising (for eventual demonstration). I agree. This is just what I said myself, that we need not decide (in fact, should not decide) whether a given hypothesis is correct before doing a great deal of work. My problem is with people who try to preempt such work or any serious discussion of it. > If that > is all that is being proposed -- great! Leave out the part about the > consensus view being "arbitrary" or "made up from whole cloth", or defend > it. I have discussed in print, in easily accessible journals, why this is NOT the consensus view and why it IS arbitrary and invented. Am I to assume that my work is not being read? AMR From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 19 16:37:15 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 11:37:15 EST Subject: Wald's continuing... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I have nothing to add to what I said earlier about Wald's attacks on Pedersen and on other Nostratic scholars, and his latest posting does not add any new evidence to substantiate his charges of racism. But I would like to object to his statement: "So maybe in the end, "Nostratic" will become the Latinate substitute for "proto-WORLD"." The confusions of Nostratic with "proto-worlds" is a widespread one, and it is often used to make fun of Nostratic. Since Wald has apparently had some slight acquaintance with Pedersen's work, though, he at least should know that this IS a preposterous confusion. AMR From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sun Feb 21 19:08:53 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 14:08:53 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- AMR ventures: "I don't know what "classical methods" here refers to, unless it is again the imaginary consensus view. The point I am making is that the relatedness of Bantu (together with its most obvious relations) with (at least some of) the Kordofanian languages, based on the congruence of the nominal class prefix markers, is not something that, to my somewhat limited knowledge, is questioned by any sane person. If I am wrong, please provide me with the relevant references." [does the comment suggest that some insane person has questioned whatever is being referred to above?] OK, for me, the consensus view and "classical methods" are those that virtually EVERYBODY accepts as demonstrating relationship -- and, as I said, marginalising skeptics (but not necessarily calling them "insane"; that is superfluous). What is wrong with calling that the consensus view? [I thought consensus is the point of departure from which further progress must be made. That the intent of the program is to try to push consensus further, NOT to trivialise what consensus already exists. However, the rhetoric of the reply suggests that trivialising it is indeed intended -- presumably, because those methods fail to "establish" more distant relationships -- even though, ON THE BASIS OF THOSE METHODS HAVE ACHIEVED, we infer that there ARE more distant relationships] As for the rest, I don't know what "congruence" means in this context. Does it mean that the singular and plural class prefix pairs are formally unrelated, as is typical of NC. Or does it also mean that an etymological connection between Kordofanian class prefixes and those of the rest of NC is "accepted" (or "established"?)? For the general picture, carefully REread (I assume) Thilo Schadeberg's article on Kordofanian in "The Niger-Congo Languages", ed. John Bendor-Samuel (1989). Note the importance (I think) of Schadeberg's comment p.72 with regard to the class system: "...similarities between the Niger-Congo and Kordofanian noun class systems are not only typological but can be extended to proper sound-meaning correspondences as well." So he is well within what I called "classical methods"; not typology, but sound-meaning correspondences. [And those sound-meaning correspondences are "accepted" as likely, not "established"; we don't dismiss them from further use just because they are accepted; an attempt will continue to establish them, because the attempt itself might lead to an unexpected insight, and the responsibility to establish them is taken seriously.] Next, the Kadugli group (Greenberg's Kadugli-Krongo branch of Korodofanian) ALSO has languages with similar class prefixes and/or class concord. However, Thilo states, p.74: "...I maintain that it has not been shown that Kadugli is part of Kordofanian, nor that it should be classified as Niger-Congo" and he refers to his 1981 paper in a volume dedicated to Nilo-Saharan for further discussion. Therefore, whatever "congruent" noun class system means, it was insufficient for him to include the Kadugli group in Korodofanian, or even NC. And yet no one has accused Thilo of insanity, and no "sane" person would. For his latest thoughts, get in touch with him at the Linguistics Dept at the University of Leiden. (He has much more data than he has had the opportunity to exhaustively analyse.) BTW, noun class systems typologically similar to NC also occur in some branches of Khoisan. Yet no one connects Khoisan with NC (or anything else for that matter -- well, I vaguely recall some early volume on a library shelf that prematurely? connects the Khoi branch with Indo-European). Aren't we all waiting to find out how the "clicks" arose from more widespread consonant types? [Again, I vaguely recall hearing about somethin in the phonetic literature, how they could have arisen, maybe in Ladefoged & Maddieson, but the Khoisan click systems have not yet been shown to have non-click origins. ANYBODY GOT ANY FURTHER INFORMATION ON THIS?] "I have discussed in print, in easily accessible journals, why this is NOT the consensus view and why it IS arbitrary and invented. Am I to assume that my work is not being read?" In my case the assumption is correct. The more you are interested in motivating readers to actually read your detailed published discussions, the more you will be specific about what you have in mind -- in LIST discussion. P.S. Can I guess that the proposal has something to do with the suggestion that some very specific features of compared languages are unlikely to be due to chance because of their specificity and/or general rarity among languages, and the question arises; how can such features be enumerated, justified and measured with respect to significance beyond sampling error? The typological and even etymological fact of a prefixal noun class system in NC has not been deemed sufficient in itself. These are indeed examples of the kinds of things that need to be discussed. From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 22 01:47:34 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 20:47:34 EST Subject: Niger-Kordofanian Message-ID: Benji Wald now says I want to classify languages on the basis of typological parallels. I never have, and I don't understand how this misunderstanding could have arisen. For the record, I was referring to the Niger-Kordofanian relationship as being based primarily on striking agreements between the paradigms of nominal classes. A good discussion of this appears in the relevant chapter of the collective work Die Sprachen Afrikas. There is also some brief discussion in Baxter's and my review of Ringe (1992) in Diachronica. About "consensus" views and "classical" methods, Wald appears to mean the views and methods espoused (but not actually used!) by authors such as Goddard and Campbell. The very fact that they recognize Comecrudan w/o the use of said methods is enough to show that I am right to say that there is no such "consensus" and the methods at issue are only a small subset of the "classical" methods. My published work on the history of language classification work (esp. on Strahlenberg and Sapir) offers more evidence that the the set of "classical" methods is much larger than these authors, or Wald, seem willing to grant. Since I just recently posted a discussion of the four (or more) different methodologies that have been and continue to be used in real work on language classification, I don't think I need to add any more--except that if we took Goddard or Campbell or Wald at their word, we would have to conclude that the Indo-European language family was discovered some time in the 1960's or later. A "consensus" view of linguistic classification would have to be which is held by at almost all scholars who work in this field--and which they actually follow in their own work. And if we go striclty by what people actually do and not what they say, then I think that there IS a "consensus" view, namely, the one I have been defending. It is almost only people who do no work on classification themselves but like to preach to those of us that do (I won't name names) or those who actually do one thing and preach something quite different (as we have discussed here over the last few weeks) who make claims along the lines of what Wald calls the "consensus" view. AMR From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Mon Feb 22 12:11:45 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 07:11:45 EST Subject: Mark Hubey's comments on lg classification Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I don't have much to say (for once), except re Mark's > comment on lgs with no (historically significant) morphology. > Mark appears to be saying that the mere existence of such > lgs suffices to refute the claim that it is only by comparing > morphologies that we can establish lg families. But this No. That is not what I wrote. 1. Some languages were classified on the basis of morphology and that can't be done if they have no morphology. 2. Some languages were classified on the basis of words/lexemes. Now, both of the above cases fall under the category of "morphemes" (because some are bound morphemes and some are free morphemes). On the basis of this we can conclude; 0) Language family classifications are based on morphemes. i) Statements to the effect that typology has no bearing whatsoever on language family classification are false since in order to use bound morphemes it is required that both languages have morphology and that requires that they have similar typology. ii) Statements that words (free morphemes or concatenations of free and bound morphemes) have nothing to do with language family classification are false. We can add more to this; iii) Statements to the effect that phonetic resemblance has nothing to do with language family classification are false. Statements of this type only reveal incapacity for comprehension. iv) Statements to the effect that some match-ups are merely "phonetic resemblance" and others are "cognates" are based on nothing more than confusion as to the meaning of "phonetic" and "resemblance" and confusion as to the relationship of "cognatehood" to "phonetic resemblance". Furthermore most statements referring to "phonetic", "phone", "phoneme", "acoustic" are totally vague, confused, or at worst, ignorant. > is not so: the alternative would be to say that for such > languages we cannot ever determine what families they > belong to. Some linguists at the turn of the century > and later held precisely this view--or something very close > to it. I don't recall saying anything similar to this. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From manaster at umich.edu Thu Feb 25 20:26:06 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 15:26:06 EST Subject: Help Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I would like to ask if there is anybody out there who would like to help do some actual work on language classification and/or methods of language classification and/or mathematical methods of language classification. Although I have several collaborators, I could use several more. Alexis MR From cwinter at orion.it.luc.edu Mon Feb 1 02:44:50 1999 From: cwinter at orion.it.luc.edu (Clyde A. Winters) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 21:44:50 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > > On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote (inter alia): > > > > > Those who have been on Altainet know that I have not > > agreed with Alexis on a number of issues so if I write > > this in support it is certainly not due to 'buddyism'. > > This is certinly true. I fear my responses to Dr. Hubey > on other lists have bordered on rude. It is very kind of > Mark to rise about that. > > [snip] > > > Most linguists do not seem to study anything at all, > > but merely memorize somethings they read and then assert them > > everywhere they go and expect everyone to bow down and kiss > > their feet. > > I do think that linguists have the same relationship to > language that physicists do to the physical universe, > and that we should be listened to in our area as much > as they are in theirs. This indeed has been my main > bone of contention with Mark, who is one of the many > nonlinguists who seem to feel that they know much > more about lg than we do. > > > There is no such thing as "proof by assertion". > > Contrary to what some of the more ignorant members of this > > profession claim (and write in their books), there is also > > no such thing as "proof by repetetion". > > That's true, but even in the natural sciences we find > people behaving as though there were. > > > > > Linguists like economists, sociologists and psychologists > > before them will have to learn to wield the tools of science, > > mostly logic and probability theory and reason cogently. > > I disagree in the sense that I think linguistics is > in most regards much more scientific than the other three > fields mentioned. Moreover, I believe that, when the real > history of Western science is written, everyone will see > that linguistics has been the source of some very important > ideas. More generally, it is not by any means true that > the natural sciences have always been ahead of the social/ > humanistic ones. The whole idea of evolution originated with > Vico in history/social science, first became really > scientific in linguistics, only then (and in part thence) > in geology and biology, and much later in physics. > > AMR > I must disagree, linguistics as it is practiced today does not always appear to rely on science. Science depends on hypothesis testing and experimentation. As pointed out in the Goddard example, the data can be interpreted in both a positive or negative way, but given the stature of Goddard his views were accepted. Science is only one way of knowing. The other ways of knowing are 1) the method of tenacity (one holds firmly to the truth, because, 'they know it' to be true); 2) method of authority or established belief, i.e., the Bible or an "expert" said it, so it must be so); 3) method of intuition (the method where a proposition agrees with reason, but not necessarily with experience); 4) the method of science which calls on self-correction (through falsification) as a way of attaining knowledge. The fact that when one becomes an expert, and has the support of a number of other linguist, that his work is accepted uncritically suggest that we may be adhering to a research method based on "authority", rather than science. This does not mean that some linguists are not using a scientific method to advance historical linguistics because they are. Yet in many cases, views regarding the results obtained by some linguistists advocating the relationship between language A and B, are rejected due to the methods of intuition and authority, rather than a rigorous falsification of the hypothesis rejected by the "experts", for example the Nostratic Hypothesis. C.A. Winters From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 1 02:53:04 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 21:53:04 EST Subject: Nostratic, Afro-Asiatic, and so on In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The more I reread what has been said on this list by various people, the more I feel I was right at one point to suggest that perhaps some people do not know the relevant literature at all, and if so, I was castigating them for the wrong reason (and apologize if that is the case). It may therefore be useful for me not merely to complain that a number of leading scholars and so less leading ones like me are being ignored and our work passed over in silence that to summarize some of the things which are apparently not known at all to a lot of people and which I was taking for granted. 1. The idea that languages can be classified into families on the basis of facts which we take to indicate that the members of each family come from a single ancestral language which is NO LONGER spoken (a protolanguage) is what many scholars assume we say that there is a family we call Indo-European, another one we call Semitic, another one (subsuming Semitic) which used to be called Hamito-Semitic and still is so by some but usually is called Afro-Asiatic, etc. Hence, when we talk about families that are more controversial than these three, e.g., Nostratic, Altaic, Nadene, Pakawan, etc. (more of these later), we mean that some people say that there once was a Proto-Nostratic, a Proto-Altaic, etc., while others say either that there was not, or that we do not have good enough evidence that was, or that there cannot in principle be such evidence (for reasons I will go into later). However, and this is important, there have at all times been (and there are now) scholars who deal with languages (including some who one clearly has to count as linguists and many who one does not, for not all scholars of language are linguists) and who are/were very good at what they do/did who either deny the reality of ANY and ALL protolanguages and hence have an entirely different notion of 'language family' and/or who deny that some particular ones among the widely-accepted protolanguages ever existed. Some of the names here include(d) Prince N. N. Trubetzkoy (better known for his work in phonological theory than in historical linguistics, but still clearly knowledgeable in the latter), Kotwicz (whose first name escapes me at the moment, one of the leading specialists in Altaic languages in the thirties and fifties), Denis Sinor (a leading Altaic scholar of the present day), Gerhard Doerfer (one of the great, and deservedly great, names of Altaic studies, but especially Turkic and Mongolic), and from what I can gather many if indeed not most people who deal with Semitic languages except those who are linguists rather than Semiticists and perhaps with some other exceptions. It is often hard to know if anyone denies ALL protolanguage as a matter of principle or only some as a matter of fact. Trubetzkoy denied Proto-IE and I think wanted to deny them all but am not sure. Kotwicz denied Proto-Altaic but I am pretty sure never spoke to the general issue of principle. Sinor, who is more a historian than a linguist but knows more about more languages than many linguists, seems to deny (or be skeptical about) the whole idea of proto-lgs and has been a vocal critic of Proto-Altaic. Doerfer seems pretty clearly to accept some proto- languages but not others. At one point he published the idea that the Anatolian languages (like Hittite) are not descended from a common protolanguage with the rest of IE, for years (as I have mentioned) rejected and still seems to reject the idea that all the Afro- Asiatic languages have a common origin (and likewise re Uralic) and is of course widely celebrated for his tireless campaign against Proto-Altaic, but I think he clearly accepts a Proto-Turkic, for example, and a Proto-Semitic. It is another matter that as far as I know, and I think I would know, he has no credentials whatever which would entitle him to an opinion re IE-Hittite, Uralic, or Afro- Asiatic. Many Semiticists, whom again I would not generally (but there may be exceptions) describe as linguists but who again know more than many linguist about all kinds of languages, seem to deny the reality of a Proto-Semitic. As for Afro-Asiatic, many Semiticists in my experience do not reject it opnely, but simply pretend as though it had no relevance in practice to their work and say little about it, but there have been some strident voices recently (and not so recently) hotly denying that Semitic is related to the other Afro-Asiatic languages. (2) Given (1), it is hardly meaningful to speak of "established" or "proven" language families (and protolgs) like IE or AA or Semitic as opposed to ones which are not "established" or "proven". One must of course distinguish degrees of controversiality. IE and Semitic are less controversial than AA, and AA is vastly less controversial than Nostratic or Altaic. (3) The Nostratic theory, which seeks to relate IE to some or all of the following (depending on the particular version of Nostratic, since there are many, as we will see) has, like most theories, complex roots, but the term goes back to Holger Pedersen, a Danish Indo-Europeanist of the late 19th and the first half or so of the 20th century, who was (this is one thing that UNcontroversial) one of the very best Indo-Europeanists of his or any age, known in particular for massive contributions to the Celtic, Armenian, Anatolian, Tocharian, and several other branches of IE (like Meillet, his great French rival and rough contemporary, he seems to have focused more than some others on the branches of IE which were not widely or deeply known to many IEnists then and indeed today). He had some experience with the questio of language classification inasmuch as he was involved with the battles within IE about the IE affiliation of the Anatolian languages (many people do not know this, but this was once almost universally denied by Indo-Europeanists and took a very long time to become universally accepted). However, I do not know that he had any great knowledge of the other Nostratic languages, though he clearly knew some Turkic and some Semitic at least, and I do not know that he actively worked in any Nostratic family other than IE or even on the problem of establishing the validity of Nostratic. (4) For the next sixty or so years (roughly 1900+ through 1960+), as now, most scholars ignored the Nostratic issue and such work as was being done on it. And the work that was being done (one particularly important name here is that of Bjorn Collinder, one of the leading specialists in Uralic linguistics) tended to involve pairs of Nostratic subfamilies (most often Indo-European with Uralic) and tended to have trouble finding precise sound correspondences even there. Nor was there much work on reconstructing a Proto-0 Nostratic. In the 1960's Vladislav ("Slava") M. Illich-Svitych and Aron (Aharon) B. Dolgopol'skij (Dolgopolsky) apparently independently convinced themselves of the reality of Nostratic (each had a slightly different list of language families in mind and I believe Dolgopolsky long resisted the term 'Nostratic'), but each told of this to one and the same person who finally brought them together. I-S (and to a much lesser extent) Dolgopolsky then proceeded to (a) compare several language families all at once, and (b) try to reconstruct a common Nostratic proto-language. Furthermore, (c) realizing that the existing body of knowledge about the proposed components of Nostratic was very inadequate, they proceeded to make changes (ranging from minor, as in IE, to major, as in Uralic and Dravidian, to really dramatic, as in Altaic) to the existing reconstructions and in the case of Afro-Asiatic, got busy with the basics such as trying to reconstruct some kind of picture of the major branches of AA (I-S worked on Chadic, Dolgopolsky on Cushitic) and laying the groundwork for a reconstruction of Proto-AA (which neither really accomplished to a very great degree). I-S died before most of his work was either done or even published, and Dolgopolsky after doing some important work emigrated from the USSR to Israel and for a long time published almost nothing of relevance as he was adjusting. I-S's unpublished work was published by a changing team led by the man who had first introduced these two, Dybo, and while it was a heroic and maybe even superhuman effort, I have elsewhere noted that it was in many ways a far-from-successful one. In any case it took a very long time, during which for all practical purposes very little substantive work (for many years none at all) on Nostratic was published or even I suspect done by anyone of this school. An American scholar, Alan Bomhard, quite independently came up with a whole series of arguments for a somewhat (actually importantly) different view of Nostratic, but after learning of the I-S and Dolgopolsky work, some of the gap narrowed. His work, while not widely and certainly not deeply known, did receive a certain amount of exposure, incl. a number of book reviews. I-S's and Dolgopolsky's work on the other hand was widely ignored even in Russia, where to this day as far as I know the only published review of I-S's posthumous Nostratic dictionary is a recent translation of a review I myself published earlier in English in Bernard Comrie's Studies in Language (in 1993 I think). In some European journals, especially in one pubslished in Czech, notice was taken of the work, but in the English-speaking world and especially in the US, that was not the case. Comrie's invitation to me to write to the review was a brave and radical departure from tradition, some twenty years after the first volume of the book being reviewed was published. To this day, despite private and public appeals from some leading American linguists, some historical but some not (incl. Hamp, Fromkin, Wasow, and others), the journal Language (edited by Sally Thomason and then by Mark Aronoff) has refused to do a review of this enormously important book, and as far as I know, the first (and maybe only?) discussion of the school of Nostratic founded by I-S and Dolgopolsky in that journal was in a brief review I have there of a Russian-lg encyclopedia of linguistics, whose treatment of Nostratic I got a chance to pan. Other journals of course have done little better. Speaking of encyclopedias of linguistics, some have chosen to ignore or dismiss Nostratic (e.g., Bill Bright's, which is probably the best known one in the US), some have begun mentioning it, as does (or will) the new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Most textbooks of historical linguistics have only recently treated Nostratic or still do not and if they do, they generally purvey disinformation (there may be exceptions). While essentially no substantive work on Nostratic has been getting done by the self-styled school of Nostratic in Moscow (which is why I have often said that there are no Nostraticists at the present time, although this is slightly less true today than when I said it a few years back) or very little by Dologopolsky isn Israel (although I keep hearing that he has been DOING a lot, but only publishing very little), Bomhard in this country has done an impressive amount of research, most of which I find not compelling (but some improtant scholars have praised it highly) and little bits and pieces have been done by various scattered people in Europe (of very uneven quality). But back in the US, Vitaly Shevoroshkin, a personal friend of I-S and Dolgopolsky's but himself an Indo- Europeanist (mostly an Anatolianist in fact) found himself through the late 1970's and the 1980's the possessor of one of the best-kept secrets in ling and tried in various ways to tell American (and other Western) linguists about, with mixed success. He also at length did a small amount of work on Nostratic himself and trained one student, Mark Kaiser, who did some work as well but has now left the field. Shevorshkin also managed to hold the first conference outside of the USSR that dealt to a significant extent with Nostratic and related issues, to get some coverage of the Russian Nostratic work in the popular press, and the like, and he inspired a few people (incl. me) to continue making noise of this kind after he himself largely gave up in disgust at the modest gains. As a result, there was some more press coverage, more conferences (one at Ann Arbor, the next at Ypsilanti), the failed effort to get Language and other journals to review I-S's work, etc. I believe that it was this noise that inspired Comrie to make his move to get I-S's work reviewed in Studies in Lg, although I do not now recall the events clearly. A small amount of (to my mind entirely misguided) criticism of Nostratic was also provoked, esp. on the part of Donald Ringe, which is better than the silent treatment, of course, but only marginally so. On the other hand, I do not know what got Brent Vine (now at UCLA) to write the only critique of Nostratic to date which neither the author who wrote it nor the editor who accepted it should feel deeply and mortally ashamed of. This is not to say that I agree with almost any of it, but it is a piece of honest scholarship by an honest (and excellent) scholar (some rebuttal of it appears in the paper which I coauthored with Michalove, Adams, and Baertsch appearing in the just-published Joseph-Salmons anthology). This brings us into the early or mid-1990's, by which time I had become somewhat tired of merely fighting for the right of Nostratic to be heard, and decided to see if I could actually believe any of it. As I recall, my first project involved looking at a proposal of I-S's involving a proposed Nostratic etymology for the Armenian plural ending -k`. To do this, I had to learn IE, which took a bit longer than it should have since I was teaching computer science full time and had to learn THAT first, and ended up writing an unbelievably long paper on the problem, which turned out to be a neat problem for IE (with Pedersen and Hamp being my heroes on this occasion, as on many later ones) but without finding out anything useful about Nostratic. I then did some work which started out trying to evaluate (and as it turned out usually rebut) all published critiques of Nostratic, many quite obscure, that I was able to find (except Vine's, which I intended to deal with separately). I think I did manage to deal with all the arguments involving typological issues in a paper in JIES not too long ago, and many otheres elsewhere, but a few may remain. (A series of replies to Ringe's series of attacks has started, too.) And in the process I found myself doing two other things I had not envisioned: (a) criticizing more and more of the I-S and Dolgopolsky work and (b) making some proposals of my own for improving on it or adding to it. A couple of years ago I had all but convinced myself that Nostratic, or at least the cluster IE-Uralic-Altaic, was really related, but was too ill to publish the arguments (some of them were publicized by George Johnson in the New York Times, and some are discussed in the paper in the Joseph-Salmons anthology). Some other bits appear in various papers, and some remain unpublished. Most recently, Dolgopolsky has published a little book which makes me cringe and which almost convinced me that Nostratic was all a matter of a set of coincidences and a set of very old borrowings. On the heels of the book, Lord Renfrew and others organized a conference on Nostratic whose proceedings will be out soon. Also, Brian Joseph and Joe Salmons, two honorable and excellent Indo-Europeanists, put out an anthology of papers pro, con, and on Nostratic based mostly on the Ypsilanti conference of a number of years ago. And I cannot see how the main journals will be able to avoid reviewing it, so some word will surely go out now. Also, even as some of the so few people working on Nostratic have been dropping out (not usually of their own choice), a small number of excellent minds from different backgrounds have in various ways come to deal with Nostratic. If I have made any real contribution, in fact, it is having gotten Peter Michalove to work on Nostratic, and having gotten Bill Baxter (in my view one of the best linguists, esp. historical linguists in the US) and Christopher Hitchcock (a philosopher of science at Cal Tech) to grapple (with some small help from me) with the mathematical (or as I hold voodoo mathematical) attacks that have been on Nostratic, esp. by Ringe. Of course, there are other names too that should be mentioned, esp. perhaps those of the people (usually quite misguided in my view) whom Joseph and Salmons got to write anti-Nostratic papers for the anthology, e.g., Lyle Campbell, Brent Vine again, etc., and the various people (whom I have not had the pleasure to meet, due to illness) whom Renfrew et al. assembled at their recent conference. (5) So what families belong to Nostratic? In I-S's formulation, IE, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian. But there are many variations on this, though I think IE, Altaic, and Uralic are part of all schemes. END OF PART 1. If there is interest and I can find eht energy, there will be a part 2 later. Alexis MR From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 1 02:57:02 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 21:57:02 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Clyde A. Winters wrote: [snip] > linguistics as it is practiced today does not always > appear to rely on science. Science depends on hypothesis testing and > experimentation. As pointed out in the Goddard example, the data can be > interpreted in both a positive or negative way, but given the stature of > Goddard his views were accepted. I do plan to say in my reply to Campbell's critique of my work on relating Comecrudan to the further languages Cotoname and Coahuilteco (and even further to Karankawa) that he accepts Goddard's Comecrudan on the basis of data which he then turns out and rejects when I use them as a (tiny) part of my case for my groupings (Pakawan and Pakawa-Karankawan alias Coahuiltecan, as I call them), and I do not dispute that personal factors may have had a role. But things are not simple. For example, I think it is not so much a matter of stature as of familiarity. Also, only very few linguists have actually LOOKED at the question. And most importantly it is a well known fact that in every science this kind of thing goes on. The real question is whether linguistics is any worse than physics or biology say at the kind of long-run self-correction that Carl Sagan took to be the hallmark of science--to me, one of the few useful ideas about what makes science science out of the BIllions and BIllions that various scholars have proposed (sorry). I think the answer is clearly yes. In some ways, we may even be better. But it takes time, and it takes jobs and money for people to do the relevant research. The wholesale destruction of comparative and esp. classificatory ling. programs in so many universities in the US and some other countries makes that process difficult, of course, but in principle I think linguistics does OK on this score. [snip] > Yet in many > cases, views regarding the results obtained by some linguistists > advocating the relationship between language A and B, are rejected due to > the methods of intuition and authority, rather than a rigorous > falsification of the hypothesis rejected by the "experts", for example > the Nostratic Hypothesis. > For someone who has spent a lot of time and energy I really could not afford to spend first arguing that Nostratic not be simply ignored to death and then that it might actually be right, there is some temptation to agree with this. But it is a temptation one must resist. There are some very good reasons why few experts accept Nostratic. The best is that there are few people who are experts in the relevant field(s). The fact that many people who have no right whatever to address the question have nevertheless made all kinds of loud pronouncements, e.g., in textbooks, is a pity, but that is something that happens in every science, I think. And even real experts are often wrong, in every science. Nor is it either uncommon or unreasonable for people to trust other people, who are thought to be good scientists. Just recently, someone has written a book arguing that modern theoretical physics is totally based on the trust a small number of people have in each other's claims, because it has become impractical to replicate the crucial experiments on a wide scale. The real question is whether (a) it is possible to break the wall of silence surrounding (real) Nostratic, and (b) in the long run arrive at a rational decision based on fact. The jury of necessity is still out. The fact is too that Nostratic research has been slow and halting, and that much of it has been of poor quality. It also has not helped that proponents of Nostratic have tended to be too bombastic in their claims. And lastly it helps not at all that Nostratic is much more often talked about in various forums, e.g., electronic lists, buy people who as far as I know have done no research at all or at least not anything the rest of us would regard as research on the subject. AMR From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Mon Feb 1 12:20:55 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 07:20:55 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > There may be cases where we would like to say this. Eastern > Armenian Romany is the classic example, although recent > surveys of the topic tend to focus on other examples > (Mitchif, Copper Island Aleut, etc.). The W. European Jewish > language known as Loshnekoudesh (apparently also once used in > at least one Christian village in Bavaria) and distinct > from Yiddish (it is in fact a mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew > in the way that EAR is a mix of Romany and Armenian, > Mitchif of French and Cree, etc.) is one that I don't > think is EVER cited, but it happens to be the only of these > which I have studied in some detail, so I thought I'd > put in a plug. It would be possible to make similar ones for language families. For example, Semitic would have two parents (one of them the African branch) and the other parent would be also the parent or ancestor of IE. Turkic would have two parents, one of them proto-Euphratic (from Landsberger) and the other some Altaic language. This would fit in with population movements over the the last 12,000 years or so when the glaciers started melting. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Mon Feb 1 12:22:28 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 07:22:28 EST Subject: what is the verdict? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It says that this is a response to Larry Trask, but it isn't. Larry Trask wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Alexis Manaster Ramer writes: > > [snip quote of me claiming that comparative linguistics is hard] > > > While I respect Larry and we usually agree about a lot of stuff, this is > > just plain wrong, and I think it is a cop-out typical of the people who > > like to criticize work on language classification but who rarely do it > > themselves and who also seem to be reluctant to discussing specific > > examples such as those I have repeatedly cited. I agree completely with Alexis Manaster-Ramer (AMR) and the basis of reasoning called probability theory and the methods based on it, usually lumped under the name "statistics" support AMR and what I say. IT is not just a cop-out but an insult to the profession to claim that they are too stupid to understand what can be taught to freshman and sophomore pscyhology, and computer science students. Economists, students of finance, sociologists all learn basic quantitative reasoning based on probability theory. If I wrote anything resembling this kind of an insult to the linguistics community, I would probably be evicted from every list. I have some works before me which are written by linguists. Bender, Marvin, "Chance CVC correspondences in unrelated languages", Language, No. 45, 1969, pp.519-531 Cowan, H. "Statistical determination of linguistic relationships', Studia Linguistics, 16, 1962, pp.57-96 Greenberg, J. 'A qualitative approach to morphological typology of language', IJAL, vol. 26, No.3, July 1960, pp.179-194 Embleton, S. Statistics in Historical Linguistics, Studienverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer, Bochum, 1986. Fox, A. Linguistic Reconstruction; An Introduction to Theory and Method, Oxford University Press, 1995 Lass, Roger, 'How realist are reconstructions?", in Historical Linguistics, edited by Charles Jones, Longman, 1993 Ohala, J. 'Phonetics of sound change', same book edited by C. Jones Nichols, J. 'The comparative method as Heuristic', edited by Ross and Durie. Ringe, D., 'Nostratic and the Factor of Chance', Diachronica XII: 55-74,1995 Lass, R. Historical Linguistics, 1998 Ringe, D. On Calculating the Factor of Chance in Language Comparison, American Philological Society, vol. 82, part 1, 1992 Hubey, H.M., Mathematical and Computational Linguistics, Mir Domu Tvoemu, Moscow,1994. Everyone of these seems to say something about chance and the historical method. For example, according to Cowan (see above) you only need 3 pairs of CVC syllables to establish geneticity. According to Greenberg (see above) you only need 3-4 pairs, and according to Bender (see above) you need somewhere between 2 and 7. I am sure J. Nichols, who is probably on this list has probably also calculated some numbers. What I am interested in is how many pairs are needed. How many? PS. To Georg, The Fox book on p. 240 has a Sanskrit word 'uccakka' (meaning 'high') which is practically identical to Turkic uch (fly) and uc (end of some material thing). Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Mon Feb 1 12:23:04 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 07:23:04 EST Subject: phonetic resemblances, etc. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I so rarely agree with anything Johanna says and vice versa > (in THIS area at least, for I like most of her work in ....J.Nichols wrote > > were the entirety of our data on those three languages, we would be > > justified in considering relatedness to be probable. For each of > > the seven glosses, at least two and often all three of the languages > > have resemblant forms; for each of the languages, each word resembles > > one or both of those of the other languages. > > > This is THE most important point, although absolute numbers cannot > be completely ignored (one of our small disagreements). Is it possible to get a summary of what this particular agreement is about? Thank you. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From Georg at home.ivm.de Mon Feb 1 12:42:59 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 07:42:59 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >I can and you know that, because I have named him in various >postings in discussions you were involved in (and in print, >but who has time to read!?). Gerhard Doerfer is certainly >a better known name in hist ling than yours or mine, and >he did for many years claim precisely that Semitic is not >related to Cushitic, he then seemed a couple of yearsago >to take it back (to my great relief), but I have reason to >believe he in fact did not mean to take it back and still >holds that opinion. But I am not 100% sure. But, Alexis, while you know me to admire Doerfer even more then you do (;-) ?), I don't see a reason for mentioning his name in the context of AA. It is true that he said those things. But is also true that he has never worked on it (he knows Arabic well, but that's it), he just voiced his general doubts on AA in some footnotes or footnote-like passages, trying to fight critique against his anti-Altaistic positions off. He may have been ill-advised to do this, but his claims to this effect *do not play a single role* in AA studies. I take it that, while every Altaicist - pro or con - knows Doerfer, there may be excellent AA'ists who have never heard his name. And they don't have to, for G.D. is simply not one of them and never wished to be. Actually, though I hate to say this in public about a scholar whom I regard in many respects as a (semi-) teacher of mine, what Doerfer said on AA was simply uninformed nonsense. Why quote it ? AA is really, to the best of my knowledge, uncontroversial today, i.e. with those people who know enough about the issue to have a say in it. By your procedure, you'd require everything, for which the smallest voice of dissent may exist somewhere - well-informed or not - , to be called "controversial". What then isn't ? Is the proposal of a Basque - Armenian connection (to the exclusion of IE) "controversial" ? At least one person out there holds it (and I think only one, and this was on an e-mail list, but these things *do* sometimes get published !). If I write in one of my next papers that I don't really understand what makes people believe in the validity of such an abominable thing as "Algonquian", while everybody knows that Cree is Siouan, Menomini Na-Dene and Fox Sino-Tibetan, will you call Alg. "controversial" and point people to what I've written ? No, you'll drop me a note and ask me whether I'm feeling OK and (hopefully) forget about the issue, assuming I was temporarily out of my mind (if I'm lucky !). Is Sino-Tibetan controversial (Roy A. Miller fights it ruthlessly, but he seems to be the only one) ? Is Uralic (Doerfer in his younger days was quite skeptical about it, but again without having actually worked on it) ? Is Indo-European (remember Trubetzkoy !) ? Let's stop this futile discussion, if I don't think that two or more languages are related, I say so, assuming that everyone listening to me is educated and intelligent enough to know that I'm a human being only and by this virtue - fallible. Everybody who asks around will find that there are actually people who do believe that, say, Altaic is valid grouping. I happen not to. And when I say "No, I don't think it is", this is an accurate information. About what I think, that is. Even saying "It isn't" is not more than that. Every intelligent and truly interested person will then go on asking me what makes me so positive about it, and I'll have no choice but to mention all those names, including yours, who hold different views. If I'm not asked further, so what, then the asker doesn't deserve better. What's the problem with that ? St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 1 21:21:05 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 16:21:05 EST Subject: Nostratic, Afro-Asiatic, and so on (fwd) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dorothy, hi, Peter Michalove can't seem to be able to post the attached and asked me to forward it.Thanks. Alexis **Peter writes:** The recent exchanges on this list have brought up a number of important points and, despite some of the rhetoric used in the heat of battle, some ideas are firming up that I think everyone would agree with. First, Alexis has pointed out that there have been a number of very well-informed scholars who have done their homework, and have been convinced of, or at least sympathetic to some incarnation of a Nostratic family. Thus to dismiss any genetic connection between IE and Semitic (or more properly Afroasiatic) without any reference to the Nostratic theory would be misleading. The correct answer, as Alexis pointed out, is simply that it's controversial. Alexis' excellent summary of the history of Nostratic research explains some of the reasons why many scholars may not be aware of it, or may have only read somewhere that it's absurd and deserves no further consideration. But there's another factor too. In reality, there has been (and continues to be) a huge number of uninformed proposals of language connections suggested between, say, Basque and Tagalog (as Larry Trask can well attest), and most of these just aren't worth considering or even responding to. So we live in an environment where otherwise busy scholars are used to dismissing such hair-brained ideas. The point to make here is that Nostratic (even if it ultimately turns out to be a chimera) is presently worthy of substantially more serious consideration than the latest Basque-Tagalog theory. It is taken seriously by a large number of scholars who have studied the languages involved. And there's a substantial body of literature on it (of greatly varying quality) that can be evaluated on its own merits. Going back a step (in the thread), Larry mentioned that when we speak of "related" languages, that's simply shorthand for "languages shown to be related and accepted as such by scholars who have worked in that area." I agree that's a mouthful, and I humbly suggest "demonstrably related" as a convenient expression. Of course that still begs the question of "demonstrably related to whose satisfaction?" but it does define the question, which is a step forward. And finally, I'd like to bring up a point that's been alluded to here, but needs to be stated explicitly: If you're going to propose a relationship among some set of languages, OR if you're going to say, "No, the evidence just isn't there to support such a claim," IN EITHER CASE you first have to make the effort to learn something (actually quite a lot) about the languages involved. An exception to this might be the case in which a critic who is only knowledgeable about part of the data offers an analysis of the part of the proposal with which he's familiar. An example is Larry's criticism of the Dene-Caucasian proposal, in which he limits himself to discussing Basque forms compared that may be loans, incorrectly segmented, etc. Larry has never claimed any expertise in Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski, and the other language families involved. Similarly, Brent Vine in his critiques of Nostratic has scrupulously confined himself to discussion of the data about which he is knowledgeable, the Indo-European portion. And proponents of both hypotheses agree that the constructive criticism of Trask and Vine has been a positive thing, the kind of thing we need more of. It goes without saying that open-minded scholars can study the evidence and honestly come to different interpretations. Unfortunately though, much of the criticism of Nostratic has come from people who reject the entire thing despite their limited background, without examining the data. Or much worse, those who say it simply can't be done, so the data is a priori meaningless. In fact, if you take the effort to learn about the data involved, you'll find much that can justifiably be criticized in all the versions of Nostratic that have been put forward so far. But it's only through that kind of informed criticism that we can make any headway in seeing if there's something persuasive there despite the noise, of if there isn't. Peter A. Michalove Assistant to the Head Department of Geology University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (217) 244-3190 peterm at hercules.geology.uiuc.edu Peter A. Michalove Assistant to the Head Department of Geology University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (217) 244-3190 peterm at hercules.geology.uiuc.edu From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 1 21:17:19 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 16:17:19 EST Subject: Mixed Languages In-Reply-To: <36B53502.C20A3E15@montclair.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mark Hubey responds to my posting wherein I said that while mixed languages (like Mitchif, Loshnekoudesh etc.) do exist, there is no sense in treating Semitic as one, saying: On Mon, 1 Feb 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: > It would be possible to make similar ones for language families. > For example, Semitic would have two parents (one of them the > African branch) and the other parent would be also the parent > or ancestor of IE. Turkic would have two parents, one of them > proto-Euphratic (from Landsberger) and the other some Altaic > language. This would fit in with population movements over the > the last 12,000 years or so when the glaciers started melting. It is NOT possible to say that because neither Semitic nor Turkic exhibit any signs whatever of being mexied languages like the ones I mentioned. Once again, I ask Mark to leave linguistics to linguists or at least those who, without having degrees in linguistics, have mastered the literature and the craft (like Dr. Michalove for example--another personal hero of mine). AMR From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Mon Feb 1 14:51:52 1999 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 09:51:52 EST Subject: end of discussion Message-ID: Dear colleagues, Once again discussion has hit a brick wall. I don't see that the discussion about genetic relationships can go any further -- I think that we must simply agree to disagree and drop the topic, at least from formal postings on HISTLING. Discussion of other topics is, of course, welcome. Dorothy Disterheft From manaster at umich.edu Tue Feb 2 02:46:27 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 21:46:27 EST Subject: Arabic and IE (response to Dr. Georg) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Mon, 1 Feb 1999, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: > But, Alexis, while you know me to admire Doerfer even more then you do (;-) > ?), I don't see a reason for mentioning his name in the context of AA. It > is true that he said those things [sc. that Semitic is not derived from the same source as Cushitic--AMR] > But is also true that he has never > worked on it (he knows Arabic well, but that's it), I pointed that out myself. > he just voiced his > general doubts on AA in some footnotes or footnote-like passages, trying to > fight critique against his anti-Altaistic positions off I dispute this too. These are central points in his work, e.g., his famous paper on Japanese and Altaic, and they are not responses to criticism but rather a crucial part of HIS attack on Altaic. His arguments against Altaic take the form of certain universal claims about what lg families MUST look like (e.g., that in a REAL lg family the word for '2' through '5' must be cognate throughout the family) and the further claim that Altaic does not satisfy the universal, therefore is not a real family. For these arguments to work, AA, Uralic, IE (and some other lg families which even Sally Thomason or Larry Trask would probably accept as real but which Doerfer does not discuss) would HAVE to be spurious because they also do not satisfy his universal claims. Of course, the reality is that AA, IE, Uralic, etc. (AND Altaic) are real families. It is Doerfer's universals that are nonsense. Same thing re various arguments of Serebrennikov, Shcherbak, Clauson, and others against Altaic. And in my view the same thing applies to the methodological claims of Lyle Campbell, Ives Goddard, Sally Thomason, Donald Ringe, Johanna Nichols, and some others. They make up various methodological rules for comparative linguistics, then claim (sometimes correctlty, often not) that these rules were flouted in the setting of proposed language families they do not like (e.g., Nostratic or Pakawan), and hence think they have an argument that these families are spurious. But, of course, as I (and others) have shown time and again, if you took these rules seriously, then IE and AA and Niger-Kordofanian and many other lg families we all accept would have to be rejected too. Of course, it is particularly nice when we find that one and the same person has him/herself done work which would have to be thrown out if these methodological principles were really valid, as in the case of Goddard clearly and Hamp almost as clearly. But that is not essential./ It is essential that we learn that a proposed linguistic universal (as in Doerfer's work) OR a proposed methodological principle (as in Campbell's, Goddard's, etc.) is violated by some of the most widely accepted lg families such as IE, AA, Uto-Aztecan, etc., etc. The logic is the same. > He may have been > ill-advised to do this, but his claims to this effect *do not play a single > role* in AA studies. I take it that, while every Altaicist - pro or con - > knows Doerfer, there may be excellent AA'ists who have never heard his > name. And they don't have to, for G.D. is simply not one of them and never > wished to be. Actually, though I hate to say this in public about a scholar > whom I regard in many respects as a (semi-) teacher of mine, what Doerfer > said on AA was simply uninformed nonsense. Why quote it ? You are right about the premises but not the conclusion. It IS uninformed nonsense. But you only feel free to say that because Doerfer is not a well-known American linguist active on this list. But it is clear from what I have said in this and earlier postings (and in print) that the claims of Thomason, Campbell, Goddard, Hamp, Nichols, Trask, and others are no better informed and no more sensible. And THAT of course is why I mention Doerfer. Because people are blinded by sociological factors such as prestige, familiarity, etc., and so accept statements from people like these which really should be actionable in a court of law. So I am trying to wake you and others up by a cheap rhetorical trick. If I can get you to accept that what Doerfer says is uninformed nonsense (you words, not mine), then show you that what he says is no better than what yourself hold or what Thomason, Trask, et al. propound, then perhaps you will draw the inevitable conclusion. For example, Ringe has no more right to say ANYTHING about probability than Doerfer does about Afro-Asiatic and what he does say (to the applause of the opinion makers in the field) is no more correct. Nichols has no more right to say ANYTHING about Altaic than D about AA and again what she does say (as you and I jointly show in a paper with Michalove and Sidwell in JL) is no more correct. Trask SURELY has no right to say ANYTHING about the many lg families he does hold forth on than Doerfer on AA, and again what he does say is no more correct. But I do not hear saying in public that they all (and sometimes you) are talking uninformed nonsense. But fair is fair. And my cheap trick WILL work, and one day soon you will (unless you are censored). > AA is really, to > the best of my knowledge, uncontroversial today, i.e. with those people who > know enough about the issue to have a say in it. If you mean by people whom I would consider competent. But some (maybe many) Semiticist think they are compoetent and they do question or even openly reject AA. And this is relevant because there is a widespread feeling that someone who knows a lg has therefore some insight into this lg's genetic connections. So that an IEnist is assumed to be competent to speak about Nostratic, a Turkologist about Altaic, and so on. Larry Trask just told us on another list that people he calls Caucanists are competent to speak as to whether East Caucasian and West Caucasian families are related to each other. But he includes people who work on the phonetics or syntax of Caucasian languages, without inquring as to whether they do any comparative linguistics. On THIS list Trask said something about how Goddard and Campbell may somehow because of their knowledge of American Indian languages in general be able to see why Comecrudan is a valid family even though he Trask does not. But how exactly does Lyle's work on Uto-Aztecanm or Mayan or Ives's on Algonquioan give them an insight into Comecrudan? Just because it is the same continent? Does someone who knows Hungarian very well thereby become an expert on the classification of the languages of Eurasia? Does someone who knows Arabic become an expert on the languages of Africa? Does Chomsky, who I happen to know from personal experience knows English and Hebrew, have a right to speak as to whether IE and Semitic are related? Of course, not. And he does not pretend to. So why do we applaud people who speak of probability who do not understand things taught in Statistics 101, people who speak about the methods of linguistic classification who have never done any work on classifying anything, people who tell us that IE is unrelated to Afro-Asiatic who have never read a page of Illich-Svitych and/or use their power to prevent the review and discussion of his work? Why? Why? Why? Because of the banality of error (the title of a book I will finish when I recover from my current illness, so please dont nobody steal it). It is all too easy to acquiesce in error which is all around us and supported by prestige and familiarity. THAT is why I mention Doerfer and Afro-Asiatic. He is not as prestigious OR familiar to THIS audience (although IN HIS OWN BAILIWICK he is a truly great historical linguist) and so it is easier to see and admit that he is talking "uninformed nonsense". And that then makes it possible to see that he is not alone... > of dissent may exist somewhere - well-informed or not - , to be called > "controversial". The equality of women, the right of the people of Timor to independence, the evolution of species, these all ARE controversial. We cannot unfortunately SAY they are not and let the forces of darkness take over. I am sure S. J. Gould has better things to do than fight the creationists, but he has no choice, and he certainly cannot make them disappear by saying they do not exist. > What then isn't ? Is the proposal of a Basque - Armenian > connection (to the exclusion of IE) "controversial" ? At least one person > out there holds it (and I think only one, and this was on an e-mail list, > but these things *do* sometimes get published !). If that person were running the official journal of the Linguistic Society or writing a widely used textbook or encyclopedia of lx, you would HAVE to deal with it, as Gould deals with creationism and as I try to deal with, say, Ringe's "probabilities". As it is, you don't have to worry about him (her?) TOO much. If it DOES get published, well, I have an easy criterion: if it is published ina journal which refuses to publish or review work on Nostratic, then you DO have a responsibility to fight. Otherwise, you have no moral responsibility as far as I can see. > If I write in one of my > next papers that I don't really understand what makes people believe in the > validity of such an abominable thing as "Algonquian", while everybody knows > that Cree is Siouan, Menomini Na-Dene and Fox Sino-Tibetan, will you call > Alg. "controversial" and point people to what I've written ? No, you'll > drop me a note and ask me whether I'm feeling OK and (hopefully) forget > about the issue, assuming I was temporarily out of my mind (if I'm lucky !). Of course. But I have written you such notes re your opposition to Altaic, I have tried patiently to explain about Nostratic and the Nostraticists to Sally Thomason. I have tried patiently to teach Ringe some elementary mathematics. I have tried sending notes to Larry Trask and I have spent hours with Eric Hamp. It does not work, though. But discussions like the present one MAY. > Is Sino-Tibetan controversial (Roy A. Miller fights it ruthlessly, but he > seems to be the only one) ? I seem to recall Sagart attacking ST as well. Certainly the state of ST lx is not satisfactory. Is Uralic (Doerfer in his younger days was > quite skeptical about it, but again without having actually worked on it) ? > Is Indo-European (remember Trubetzkoy !) ? > I mentioned both of these myself. > Let's stop this futile discussion, if I don't think that two or more > languages are related, I say so, assuming that everyone listening to me is > educated and intelligent enough to know that I'm a human being only and by > this virtue - fallible. Eric Hamp has noted in print that you should NOT say that. I defer to him on this point. > Everybody who asks around will find that there are > actually people who do believe that, say, Altaic is valid grouping. I > happen not to. And when I say "No, I don't think it is", this is an > accurate information. About what I think, that is. Even saying "It isn't" > is not more than that. Every intelligent and truly interested person will > then go on asking me what makes me so positive about it, and I'll have no > choice but to mention all those names, including yours, who hold different > views. If I'm not asked further, so what, then the asker doesn't deserve > better. > What's the problem with that ? > None, IF the asker knows that you are just expressing YOUR opinion and that the issue is controversial. But then why would (s)he ask? Certainly the person who asked whether Arabic might be related to IE did not know that the people to tried to misinform him were merely expressing THEIR opinion and that the question was controversial. I am not sure they themselves knew that either. That's why I posted my long posting about Nostratic. Alexis From J.Hope at mdx.ac.uk Wed Feb 3 12:19:21 1999 From: J.Hope at mdx.ac.uk (Jonathan Hope) Date: Wed, 3 Feb 1999 07:19:21 EST Subject: Research Studentships In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Research Studentships The School of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University, London, UK is offering four fully funded three-year research studentships (incorporating maintenance grant ?6,855, teaching bursary ?1,200 and full-time fees) in English Studies. The studentships will be in two fields: English literature, drama, language and culture of the early modern period; and twentieth century fiction, especially that of the later century, with particular emphasis on issues of gender and sexuality. As a potential supervisor of successful applicants, I would be very interested in hearing from students with an interest in pursuing a PhD topic on any aspect of Early Modern English (literary or non-literary). I have just begun a research project in collaboration with the Arden Shakespeare, and would hope that anyone taking up a studentship in this area would wish to become involved. Please feel free to contact me informally: J.Hope at mdx.ac.uk For further information and application forms please contact: Anna Pavlakos, School of Humanities and Cultural Studies, Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR, UK. email: a.pavlakos at mdx.ac.uk tel.: 0181 362 5363 Jonathan Hope Middlesex University From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu Thu Feb 4 12:57:01 1999 From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 07:57:01 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Mon, 1 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > Is Sino-Tibetan controversial (Roy A. Miller fights it ruthlessly, but he > > seems to be the only one) ? > > I seem to recall Sagart attacking ST as well. Certainly the > state of ST lx is not satisfactory. Hmmm ... "not satisfactory"? You could say that about any language family, I suppose. I won't be satisfied with Indo-European until there's some consensus on the subgrouping of the major branches, for example. And the state of Altaic linguistics has been discussed often enough here, and elsewhere ... But if you mean to imply that there is serious room for doubt about the genetic unity of Sino-Tibetan, I don't think that's the case. The older opposition to the idea stems primarily from a gross misunderstanding of the relevance of typology. I can't imagine that on this list we have to go very far into the argument that Chinese and Tibeto-Burman can't be related because they are so typologically dissimilar, or the converse (often held by exactly the same people) that Chinese must be related to Tai because they are so typologically congruent. More legitimately, I've heard the argument made (by Chris Beckwith, I think, among others, though he shouldn't be held hostage to my imperfect memory) that ST can't be considered *proven* because the lack of morphology in Chinese makes it impossible to find the kind of nice syntagmatic and paradigmatic morphological correspondences that make us so confident of Indo-European or Semitic or Algic. This of course isn't really an argument *against* ST unity, only a healthy cautionary note. But let us remember that at least certain morphological *processes* can be reconstructed for pre-Old Chinese which are strikingly parallel to attested TB morphology, most strikingly an *-s suffix with a range of functions, especially derivation of nouns. Since this morphology is derivational, and was already somewhat decayed and hence unsystematic at the earliest stage of Chinese which we can reconstruct, no one has been able to find much in the way of paradigmatic sets of cognates, but there are lots of cognate sets where a one form in Chinese corresponds to one of a set in Tibetan, or vice versa. As for Sagart, he is indeed convinced that the Chinese-TB link is a chimaera, but as far as I know he is the only working Sino-Tibetan linguist who takes that view, and I cannot for the life of me see what his argument is. (And I'm far from alone in that). On the one hand, he has identified some significant Austronesian elements in the Chinese vocabulary, but this is hardly surprising (or new; Tsu-lin Mei and Jerry Norman pointed some of that out 30 years ago). And he would like to build a case for a special genetic relationship between Chinese and Austronesian, which would indeed require splitting Chinese off from TB. But I have to say that the few arguments I've seen of his *against* ST are not impressive, to put it diplomatically. Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Thu Feb 4 13:27:27 1999 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 08:27:27 EST Subject: LISTSERV problems Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, On Tuesday, February 2, we experienced some LISTSERV problems here. which resulted in all of the posted messages being lost. Please, if you sent me something to post on Tuesday, would you send it again so that it may be distributed? I would very much appreciate this. I myself posted a message to HISTLING on Tuesday, which never was distributed. It acknowledged the fact that several people wrote to me, asking if I would reconsider my decision to cut off discussion of genetic language families. In particular, they wanted to read Part Two of Alexis Manaster Ramer's promised posting on Nostratic. My message on Tuesday told list members that I would have AMR post his Part Two, and that they should continue discussion of the topic, as long as their contributions remained relevant to historical linguistics, were not redundant, and were of reasonable length. The fact that Tuesday's message was lost explains the fact that I have continued to post messages on this topic despite Monday's announcement. Dorothy Disterheft From manaster at umich.edu Thu Feb 4 22:01:11 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 17:01:11 EST Subject: Sum: Yakhontov's principle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Does anybody have the list of 65 meanings which belong in part 2 of Yakhontov's hypothesis? AMR From jrader at m-w.com Thu Feb 4 22:00:03 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 17:00:03 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In reference to Tsu-Lin Mei and Jerry Norman, I think you mean Austroasiatic rather than Austronesian, don't you? The article I have a reference to is "The Austroasiatics in ancient south China: some lexical evidence" (_Monumenta Serica_ 32 [1976], p. 274-301). Jim Rader > > As for Sagart, he is indeed convinced that the Chinese-TB link is > a chimaera, but as far as I know he is the only working Sino-Tibetan > linguist who takes that view, and I cannot for the life of me see > what his argument is. (And I'm far from alone in that). On the > one hand, he has identified some significant Austronesian elements > in the Chinese vocabulary, but this is hardly surprising (or new; > Tsu-lin Mei and Jerry Norman pointed some of that out 30 years ago). > And he would like to build a case for a special genetic relationship > between Chinese and Austronesian, which would indeed require splitting > Chinese off from TB. But I have to say that the few arguments I've > seen of his *against* ST are not impressive, to put it diplomatically. > > Scott DeLancey > Department of Linguistics > University of Oregon > Eugene, OR 97403, USA > > delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu > http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html > From manaster at umich.edu Thu Feb 4 21:58:58 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 16:58:58 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Scott DeLancey wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Mon, 1 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > > > Is Sino-Tibetan controversial (Roy A. Miller fights it ruthlessly, but he > > > seems to be the only one) ? > > > > I seem to recall Sagart attacking ST as well. Certainly the > > state of ST lx is not satisfactory. > > Hmmm ... "not satisfactory"? You could say that about any language > family, I suppose. I won't be satisfied with Indo-European until > there's some consensus on the subgrouping of the major branches, > for example. And the state of Altaic linguistics has been discussed > often enough here, and elsewhere ... I was afraid of that. Just as Hockett got yelled at twenty years ago or so for pointing out scandalous state of Athapaskan or Nadene linguistics (I think I have this right). As I point out in my Part 2 (to appear here soon), all too briefly, I agree re IE (but not because of the branching so much as because of the all-too-great disregard for the regularity of sound laws, morphological analysis, and semantic responsibility even there). Altaic the same story but more so, except that I do not see how anyone can deny that the Altaic languages are related, which is distinct from questioning the validity of the current reconstructions (which leave a lot to be desired obviously than Altaic does). But what I meant was precisely that just as people who doubt Altaic altogther seem to be misled by this very elementary cnfusion and say in effect that if the current reconstruction is so bad (this of course was true 20 or 30 years ago much more than now) than the whole family is in doubt, so too I think that the few critics of ST are really reaction to the unsatisfactory state of the actual work on ST (and again just as in Altaic to some extent I suspect that Miller is reacting to ST as it was some decades ago esp. to Benedict's work much as the anti-Altaicists are still really responding to the errors of Ramstedt in the 50s and Poppe in the 60s). I myself to the extent that I have a right to an opinion (which being a mere mortal who can barely read a little Chinese and has no Tibetan or any other ST language at all, though I did once know a bit of whatever the language of Mizoram is called (Mizo is it) but have now forgotten it down to the last morpheme is a very small extent) do not qustion the validity of ST, and have repeatedly urged Sagart (and just the other day Miller) to reconsider. But does anybody listen? I certainly support 100% Baxter's recent elegant demonstration of (a) how obviously ST lgs must be related and (b) how to do probabilistic testing of language relatedness if you are gonna do it at all --though I do not in general believe the latter is (so far anyway) at all necessary or (more to the point) useful. But Benedict's methods and those of other ST scholars have not been free of problems. > > But if you mean to imply that there is serious room for doubt about the > genetic unity of Sino-Tibetan, I don't think that's the case. I dont mean to imply that. I agree with you, as far as I am entitled to say anything about ST. > The > older opposition to the idea stems primarily from a gross misunderstanding > of the relevance of typology. I can't imagine that on this list we > have to go very far into the argument that Chinese and Tibeto-Burman > can't be related because they are so typologically dissimilar, or > the converse (often held by exactly the same people) that Chinese > must be related to Tai because they are so typologically congruent. I agree about the early history of the subject (I have written something on this general problem in East/SE Asian languages though I talked by the Maspero brothers' celebrated obsessions with separating "tonal" from "atonal" languages (as in Austroasiatic) rather than with ST), but I do not agree about this list. Sure, in theory, everybody knows that typology has no place in lg classification. But I dont think this is so in practice necessarily. I would think that some of the opposition to Nostratic also has in part typological roots. > > More legitimately, I've heard the argument made (by Chris Beckwith, > I think, among others, though he shouldn't be held hostage to my > imperfect memory) that ST can't be considered *proven* because the > lack of morphology in Chinese makes it impossible to find the kind > of nice syntagmatic and paradigmatic morphological correspondences > that make us so confident of Indo-European or Semitic or Algic. Thank you very much for bringing this up. I have both in print and here excoriated Godard and others for this false methodological "principle" which seems to go to a paper in which Meillet got carried away in his fight with Kroeber and asserted it but later even Meillet saw he was wrong and specifically said that it is the languages of E Asia that show that the principle is a false one--although he underestimated the role of morphology in E Asia. > This of course isn't really an argument *against* ST unity, only > a healthy cautionary note. Not even that. It is simply a false principle. Of course, more evidence is always better than less and morphology usually makes for better evidence but that is a matter of detail not of principle. We have know this ever since Rask and it is one of the things we really do know and which will not change. > But let us remember that at least > certain morphological *processes* can be reconstructed for pre-Old > Chinese which are strikingly parallel to attested TB morphology, > most strikingly an *-s suffix with a range of functions, especially > derivation of nouns. Totally. That's just what I was alluding to. But it would be nice if thre really WERE no morphology in Pre-Old chinese to compare to TB languages, for the sake of the theoretical points, But Comecrudan will make the same point. [snip] > > As for Sagart, he is indeed convinced that the Chinese-TB link is > a chimaera, but as far as I know he is the only working Sino-Tibetan > linguist who takes that view, and I cannot for the life of me see > what his argument is. (And I'm far from alone in that). I have argued with Sagart too, many times. But I would like to say something sociological here. I have attended ST meetings but I know Sagart as well as some leading ST people (I knew Benedict too) and I have seen Sagart argue with e.g. Baxter at other meetings and I have seen the literature where the debate about Chinese-TB vs. Chinese-Austronesian goes on and I am impressed by the professional and scholarly tone of teh debate, no matter how ANNOYED most of you must be with Sagart and how FRUSTRATED he must be so alone. This is such a sharp and refreshing contrast to the tone of similar debates elsewhere in this field that I think it important to call attention to. No one as far as I can see calls for "shouting down" Sagart, as campbell famously did Greenberg, no one villifies and libels the other side, above all no one tries to suppress and censor the discussion of opposing viewpoints as has so long been the case with Nostratic where as I said even to this day most journals will not admit that Illich-Svitych ever existed. > On the > one hand, he has identified some significant Austronesian elements > in the Chinese vocabulary, but this is hardly surprising (or new; > Tsu-lin Mei and Jerry Norman pointed some of that out 30 years ago). > And he would like to build a case for a special genetic relationship > between Chinese and Austronesian, which would indeed require splitting > Chinese off from TB. But I have to say that the few arguments I've > seen of his *against* ST are not impressive, to put it diplomatically. > I think they are incorrect too but he has in my opinion done an impressive job with so little and with a theory seems to me hopeless. He is a certainly an impressive scholar all around, although I think that his most important contribution by far, and which will one day revolutionize the study of ethnology and anthropology and indeed socail sciences generally (and bring them to the level of linguistics) is his study with Immanuel Todd on the prehistory of certain types of family structure in Eurasia. It is not linguistics but it uses methods first developed by linguists and opens up the possibility of an anthropological science no less successful and important than comparative linguistics. Alexis MR From manaster at umich.edu Thu Feb 4 21:54:29 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 16:54:29 EST Subject: Nostratic et al. Part 2: The Challenge Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dorothy has been kind enough to suggest I do a quick and brief (!) part 2, so I'll just say some things and refer y'all to the literature for more (on general issues, please see my paper with Michalove and Georg in the Annual Review of Anthro, just published). And I will only use less than third of the over 20K bytes of part 1. (1) Re Nostratic, please read Nostratic: Evidence and Status, ed. by Brian Joseph and Joe Salmons, out of Benjamins as well as my review of I-S's dictionary in Studies in Lg in 1993. In addition I can email the draft of Hitchcock's and my reply to Ringe's (highly acclaimed) voodoo-mathematical "refutation" of Nostratic to anybody who asks. As for my own views (which several people asked me about) on Nostratic, it struck me that in the recent Dolgopolsky book, which I do NOT recommend except if you run out of firewood, the best etyma for kinship terms are for in-laws, which, assuming exogamy, strongly hints of borrowing. For this and many other reasons published by me, a significant number of the supposed Nostratic etyma are old borrowings. However, some Nostratic comparisons are much less likely to be borrowings, incl. my own comparison of the IE words for FIVE, FINGER, and FIST (all themselves cognate within IE, as per Meillet and Saussure, but many IEnists dissent for reasons I cannot comprehend) with Altaic and Uralic words with various bodypart meanings but no numeral meaning. I see here a real Nostratic etymon: *payngo or something close to that. Perhaps because I discovered it, this (and some other things, of course, which there is no room for here) makes me ready now (as I never have before) to say that Nostratic (meaning IE, Uralic, and Altaic at least) is extremely probable and close to being a fact. (2) Re Altaic (the controversial language family comprising Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese-Ryukyuan), all I'll say say is (1) it is an accident of the sociology and psychology of a few crucial people that it is not as accepted as Uralic or IE, (2) for details, see the in-print paper by Georg, Michalove, Sidwell, and me "Telling General Linguists about Altaic" in Jo. of Linguistics, and the bibliography therein. and (3) it is unconscionable, as we spell out there, that some well-known general linguists with NO expertise in the field have been publishing disinformation about the debates within the Altaic field and that such people write book reviews and encyclopedia articles on comparative Altaic. (3) Re Pakawan, this is a small family of extinct Native American lgs of Texas and N Mexico which I posited and which includes Goddard's Comecrudan. Pakawan = Comecrudan + Coahuilteco + Cotoname. Pakawan is related to Karankawa, forming what I now call Pakawa-Karankawan. Sapir and Swanton (two leading classifiers and describers of N. American lgs a long time ago) claimed that these lgs were also related to Tonkawa and at times they included Atakapa. I exclude Tonkawa, and am unsure about Atakapa (Pam Munro of UCLA has some goodish arguments for Atakapa belonging elsewhere). The MAIN reason why these lgs are good to talk about is that the amount of data we have on them, while adequate, is manageable, and can be accessed by anyone with some basic skills in comparative linguistics (these being very similar in turn to the skills taught in generative phonology) and a week or so of free time. The data are found in just two or three places, which is convenient. All unpublished data known to exist are available from me by email, and will some day be published. (4) Some other controversial linguistic groupings which it would be nice, and not too difficult, to work on are: (a) Vovin's tentative linkage of Ainu to Austroasiatic (which I am sure is right) and Bengtson's proposal to link THAT to Nahali (which appeals me), (b) Diakonov's tentative(?) linkage of Sumerian to Austroasiatic (which also appeals to me), (c) Sapir's linkage of Haida to the rest of Nadene, endorsed by Pinnow and Greenberg and recently ably defended by someone with the same name as me (Anthropological Linguitstics 1996), (d) Eric Hamp's linkage of Hattic to IE (which I strongly doubt), (e) Swadesh and Hamp's linkage of Chukchee-Kamchatkan with Eskimo-Aleut (unless Michael Fortescue has already done it), (f) the competing North-Caucasian and IE linkages proposed for Etruscan, (g) Bengtson's proposals re Basque, North Caucasian, and Burushaski and Starostin's re North Caucasian and Yeniseyan (I leave out Sino-Tibetan cause then it is NOT manageable for mere mortals like me), and (h) Austronesian + Austroasiatic = Austric, as argued by various people every 20 years or so, Pater Wilhelm Schmidt being the first and recently L.V. Hays being of great importance. That's my challenge to y'all. Work one or more of these instead of perpetrating or merely repeating or even merely allowing others to perpetrate or teach, unchallenged, the pseudomethodological fabrications we keep hearing instead of real work, and perhaps as an excuse for not doing real work. I can't think of any other reasonably straightforward problems just now, but there are some I am forgetting. I do think it is a scandal that virtually no one is doing this yet, while so many are doing so much to malign the whole field of language classification and to do away with the teaching of comparative linguistics in universities, instead. (5) Of course, there are many other classification issues that need work, but most are not easily accessible. There ARE some simple mathematical issues that have not been solved and anyone who knows elementary probability theory and loves linguistics is invited. (6) Finally, I say that comparative linguistics of the OTHER kind, i.e., the one that deals not with classification but with the (pre)history of language families only minimally controversial like Indo-European, Dravidian, Uto-Aztecan, Kartvelian, Uralic, etc., is also full of manageable problems which remain unsolved because (oh no, don't say it !) quite simply most of the work being done in THIS field suffers from precisely the methodological problems which are laid by Trask, Thomason, et al. (usually incorrectly) at the door of the kind of linguistics that does deal with classification. The shoe is on the other foot, as I am prepared to document in detail if asked (and already have in various articles, notably in International Jo. of Dravidian Linguistics, IJAL, Georgica, JIES, etc.). If we can have the dravidian etymological dictionary in successive editions not give a single reconstruction, state a set of correspondence which account for a fraction of the comparisons that are then made, and freely mix borrowed and inherited and accidentally resemblent forms, there something wrong ESPECIALLY if at the same time it is widely procalimed that Dravidian is a model language family, and the Dravidianists models of modern comp. linguists. The most beuatiful example, which I discuss in print, is how the DED manages to get the word for menstruation in one Dr. lg derived from the etymon for house simply because they look somewhat alike, sound laws do notr count among friends, and the word happens to occur in the phrase 'menstruation hut' (but they forgot which is hut and which menstruation, no matter the rigid order of such expressions in Dravidian). Kartvelian is little better, esp. in the Klimov version. Much of Native American work ditto (e.g., in the family I have worked on for more than a decade, Uto-Aztecan). IE is FAR FAR better, partly because so much EASIER (thaks to Sanskrit and other old data being available) but even here we find a LOT of this kind of stuff. And yet we all know where the critics of Nostratic, Amerind, etc., come from. This then is theother challenge: let us educate a new generation to clean u[p the historical linguistics of well-established language families even as we try to test and refine theories that posit more far-flung families. Of course, systematically taking positions in comparative linguistics (even IE) in major universities and cannibalizing them for yet more positions in generative or sociolinguistics so that most departments that did just recently no longer can pretend to teach comp. ling. AT ALL is not the way to do it. Nor is the policy of certain journals to effectively ban comp lx as no longer of "theoretical" interest. Alexis Manaster Ramer Professor of Computer Science Wayne State University From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu Fri Feb 5 17:10:27 1999 From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 12:10:27 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) In-Reply-To: <15443510606258@m-w.com> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Jim Rader wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > In reference to Tsu-Lin Mei and Jerry Norman, I think you mean > Austroasiatic rather than Austronesian, don't you? The article I have > a reference to is "The Austroasiatics in ancient south China: some > lexical evidence" (_Monumenta Serica_ 32 [1976], p. 274-301). You're right, of course. But I was sure, when I wrote, and still am, that I remember someone in those days turning up Austronesian etymologies as well. Can anybody jog my memory on this? Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 5 13:42:28 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:42:28 EST Subject: Sum: Yakhontov's principle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Does anybody have the list of 65 meanings which belong in part 2 of Yakhontov's hypothesis? AMR From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu Fri Feb 5 13:41:31 1999 From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:41:31 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 4 Feb 1999 manaster at umich.edu wrote: [a lot] OK, I was just making sure. I agree with most of what you say. It's true that we don't have a clear, coherent, generally-agreed-upon reconstruction scheme for ST, and that is certainly an unsatisfactory situation. And it's quite true that a lot of Benedict's work (much as I loved the man, and never denying his substantial contributions to the field) is not anything you'd want to show your historical linguistics students as an example of how to do reconstruction. And that people like Miller (actually, by this date, I think he's the only one left) are attacking ghosts rather than addressing the overall body of evidence. And, the overall body of evidence for the genetic unity of Sino-Tibetan, in my opinion and (with the exception of Sagart) that of everyone I know of who has looked at it carefully, is overwhelming. > other ST language at all, though I did once know > a bit of whatever the language of Mizoram is called > (Mizo is it) but have now forgotten it down to the Nowadays they call it Mizo; in the older literature it's referred to as Lushai or Lushei. > Thank you very much for bringing this up. I have both in > print and here excoriated Godard and others for this false > methodological "principle" which seems to go to a paper in > which Meillet got carried away in his fight with Kroeber > and asserted it but later even Meillet saw he was wrong > and specifically said that it is the languages of E Asia > that show that the principle is a false one--although he > underestimated the role of morphology in E Asia. Well, in S-T, yes, everybody did, until reconstruction of Old Chinese proceeded far enough that we could begin to see it. But if you're looking for a clear example of an indisputable family established without any morphological basis, Tai will do fine. Actually, I mentioned this to Goddard once when we were disagreeing about exactly this point, and what I remember him saying (again, he's not responsible for my memory) was, essentially, well then, we can never really be sure that the relationship among these languages is genetic. Since Goddard hasn't ever looked at Tai, I suppose I can imagine how he might say such a thing, but really--this is a relationship that is inspectionally evident. > points, But Comecrudan will make the same point. Realistically, I think you might find some resistance to this example, as I'm sure you're aware. Tai is better, because there's no room anywhere for doubt. Take dictionaries of any 2 or 3 Tai languages and the relationship is obvious. And, surely, no historical linguist could spend half an hour with Li's _Handbook of Comparative Tai_ and come away with any doubts at all about what we're looking at. > and I am impressed by the professional and scholarly tone > of teh debate, no matter how ANNOYED most of you must > be with Sagart and how FRUSTRATED he must be so alone. Laurent Sagart is a gentleman and a scholar, and, as you say, an able and well-informed linguist. He happens to be dead wrong about something important. Alas, I rather doubt that that fact significantly distinguishes him from any of the rest of us. Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Fri Feb 5 13:45:09 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:45:09 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I wrote: >> (With regard to racism, Pedersen's discussion makes a particular point of >> denying that the Egyptians or EVEN the Nubians were "Negro" (actually he >> spells it "negro", indicating he is talking about a "racial" >> classification), but concedes that the same cannot be said of the Hausas -- >> currently part of the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic.) AMR replied: >I am not sure whether he was or was not a racist. What you mention >does not prove that he was. I am not interested in labelling Pedersen one way or another in this regard. What he wrote was simply an uncredited report on the opinion of others, which reflects the ideologically inspired institutional racism of his time. I did not think I had to spell out the point. Although he was relying on the opinion of others, he did a common academic thing of simply asserting it without characterising it as an opinion or crediting it to anyone else. Even post-colonial work of political analysis still referred to the Tutsi as being of "Ethiopid origin" (avoiding the antiquated term "Hamitic") and down-played the role of the German and then Belgian colonial authorities in promoting the caste system which they exploited in colonial times. Just to spell out the implications of Pedersen's (no doubt unthinking) acquiescence to insitutional racism, it is thaty there is a (natural?) pecking order (Indo-)European over (Semito-)Hamite over "black" African. In the 19th c there was much concern in institutional racism to remove the Egyptians from "black" ancestry. Somehow, by Pedersen's time that had been extended to the Nubians. That is logical according to institutional racism since the Nubians were literate before the Europeans, and even had some late pharoahs over Egypt (in the late dynastic times called "decadent" by Western historians -- having it both ways apparently. NB: in Western popular culture the Nubians were black and "slaves" of the Egyptians, cf. the black actor playing a explicitly labelled "NUBIAN" slave of the "Mummy", played by (white) Boris Karloff in 1933). Whatever Pedersen's personal feelings about black people, his acceptance of the solemn authority of those who distinguished "Nubians" from "negroes" would certainly preclude it occurring to him that Semitic and Hamitic might have an African rather than a Eurasian linguistic alignment, andthe intellectual climate of the times would discourage him from looking to Africa for the antecedents of Semito-Hamitic (or Hamito-Semitic). From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Fri Feb 5 13:44:19 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:44:19 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >I enjoyed Alice Faber's message criticising the supposed relationship of >"Semitic to Indo-E". In essence, her comments indicate that the wording >of such a proposed relationship is as misleading as proposing a >"relationship" between "AFRO-ASIATIC and GERMANIC". While I admire AMR's >energy and industry in pursuit of countless issues in historical >linguistics, I find it inconsistent that he deplores the rhetoric which >states "there IS NO relationship between Semitic and IE" rather than the >more accurate statement "NO demonstration of a relationship between >Semitic and IE is GENERALLY ACCEPTED (? by those qualified to accept >such)", or innumerable paraphrases of the same, at the same time that he >is lenient about the wording of the "Semitic-IE relationship". Within the >field (as opposed to public relations), the rhetoric of "there is NO >relationship" is readily understood under the GENERALLY ACCEPTED principle >of historical linguists that a relationship has to be demonstrated, NOT >the lack of one ("unrelated until demonstrated"). No one denies that; at >best they disagree about what it takes to demonstrate a relationship (I >guess I mean a GENETIC relationship, at that). > >Alice's counter that AFRO-ASIATIC MAY be more closely related to >NILO-SAHARAN than to INDO-E is instructive at least for its shock value -- >and it makes geographic sense -- though I would hope that there is more to >such a speculation than the fact that some border Ethiopian languages >exhibit "ambiguity" as to whether they should classified as Afrasian or >Nilo-Saharan (convergence!?). > >I particularly enjoyed her closing comments: > >>Furthermore, and now I'm speculating wildly, if I were seriously interested in >>linking Afro-Asiatic with other language stocks, Indo-European, or, indeed, >>any other Eurasian language stock, is *not* where I would look first. Rather, >>I would look seriously at Nilo-Saharan. I fear that at least some of the >>interest, especially from non-specialists, in relating Semitic and >>Indo-European is motivated by a notion of "Judeo-Christian cultural >>tradition" that may, itself, not be supported by the historical record. > >It reminds me of a joke I made (I forget whether on this list or >elsewhere) relating "Nostratic" to "Cosa Nostra", as the "Western >Civilisation mafia". Slightly more seriously, the proposal of a >relationship of Semitic to I-E (inter alia) predates recognition of >Semitic as part of a larger mainly African-based Afro-Asiatic family. >Politically it could have even been "brave" to propose such a thing at a >time and place when there were opposing racist Nazoid theories insisting >on the primeval distinctness of "Aryan" (Indo-GERMANIC) from "Semitic", >and I think Alice is quite right to insinuate that Nostratic was, in >contrast, a "philo-Semitic" theory seeking to identify Indo-European with >Semitic because of the recognised (though belated) impact of Semitic >culture on "Western civilisation". That has no bearing on whether it is >scientifically true or not; it is politics. I can imagine, then, that an >enterprising scientific journalist could make headlines (of a sort), even >in this day and age, if it turned out to be tenable that Afro-Asiatic >(i.e., "Semitic") is a part of a larger AFRICAN family which includes >NILO-SAHARAN sooner than that it is related to the I-E languages, given >how cherished the Semitic heritage of Western culture is, and how strong >the feeling is to identify with that heritage (as opposed to an African >heritage, which is OK only as long as it is pre-homo sapiens.) > From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Feb 5 13:45:39 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:45:39 EST Subject: Nostratic et al. Part 2: The Challenge In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: >I can't think of any other reasonably >straightforward problems just now, but >there are some I am forgetting. Not straightforward (but I don't think all of the problems mentioned by Alexis are necessarily straightforward), but important [and a neglected area] would be, as Alice Faber mentioned the other day, to investigate links between Africa and Eurasia (say, Nostratic and Nilo-Saharan and/or Niger-Congo). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk Fri Feb 5 13:46:01 1999 From: Roger.Wright at liverpool.ac.uk (Roger Wright) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:46:01 EST Subject: Larry Trasks' Hist Ling Dic Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Nobody else seems to have reacted to Larry Trask's announcement of his forthcoming Hist Ling Dic, so I'd just like to say how much I'm looking forward to being able to use it. If it's as good as his other dictionaries, it will be indispensable. ---------------------- rhpwri at liverpool.ac.uk Tell me what you think of my Web-page: http://www.liv.ac.uk/~lynnf/rwright.html From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Fri Feb 5 13:49:41 1999 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Dorothy Disterheft) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:49:41 EST Subject: No subject Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- We have prepared a web page for potential graduate students and their advisors, advertising the concentration of specialists in many aspects of historical linguistics at the University of Manchester, now a world-class centre for the subject. Please have a look at http://www.art.man.ac.uk/english/pgdegree/manhstlx.htm The page gives a brief listing of projects currently in progress at Manchester, scholars, and courses, with links to all the relevant information. David Denison and Nigel Vincent <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> David Denison Dept of English and American Studies University of Manchester | Manchester M13 9PL | U.K. +44 (0)161-275 3154 (phone) +44 (0)161-275 3256 (fax) d.denison at man.ac.uk (email) http://www.art.man.ac.uk/english/staff/dd/ From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 5 13:54:22 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:54:22 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Tue, 2 Feb 1999, bwald wrote: > AMR writes in reply to Alice Haber's message (which I commented on in my > last posting) > > >This could well be right, but historically Nilo-Saharan was all > >but unknown to the pioneers of Nostratic.. > > What kind of interest have Nostraticists shown in Nilo-Saharan since? There has been almost no serious published research into Nostratic since the pioneering days by the Moscow school. Bomhard's school consists of one man who works full time outside of academia and yet does more than most linguists working on the inside (though having said that I STILL do not like most of what he has done, but I could be wrong). Greenberg's Eurasian (his version of Nostratic) has not been published as far as I know. Of what may perhaps be called the revisionist school, Peter Michalove has only recently joined work on Nostratic, is not a linguist at all by background, and has an even worse job situation than Bomhard, and I (the other member of this "school") work in computer science full time except that I have been ill for the last several years and do no work except with the help of other people under doctors' orders, and of course Nostratic is a minor area of research for me. In any event, my first priority has been to see if there is any merit to Nostratic at all and trying to extent it surely is not the most obvious way to do that. To my mind, you start out by checking the IE-Uralic-Altaic connection out. Kartvelian comes next. I have not even done any serious work on whether AA is likely to be related to these. But we do not own Nostratic. People who are interested are free to work Nilo-Saharan and Nostratic w/o having to wait for us or our permission. > > To get back to racist theories that were discredited by GREENBERG's > establishment of the Nilo-Saharan (and Niger-Congo) families, while AMR is > quite right, in pre-Greenbergian times when a Nostratic was conceived that > included Semitic and Indo-E, various Nilo-Saharan languages were indeed > known to linguists and were classified, along with other languages (which > turned out to be Niger-Congo) as "Nilo-HAMITIC" and such. The concept > "Hamitic" by itself was applied to languages now classified as > (non-Semitic) Afro-Asiatic (since Greenberg). PEDERSEN himself devotes a > SINGLE section 5. to "Semitic and Hamitic" in his Chapter (V) on "the study > of non-Indo-European languages", and notes the likelihood that Semitic and > Hamitic are genetically related (as now accepted). Yes, but he hardly did any WORK if at all on these languages. He was an IEnist only. > He does not treat > "Nilo-Hamitic" and such, so I am not sure how aware he was of them, but > contemporaneous with him were such influential Africanists as Carl MEINHOF, > who supposed that Nilo-Hamitic was a mixture of "Negro" and "Hamitic", a > proposal that expanded among Africanists throughout Europe and remained > until Greenberg, who specifically went after Meinhof and bashed the racist > basis of his ideas. > Again, since Pedersen did no original work of his own, all this is purely academic. > (With regard to racism, Pedersen's discussion makes a particular point of > denying that the Egyptians or EVEN the Nubians were "Negro" (actually he > spells it "negro", indicating he is talking about a "racial" > classification), but concedes that the same cannot be said of the Hausas -- > currently part of the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic.) > I am not sure whether he was or was not a racist. What you mention does not prove that he was. > The effects of the racism were recently seen in the 1994 Ruanda genocide. > Under the kinds of historical notions that associated Hamitic with Semitic > speakers, as "racially non-Negro" peoples of "superior culture" (including > advanced militarism), the Belgian colonial administration classified a > certain Ruandese group called "Tutsi" (popularly known as the Watusi in > early to mid 20th c Western culture) as of "Hamitic" origin, as evidenced > by their domination of the "Bantu" (= "Negro") Hutu (even though the Tutsi > had adopted the same "Negro" language as the Hutu). This however is not the fault of the Nostraticists. Blame the bicyclists (as in the famous, I hope it IS famous, joke). Note that the spectacular failure of the West to assist the Tutsi (even to the trivial extent that we "assist" the Bosniaks or the Kosovars) means that no one now here considers the Tutsi any less "negro" than the Hutu. [snip] > > My guess is that Pedersen was quite aware of the "Hamitic-Negro" "mixture" > theories, and may even have accepted them, but shunned them for the > pedagogical purposes of his book dedicated to conventional GENETIC > relationships and families. I am sure he was aware them but I think he shunned them because he did not approve of them or at least suspected that they were untenable. He WAS after all one of the best linguists of all time. > > In view of continued interest in historical-cultural interest in the > implications of linguistic classification, it is best to remember the > history of historical linguistics, to probe the motives underlying current > controversies, and to keep trying to establish STRICT CONTROLS on > classificatory/reconstructive METHODOLOGY -- and, of course, on > cultural-historical interpretation of the results. If this is intended to suggest that Nostraticists in general or I in particular are either racists or follow a nonstrict methodology, I would ask for specifics which can be refuted. AMR From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Fri Feb 5 13:54:06 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:54:06 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- AMR writes in reply to Alice Haber's message (which I commented on in my last posting) >This could well be right, but historically Nilo-Saharan was all >but unknown to the pioneers of Nostratic.. What kind of interest have Nostraticists shown in Nilo-Saharan since? To get back to racist theories that were discredited by GREENBERG's establishment of the Nilo-Saharan (and Niger-Congo) families, while AMR is quite right, in pre-Greenbergian times when a Nostratic was conceived that included Semitic and Indo-E, various Nilo-Saharan languages were indeed known to linguists and were classified, along with other languages (which turned out to be Niger-Congo) as "Nilo-HAMITIC" and such. The concept "Hamitic" by itself was applied to languages now classified as (non-Semitic) Afro-Asiatic (since Greenberg). PEDERSEN himself devotes a SINGLE section 5. to "Semitic and Hamitic" in his Chapter (V) on "the study of non-Indo-European languages", and notes the likelihood that Semitic and Hamitic are genetically related (as now accepted). He does not treat "Nilo-Hamitic" and such, so I am not sure how aware he was of them, but contemporaneous with him were such influential Africanists as Carl MEINHOF, who supposed that Nilo-Hamitic was a mixture of "Negro" and "Hamitic", a proposal that expanded among Africanists throughout Europe and remained until Greenberg, who specifically went after Meinhof and bashed the racist basis of his ideas. (With regard to racism, Pedersen's discussion makes a particular point of denying that the Egyptians or EVEN the Nubians were "Negro" (actually he spells it "negro", indicating he is talking about a "racial" classification), but concedes that the same cannot be said of the Hausas -- currently part of the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic.) The effects of the racism were recently seen in the 1994 Ruanda genocide. Under the kinds of historical notions that associated Hamitic with Semitic speakers, as "racially non-Negro" peoples of "superior culture" (including advanced militarism), the Belgian colonial administration classified a certain Ruandese group called "Tutsi" (popularly known as the Watusi in early to mid 20th c Western culture) as of "Hamitic" origin, as evidenced by their domination of the "Bantu" (= "Negro") Hutu (even though the Tutsi had adopted the same "Negro" language as the Hutu). The Belgian authorities reinforced and expanded the caste system that put the "Hamites" above the "Negroes". The eventual genocide (Tutsi victims) was quite comparable in scale and motive to the European Holocaust of the Jews, and sprang from the SAME political framework of racism with the same "ethnolinguistic" intellectualised rationale (and in both cases the majority slaughtered the minority) All of this, of course, has nothing to do with scientific basis of classifying languages (although it does have to do with nationalistic motives that promoted the science in the first place), but it has to do with how certain Nilo-Saharan languages were classified before the Nilo-Saharan family was established (to the extent that it is established) and the HISTORICAL-CULTURAL interpretation (and POLITICAL use) of the earlier classification. By the way, such typological things as having gender (of the m/f variety) were the basis of such concepts as "Nilo-Hamitic" (now esp the Nilotic branch of Nilo-Saharan, inter alia). The idea of language "mixture" was much more often applied to languages, and particularly various African languages, than is now permitted, and allowed a rather free hand in historical cultural interpretation of language relationship, so that it was fairly easy to associate "original" language family with "race" and allow such things as Semitic and IE are GENETICALLY related (with racial implications -- for those who wanted them) without denying linguistic resemblances (due to "mixture", just as "races" can mix) between (Semito-)Hamites and certain "black" Africans. Generally, the assumption (or rationalisation) was that the groups who exhibited the "imperialistic spirit", demonstrated by domination over other African groups, were either linguistically and "racially" "Hamites", related to Semites and superior (more European-like) to other Africans, or by language shift were only (at least partially) racially Hamites -- no longer also linguistically "Hamitic". NB: when the linguistically "Hamitic" speakers dominated other Africans, this was seen as evidence of the (inevitable?) cultural history of the Hamites. When other groups did, they were still assumed to be decendants of Hamites but had shifted languages. With such logic, this theory would not be unduly disturbed by Greenberg's criticism of Meinhof's theory about the Fulani conquering the Hausa. Meinhof assumed that the Fulani were (mixed) "Hamitic" and the Hausa non-Hamitic, whereas Greenberg pointed out that just the opposite was the case, the Hausa were Hamitic, i.e., Afro-Asiatic, and the Fulani were non-Hamitic, i.e., Niger-Congo. Meinhof had already died, supporting Hitler as "good for Germany" (get back the African colonies lost after World War 1?), but he would have had no trouble reinterpreting the results as indicating that the Fulani had shifted from a Hamitic to a "Negro-Bantu" language and vice-versa for the Hausa. (For all his faults, Meinhof was an indefatiguable Africanist, and had deeply studied and extensively written about all these languages -- without seeing what is now obvious.) My guess is that Pedersen was quite aware of the "Hamitic-Negro" "mixture" theories, and may even have accepted them, but shunned them for the pedagogical purposes of his book dedicated to conventional GENETIC relationships and families. (Detractors of Greenberg, in reading Pedersen, will now say that from Hamitic + Semitic to Afro-Asiatic was not so large a step, or intellectual a feat, but it is the vehemence with which G trashed the earlier racist theories of African linguistic-cultural relationships that is really of importance. He showed how twisted and ideologically motivated the earlier logic was, twisted in a way that would be immediately recognised as absurd if applied to Indo-European). Of course, serious attention paid to mixed languages has made a comeback in recent times, with a sounder theoretical basis and undeniable empirical evidence, but the apparent delight with which the reports of BLONDE corpses in the former Tokharian-speaking area were received a few years ago seemed to me to be an echo of an earlier (more naive if you want) age in which "racial mixture" was assumed (or hoped?) to have a shallow history (at least with respect to Indo-European and its implications). Fortunately, we have now rejected racism (though its former influence lingers in various other fields and popular culture), but that's about all. We still seem to have great stakes in who is culturally related to who at what level, and I view Nostratic with deep suspicion as motivated (perhaps often unconsciously) by pet theories of ancient cultural alignments and pedigrees. That's why I started out by asking; now that Nilo-Saharan has been posited for almost half a century, what help have the Nostraticists been doing to help us sort out the data of that messy and potentially highly controversial family? In view of continued interest in historical-cultural interest in the implications of linguistic classification, it is best to remember the history of historical linguistics, to probe the motives underlying current controversies, and to keep trying to establish STRICT CONTROLS on classificatory/reconstructive METHODOLOGY -- and, of course, on cultural-historical interpretation of the results. From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 5 13:54:46 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 08:54:46 EST Subject: Holger Pedersen and "Race" Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I have just had a chance to look over Pedersen's book The Discovery of Language, and contrary to the (in my view libelous) claims by B. Wald posted on this list, it is immediately apparent (pp. 101, 321) that the late great Indo-Europeanist explicilty and strongly criticizes work (e.g., Mu"ller's) which used racial criteria to classify languages, that he himself refers to purely linguistic criteria as the basis for "Hamitic" and for connecting this to Semitic (p. 122 and passim). I also not see that he is anywhere dwelling on the Egyptians not being "negroes", and the only possible interpretation of the passage about Nubians' and Hausas' racial affiliations is that he is in fact trying to say that even though the former were not supposedly (this is of course nonsense) "negroes" and the latter are, this tells us nothing about whether their languages belong, because we do not (this is Pedersen speaking) know enough of the Nubian language, and the status of Hausa had not yet been sufficiently studied to be certain that it is "Hamitic" (which is true). There is also no hint of any suggestion that the Hamitic languages are "mixed", some kind of mongrel of Semitic and "negro" languages, which apparently many Africanists did believe but which Pedersen clearly did not (good IEnists, of course, as a rule tended, and rightly, to reject the rife speculation about "mixed languages" then as now, Pedersen's French counterpart and rival Meillet of course being the most vocal of the whole of "mixed languages". I really would ask that people be more cautious about posting attacks on the integrity of great (and esp. dead) scholars, esp. in areas as touchy even now as "race", without doing their homework. AMR From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp Sat Feb 6 16:38:40 1999 From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:38:40 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > In any > event, my first priority has been to see if there is any > merit to Nostratic at all and trying to extent it surely > is not the most obvious way to do that. To my mind, you > start out by checking the IE-Uralic-Altaic connection out. > Kartvelian comes next. I have not even done any serious > work on whether AA is likely to be related to these. I am curious about something. This whole thread started with Alexis criticizing me for not paying proper attention to work being done on "Semitic-IE" comparison. But is there in fact anyone who is now working on or arguing for an IE-Afroasiatic grouping (either within or out of Nostratic)? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the Nostratic idea started in the 19th century as a way to link what was then known about language families with the Biblical narrative. There were supposed to be three families corresponding to the three sons of Noah-- Semitic, Hamitic, and Japhetic (IE). Other families were gradually added. Now from what (little) I know of the modern Nostratic work, the best, or at least most obvious argument for a common link are the similarities in the system of pronouns (including the verb conjugation) of IE, Uralic, and Altaic. But AA languages show a radically different system. (The best evidence for AA itself is similarities in this same subsystem). The older arguments for a Semitic-IE relation relied, I believe, on things like presence of a two-gender system and a dual number-- broad typological properties, which are in any case absent from Uralic and Altaic (though I recently heard that old Mongolian had gender). So I suspect that the inclusion of AA in nostratic is purely an accident of history-- a relic of the pre-scientific 19th century roots of the Nostratic proposal-- rather than something that any contemporary linguist who knows the material and the methodology has seriously proposed. I, for one, am very impressed that Greenberg doesn't include AA in Nostratic. So who does argue for an IE-AA link and why? -RR +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Robert R. Ratcliffe Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku Tokyo 114 Japan From manaster at umich.edu Sat Feb 6 16:39:20 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:39:20 EST Subject: Yakhontov Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask recently initiated some discussion of the Yakhontov claims about how a modified Swadesh list can be used to test for language relatedness (based on Starostin 1991, where Starostin refers to a written communication from Yakhontov). However, some of what Larry says is not correct, as I will show. Let's begin at the beginning. Acc. to Starostin, Yakhontov modified the Swadesh list and then divided it into two sublists, a 35-word one and a 65-word one. Larry posted the 35-word one, but not the 65- word one. There are several problems in figuring what Yakhontov actually claimed, since Larry (and I) are getting this not from Yakhontov's work but from Starostin's (1990) book on Altaic and Japanese. Further, there are problems of translation which I note below, by giving the Russian original when the English translation is problematic. Also, Starostin nowhere give the actual 65-word sublist or the whole 100-word list. Rather he lists the 35-word sublist. He then defines the 100-word Yakhontov list by saying that Yakhontov deletes 10 of Swadesh's items and added ten new ones (all of these changes are listed), and then defines the 65-word Yakhontov sublist as what is left from the revised 100-word list when the 35-word sublist is removed. However, there is a problem since one of the words said to have been deleted is given as Russian tech', lit. 'to flow', which is NOT in the Swadesh list. Starostin (p.c.) tells me this was typo for zhech' 'to burn'. So with this in mind it is possible to reconstruct the Yakhontov 100-word list and the 65-word sublist (please see below). Anyway, Larry also relates two claims supposed to have been by Yakhontov about these lists in relation to language relatedness, one of which are: Claim 1. If two languages are genetically related, then the proportion of cognates in the 35-word list will always be greater than the proportion in the 65-word list. The other is, acc. to Larry Trask, but not in reality: Claim 2 acc. to Larry: "If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list is higher than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word list, then this is evidence that the languages are related". Actually, what Starostin (1991) has, though, is something quite different: "But if the percentage of matches (Russian: sovpadenij) is identical [sc. in both sublists--AMR] or the percentage of matches (Russian: sovpadenij) the 35-word list is less than (or equal to) the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word list, then the parallelism (Russian: skhodstvo) between the languages is accidental (i.e., there exists an accidental coincidence [Russian: sovpadenie] or the result of active contacts and borrowings." If I am not mistaken, this means that the second claim is not really separate claim at all. It says the same thing as claim 1, viz., that related languages are supposed to look a certain way, but it is not stated or logically implied that languages that look that way must be related. Moreover, Larry makes an even bigger mistake (or else someone again misinformed him about what Starostin says). Specifically, he claims that the Yakhontov method is to look at superficial phonetic similarities. However, Starostin (p. 25-26) clearly says that he (Starostin) is looking at matches based on sound correspondences and all other claims of the Altaic theory (such as morphological analysis, etymology, etc.), and indeed relates words which LOOK nothing alike, but are cognate under the Altaic theory, e.g., Turkic *yapur-gak : Mongolic *lab-c^in : Middle Korean *nip(h). Since Yakhontov had not published a detailed description of his method, I cannot claim that this is how HE would have used it, but this is certainly how Starostin uses it. This goes to the heart of the whole fight about what role phonetic similarity plays in comparative linguistics (Larry claims none at all. I claim a subordinate but important and indeed probably crucial one). But note that Starostin is not doing anything that Larry could object to on this score. He is NOT using phonetic similarity at all. Swadesh List 1. all 2. ash(es) 3. bark 4. belly 5. big 6. bird 7. bite 8. black 9. blood 10.bone 11.breast (female) 12.burn 13.claw 14.cloud 15.cold 16.come 17.die 18.dog 19.drink 20.dry 21.ear 22.earth 23.eat 24.egg 25.eye 26.feather 27.fire 28.fish 29.fly (vb) 30.foot 31.full 32.give 33.go 34.good 35.grease 36.green 37.hair 38.hand 39.head 40.hear 41.heart 42.horn 43.hot 44.human being 45.I, me 46.kill 47.knee 48.know 49.leaf 50.lie down, recline 51.liver 52.long 53.louse 54.man 55.many 56.meat 57.moon 58.mountain 59.mouth 60.name 61.neck 62.new 63.night 64.nose 65.not 66.one 67.path 68.rain (noun) 69.red 70.root 71.round 72.sand 73.say 74.see 75.seed 76.sit 77.skin 78.sleep(vb) 79.small 80.smoke 81.stand 82.star 83.stone 84.sun 85.swim 86.tail 87.that 88.this 89.tongue 90.tooth 91.tree 92.two 93.water 94.we, us 95.what 96.white 97.who 98.woman 99.yellow 100.you (sg) Yakhontov deletes: all, bark, bite, burn, claw, feather, hot, lie down, seed, we Yakhontov adds: 101. blizkij 'close, near (adj.)' 102. daljokij 'far, distant (adj.)', 103. tjazholyj 'heavy' 104. sol' 'salt' 105. korotkij 'short' 106. zmeja 'snake' 107. tonkij 'thin' 108. veter 'wind' 109. cherv' 'worm' 110. god 'year' Hence, Yakhontov 100-word list must be: 1.-- 2. ash(es) 3. -- 4. belly 5. big 6. bird 7. -- 8. black 9. blood 10.bone 11.breast (female) 12. -- 13.claw 101. close, near (adj.), 14.cloud 15.cold 16.come 17.die 18.dog 19.drink 20.dry 21.ear 22.earth 23.eat 24.egg 26.-- 102. far, distant (adj.) 27.fire 28.fish 29. fly 30.foot 31.full 32.give 33.go 34.good 35.grease 36.green 37. hair 38.hand 39.head 40. hear 41.heart 103. heavy 42.horn 43.-- 44.human being 46.kill 47.knee 48.know 49.leaf 50.-- 51.liver 52.long 53.louse 54.man 55.many 56.meat 57.moon 58.mountain 59.mouth 60.name 61.neck 62.new 63.night 64.nose 65.not 66.one 67.path 68.rain (noun) 69.red 70.root 71.round 104. salt 72.sand 73.say 74.see 75.-- 105. short 76.sit 77.skin 78.sleep(vb) 79.small 80.smoke 106. snake 81.stand 82.star 83.stone 84.sun 85. swim 86.tail 87.that 107.thin 88. this 90.tooth 91.tree 92.two 93.water 94. -- 95.what 96.white 97.who 108. wind 98.woman 109 worm 99.yellow 110 year 100. you (sg) Yakhontov's 35-word sublist (order reflects the alphabetical order of the Russian translations): wind, water, louse, eye, year, give, two, know, tooth, name, stone, bone, blood, who, moon, new, nose, fire, one, full, horn, hand, fish, dog, sun, salt, you (sg.), die, ear, tail, what, this, I, tongue, egg And hence Yakhontov's 65-word sublist is: 1.-- 2. ash(es) 3. -- 4. belly 5. big 6. bird 7. -- 8. black 11.breast (female) 13.claw 101. close, near (adj.), 14.cloud 15.cold 16.come 19.drink 20.dry 22.earth 23.eat 24.egg 26.-- 102. far, distant (adj.) 29. fly 30.foot 33.go 34.good 35.grease 36.green 37.hair 39.head 40. hear 41.heart 103. heavy 43.-- 44.human being 45.I, me 46.kill 47.knee 49.leaf 50.-- 51.liver 52.long 54.man 55.many 56.meat 58.mountain 59.mouth 61.neck 63.night 65.not 67.path 68.rain (noun) 69.red 70.root 71.round 72.sand 73.say 74.see 75.-- 105. short 76.sit 77.skin 78.sleep (vb) 79.small 80.smoke 106. snake 81.stand 82.star 85.swim 87.that 107. thin 89.tongue 91.tree 94. -- 96.white 98.woman 109 worm 99.yellow From manaster at umich.edu Sat Feb 6 16:44:17 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:44:17 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I dont know how much longer this has to go on, but: On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, bwald wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I wrote: > > >> (With regard to racism, Pedersen's discussion makes a particular point of > >> denying that the Egyptians or EVEN the Nubians were "Negro" (actually he > >> spells it "negro", indicating he is talking about a "racial" > >> classification), but concedes that the same cannot be said of the Hausas -- > >> currently part of the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic.) > > AMR replied: > > >I am not sure whether he was or was not a racist. What you mention > >does not prove that he was. > > I am not interested in labelling Pedersen one way or another in this > regard. What he wrote was simply an uncredited report on the opinion of > others, which reflects the ideologically inspired institutional racism of > his time. That is untrue. He was critical (I think you meant "unCRITICAL") on almost every page, and the views he endorses or even those he recognized as merely possible or plausible are in no single instance racist. > I did not think I had to spell out the point. Although he was > relying on the opinion of others, he did a common academic thing of simply > asserting it without characterising it as an opinion or crediting it to > anyone else. That too in untrue. He refers to specific authors repeatedly, e.g., Lepsius. > Even post-colonial work of political analysis still referred > to the Tutsi as being of "Ethiopid origin" (avoiding the antiquated term > "Hamitic") and down-played the role of the German and then Belgian colonial > authorities in promoting the caste system which they exploited in colonial > times. This has nothing to do with Pedersen. >Just to spell out the implications of Pedersen's (no doubt > unthinking) acquiescence to insitutional racism, it is thaty there is a > (natural?) pecking order (Indo-)European over (Semito-)Hamite over "black" > African. He did not state or imply anything of the sort. > In the 19th c there was much concern in institutional racism to > remove the Egyptians from "black" ancestry. Somehow, by Pedersen's time > that had been extended to the Nubians. Again nothing to do with Pedersen. > That is logical according to > institutional racism since the Nubians were literate before the Europeans, > and even had some late pharoahs over Egypt (in the late dynastic times > called "decadent" by Western historians -- having it both ways apparently. > NB: in Western popular culture the Nubians were black and "slaves" of the > Egyptians, cf. the black actor playing a explicitly labelled "NUBIAN" slave > of the "Mummy", played by (white) Boris Karloff in 1933). > No Pedersen here either. > Whatever Pedersen's personal feelings about black people, his acceptance of > the solemn authority of those who distinguished "Nubians" from "negroes" > would certainly preclude it occurring to him that Semitic and Hamitic might > have an African rather than a Eurasian linguistic alignment, andthe > intellectual climate of the times would discourage him from looking to > Africa for the antecedents of Semito-Hamitic (or Hamito-Semitic). > This is completely untrue. He specifically explains his view about the fact that not enough was known to know which languages were "Hamitic" and which not. If he had been using race as a criterion, he could not have said this, because he was (at least acc. to Benji) in no doubt about the racial divisions. I do think that accusations of racism should be based on SOMETHING. Benji's is based on NOTHING. Worse, I have cited specific evidence that Pedersen was NOT using race directly or indirectly to guide his linguistic classifications, and was in fact vociferously condemning those who did. From manaster at umich.edu Sat Feb 6 16:46:41 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:46:41 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan Lives In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Scott DeLancey wrote [in response to my response his response to my originally saying that the state of S-T linguistic was "unsatisfactory". > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > OK, I was just making sure [sc. that I accept S-T as a valid language family--AMR] > I agree with most of what you say. It's > true that we don't have a clear, coherent, generally-agreed-upon > reconstruction scheme for ST, and that is certainly an unsatisfactory > situation. And it's quite true that a lot of Benedict's work (much as > I loved the man, and never denying his substantial contributions to > the field) is not anything you'd want to show your historical linguistics > students as an example of how to do reconstruction. And that people > like Miller (actually, by this date, I think he's the only one left) > are attacking ghosts rather than addressing the overall body of evidence. > And, the overall body of evidence for the genetic unity of Sino-Tibetan, > in my opinion and (with the exception of Sagart) that of everyone I know > of who has looked at it carefully, is overwhelming. > [snip re the name of Mizo alias Lushai] [re the claim that language relatedness can only be established with reference to morphological comparisons, as per Goddard and early Meillet et al.]: > But if you're looking for a clear example of an indisputable > family established without any morphological basis, Tai will > do fine. Actually, I mentioned this to Goddard once when we > were disagreeing about exactly this point, and what I remember > him saying (again, he's not responsible for my memory) was, > essentially, well then, we can never really be sure that the > relationship among these languages is genetic. Since Goddard > hasn't ever looked at Tai, I suppose I can imagine how he might > say such a thing, but really--this is a relationship that is > inspectionally evident. I had forgotten about Tai, thank you for pointing this out. It IS interesting though that for many years many linguists (e.g., Meillet) seemed to think that ALL East/Southeast Asian lgs lack morphology, and actually this seems to be quite restricted in time and space. I mean lgs which lost ALL their old morphology, like Chinese losing finally all S-T morphology, has finally started making some new morphology like the Mandarin -r and other suffixes (I know nothing about any other Chinese language but Mandarin, so I don't know if it generalizes to all of them). BTW, although this is off-topic I think it is important to call attention to the fact that The Economist has just devoted an extensive article to largely accurate coverage of what linguists have discovered about some basic points of Chinese, incl. the fact that it is not one but several languages (though some other things in the article are nonsense). > Realistically, I think you might find some resistance to this [sc. Comecrudan--AMR] > example, as I'm sure you're aware. Tai is better, because there's > no room anywhere for doubt. Take dictionaries of any 2 or 3 Tai > languages and the relationship is obvious. And, surely, no > historical linguist could spend half an hour with Li's _Handbook > of Comparative Tai_ and come away with any doubts at all about > what we're looking at. > Yes I am aware. Thanks again. But if I may beat the drum again, the trouble is that linguists who make methodological claims and are prepared to in effect accuse others (e.g., Greenberg or me) of incompetence in comparative ling because we do not accept these claims apparently do NOT read Li's Handbook or refuse to learn from the reading. Perhaps Dr. Thomason would care to comment. [in response to AMR's praise of Sagart]: > > Laurent Sagart is a gentleman and a scholar, and, as you say, an > able and well-informed linguist. He happens to be dead wrong > about something important. Alas, I rather doubt that that fact > significantly distinguishes him from any of the rest of us. > Of course, I agree. I am only disappointed that you did not comment on my claim that the respectful and scholarly way in which you guys in S-T have conducted yourselves with Laurent and he with y'all is a shining example of how such things ought to be handled and stands in stark contrast to the shabby way in which, for example, Greenberg and the late Illich-Svitych have been treated (not to mention, as an example picked at random, that fellow Monstrous Rumor from Wayne State or whatever his name is). AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sat Feb 6 16:48:55 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:48:55 EST Subject: Nostratic and Nilo-Saharan Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I am an idiot, I confess it. When Alice Faber and Benji Wald attributed to, respectively, a false notion of a "Judeo-Christian cultural tradition" and racism the fact that Nostraticists have sought to connect Afro-Asiatic to Indo- European rather than to Nilo-Saharan, I said many things, especially about the intolerable racism charge, which, while true, missed the point that in fact Nostraticists HAVE looked at Nilo-Saharan. I do not know who precisely but Shevoroshkin (1989:3) and Kaiser and Shevoroshkin (1988:310) include not just Nilo-Saharan but also Niger-Kordofanian (another group of languages spoken by people whom racists call Fblack' rather than Fwhite' or something in between) in Nostratic and allude to work which has established it. As I recall, I objected to including this statement in the paper I coauthored with Shevoroshkin (see below) in 1991 because he could not provide me with a copy of the relevant literature. I suspect it was something never published at all or only samizdated, but I do not know that for a fact. This I think closes the case. But an apology or two would still be nice. And, think, called for even if no such work had ever been by any Nostraticist. Kaiser, Mark; and Shevoroshkin, Vitaly. 1988. "Nostratic". Annual Review of Anthropology 17: 309-329. Shevoroshkin, Vitaly. 1989b. "Methods in Interphyletic Comparison". Ural-Altaische Jahrbu"cher 61: 1-26. Shevoroshkin, Vitaly; and Manaster Ramer, Alexis. 1991. "Some Recent Work on the Remote Relations of Languages". In: Lamb, Sydney M.; and Mitchell, E. Douglas (eds.), Sprung from some common source, 178-199. Stanford: Stanford University Press. From hubeyh at Montclair.edu Sat Feb 6 16:50:07 1999 From: hubeyh at Montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:50:07 EST Subject: Nostratic et al. Part 2: The Challenge Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > (5) Of course, there are many other classification issues that need > work, but most are not easily accessible. > There ARE some simple mathematical issues that have not > been solved and anyone who knows elementary probability > theory and loves linguistics is invited. Since my main interest is methodological and I do not see myself memorizing thousands of words from tens of languages, I am more than happy to find this kind of work collected in one spot so more time can be spent reading instead of driving to libraries. I am happy to volunteer as someone who does do probability theory. > most of the work being done in THIS field suffers from > precisely the methodological problems which are laid by > Trask, Thomason, et al. (usually incorrectly) at the door of > the kind of linguistics that does deal with classification. > The shoe is on the other foot, as I am prepared > to document in detail if asked (and > already have in various articles, notably in > International Jo. of Dravidian Linguistics, IJAL, Georgica, > JIES, etc.). The least that should be done is to follow in the footsteps of those like J. Nichols (and you) who have done work creating objective measures of family relationship possibilities/probabilities so that everyone can at least learn to deal with one or several numbers on strength of classification families so that like sociologists, psychologists, economists and other social scientists historical linguists can also compare these numbers instead of their gut feelings, and other apparently inexplicable ways in which they get such strong feelings about certain things. (I have already done a little in this respect in the History of Language journal and much more in my book.) > This then is theother challenge: let us > educate a new generation to clean u[p > the historical linguistics of well-established > language families even as we try to test > and refine theories that posit more far-flung > families. > One of the ideal candidates for this is, fuzzy logic, which was constructed practically for natural languages by L. Zadeh. There are many things going for it. The first is that logic is easier to learn than probability theory so that the basic meanings of what means what can be learned in logic and then the meanings extended to fuzzy logic. The second is that fuzzy logic sort of sits between probability theory (which is difficult for many) and logic. Furthermore, one can look at a site which says plainly that probability theory is extended logic: http://bayes.wustl.edu. I don't think people exist who will deny that that historical linguistics should be illogical and irrational. All three forms of reasoning, above, then can plainl be seen as about nothing else but logic and reasoning. I hope that soon the age of having gut feelings on family relationships will soon be over. I intend to do my part on this and since I just got a paper accepted (about 2 days ago) to the Journal of the International Quantitative Linguistics Association, even those that only respect authority should not have problems believing the seriousness of my efforts. > Alexis Manaster Ramer > Professor of Computer Science > Wayne State University -- M. Hubey Associate Professor of Computer Science Montclair State University Email: hubeyh at Montclair.edu Backup:hubeyh at alpha.montclair.edu WWW Page: http://www.csam.montclair.edu/Faculty/Hubey.html From w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de Sat Feb 6 16:51:04 1999 From: w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de (WB (in Frankfurt today)) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:51:04 EST Subject: (Fwd) Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear subscribers to HISTLING: Wolfgang Behr has forwarded to me a recent posting by S. DeLancey on your list, in which my ideas on Chinese and Tibeto-Burman (TB) are very seriously misrepresented. Unfortunately DeLancey is completely unfamiliar with my work. Although I am not a member of your group, I hope you will not mind my responding. I am grateful to Wolfgang for posting this for me. I will try to be as brief as possible. Delancey wrote: >As for Sagart, he is indeed convinced that the Chinese-TB link is >a chimaera, but as far as I know he is the only working Sino-Tibetan >linguist who takes that view, and I cannot for the life of me see >what his argument is. That is not, and has never been, my view. I have never claimed that ST is a chimera, does not exist, is an invalid construct, etc. In fact, right from the beginning of my work on on Chinese and Austronesian, I have repeatedly cautioned readers against that interpretation of my views. In the conclusion of my first paper (titled ?Chinese and Austronesian are genetically related?), presented in 1990 at a Sino-Tibetan conference in Texas, I wrote (p. 29): ?our claim (i.e., of a genetic unity between Chinese and Austronesian), it must be noted, should not be taken to imply that there exists no genetic relationship between Chinese and the TB languages (or, for that matter, between AN and Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, etc.), but simply that, if such a relationship exists, it is in any case less close than that between AN and Chinese (...).? Statements to the same effect can be found in my later work, for instance in my paper ?Proto-Austronesian and Old Chinese evidence for Sino-Austronesian?, published in Oceanic Linguitics 33, 2 (1994) p.300. On p. 301-302 of the same paper (Oceanic Linguitics 33, 2, 1994), I discussed the evidence for Sino-Tibetan, concluding p. 302 that ?the relationship, though not implausible, is less well demonstrated than is usually assumed?, due to evidence of long-term intimate contact, and poorly understood sound correspondences, this despite evidence of shared basic vocabulary and ?limited? shared morphology. In my subsequent work, I have documented several instances of lexical borrowings from Chinese into TB. I have argued that TB, which has been subjected to 3000 years of political and cultural pressure from Chinese, at times intimate, and with long-term bilingualism, cannot but include a thick layer of Chinese loanwords ?this does not mean there is no genetic layer !?. I have argued that the loanwords include some basic vocabulary, and even the 1st-person pronoun *nga and the numeral ?3?. Borrowing of pers. pronouns and numerals is more common in East Asia than in Europe. Some Central Tai and Northern Tai dialects have likewise abandoned their own pers. pronouns and numerals for the Chinese pronouns and numerals. Incredible though it may seem, most accounts of Sino-Tibetan make no provision *at all* for contact between Chinese and TB. The question of the Chinese-TB relationship being for me in doubt, the next question was, of course, whether Tibeto-Burman too was related to Austronesian. In my 1990 paper, on p. 30, I wrote: ?A corollary of our claim is that if Chinese and the TB languages are genetically related, then the TB and AN groups must also be related. we have at this point no reason to regard the latter hypothesis as absurd or implausible? In the revised version of this paper, published in Journal of Chinese Linguistics 21, 1 (1993), I remarked that ?possible links between Tibeto-Burman and Austronesian have never been investigated? (p. 56). Beginning in 1993, I began investigating such links. In my paper of 1994 in Oceanic Linguistics, I presented on pages 302-303 lexical and morphological evidence relating Chinese, TB and Austronesian, or in some cases *directly* TB and Austronesian. I pointed out (p. 302) that this new evidence actually *strengthened* the case for Chinese-TB relationship: I cited in particular a stative/intransitive prefix (Proto-Austronesian ma-, Chinese N-, TB m-). That evidence was new, even for Chinese-TB. At a symposium held in Hongkong in December 1993 (proceedings still unpublished), I added more elements of shared morphology: in particular TB prefixed s-, OC prefixed s-, PAn prefixed Si- (directive/benefactive); TB suffixed -n, PAn suffixed -en (noun-deriving). These facts have led me to think that the hypothesis of a Chinese-TB-AN unity is valid. I now believe that the ancestor language for these three groups was spoken by the domesticators of millet in the Huang He valley in early neolithic north China. I have held that view since 1994. It is outlined at the end of my paper "Some remarks on the Ancestry of Chinese" published in William S.-Y. Wang (ed.) The Ancestry of the Chinese Language. Journal of Chinese Linguistics monograph series no. 8, pp. 195-223. A complete discussion is in preparation. Since 1994, then, my view has been that Chinese and TB *are* genetically related, but not as closely as most Sino-Tibetanists think (because the genetic layer in the lexicon is thinner than usually assumed), and within a family also including ?at least? the Austronesian languages. Various statements to the effect can be found in three papers published in 1995: Some remarks on the Ancestry of Chinese. In: William S.-Y. Wang (ed.) The Ancestry of the Chinese Language. Journal of Chinese Linguistics monograph series no. 8 (1995), pp. 195-223. Comments from Sagart. In: William S.-Y. Wang (ed.) The Ancestry of the Chinese Language. Journal of Chinese Linguistics monograph series no. 8 (1995), pp. 337-372. Questions of method in Chinese-Tibeto-Burman comparison. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale XXIV (1995), 2: 245-255. I hope these precisions are useful. One more thing, DeLancey wrote: >On the >one hand, he (Sagart) has identified some significant Austronesian elements >in the Chinese vocabulary, but this is hardly surprising (or new; >Tsu-lin Mei and Jerry Norman pointed some of that out 30 years ago). Actually, what Mei Tsu-lin and Jerry Norman pointed out were *Austroasiatic* elements in Chinese, not *Austronesian* elements. Regards to all, Laurent Sagart ================================================== Laurent Sagart CRLAO 54 Bd Raspail 75270 Paris cedex 06 France Tel.: +33 1 49 54 24 18 Fax: +33 1 49 54 26 71 From manaster at umich.edu Sat Feb 6 16:51:39 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:51:39 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Sagart is, of course. The Chinese words he cites as evidence of Chinese being related to Austronesian are presumably, for those of us who do not accept his conclusion, not mere coincidences but Austronesian borrowings into Old Chinese. Am I missing something? Is the question whether anyone BESIDES Laurent Sagart is finding such borrowings? I would like to hear if there is. AMR On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Scott DeLancey wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Jim Rader wrote: > > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > In reference to Tsu-Lin Mei and Jerry Norman, I think you mean > > Austroasiatic rather than Austronesian, don't you? The article I have > > a reference to is "The Austroasiatics in ancient south China: some > > lexical evidence" (_Monumenta Serica_ 32 [1976], p. 274-301). > > You're right, of course. But I was sure, when I wrote, and still > am, that I remember someone in those days turning up Austronesian > etymologies as well. Can anybody jog my memory on this? > > Scott DeLancey > Department of Linguistics > University of Oregon > Eugene, OR 97403, USA > > delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu > http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html > From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sat Feb 6 16:54:24 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:54:24 EST Subject: Holger Pedersen and "Race" Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I appreciate that mentioning "(INSTITUTIONAL) racism" can have a discomforting effect on scholars who pursue their interests without recognising the historical cultural motives that have offered them those interests, and that in subtle ways shape their assumptions about what they are doing, or how to go about it. The historiography of linguistics justifies itself by seeking to uncover such things which may affect our views and assumptions in linguisics without us being aware of it. I hasten to add that I have not seen studies in the historiography of linguistics that have examined the issue of 19th and early 20th century historical linguistics in connection with institutional racism (indeed the most influential linguists throughout the 20th century, and ONLY the 20th century -- so far, have been outspoken critics of racism when they have noticed it), but I have my own sensibilities and interests that help me interpret such things, and I think the point I made about Nostratic and Pedersen is interesting and relevant. I also hasten to add that discomfort leads to confusion and misunderstanding, so I need to make a further careful and serious response to AMR's last message, since I think he did not fully understand what I was saying, possibly because of the way I said it. He writes: >I have just had a chance to look over Pedersen's book >The Discovery of Language, and contrary to the (in >my view libelous) claims by B. Wald posted on this >list, it is immediately apparent (pp. 101, 321) BW: amazingly enough, decades ago I underlined the very passages in my copy of Pedersen's book that AMR has in mind. They refer to the utter distinction between language and "race", and making inferences about race from reconstructed language family. Pedersen is among the linguists I referred to parenthetically above who criticise racism WHEN THEY RECOGNISE IT. Institutionalised racism is deeper than that. Back to AMR: >that the late great Indo-Europeanist explicilty >and strongly criticizes work (e.g., Mu"ller's) >which used racial criteria to classify >languages, that he himself refers to purely >linguistic criteria as the basis for "Hamitic" >and for connecting this to Semitic (p. 122 >and passim). I also not see that he is anywhere >dwelling on the Egyptians not being "negroes", >and the only possible interpretation of the >passage about Nubians' and Hausas' racial >affiliations is that he is in fact trying to >say that even though the former were not >supposedly (this is of course nonsense) "negroes" >and the latter are, this tells us nothing >about whether their languages belong, because >we do not (this is Pedersen speaking) know >enough of the Nubian language, and the status >of Hausa had not yet been sufficiently studied >to be certain that it is "Hamitic" (which is true). OK. Here's the passage on p122 in Pedersen: "Nubian is interesting because of its ancient literary monuments. ... There are also Nubian inscriptions dating from imperial Rome, in an alphabet based on Egyptian characters. But we still do not understand much of them. *The Nubians are not negroes; but to the negro *race** belong the Haussa, whose language is also disputed..." Many readers can pass over the implications of this passage as innocuous because they are not aware of the historical-intellectual context of the point that "Nubians are not negroes", and how Pedersen in making this statement is (no doubt) unquestioningly accepting (or being duped by) the institutionalised racism of his time, in fact promoting it with a statement which NOW but NOT THEN seems gratuitous. It seems I must add that it has nothing to do with Pedersen's personal feelings or whether or not he was a racist (who cares?), but with a set of assumptions that had developed by his time which reflect an ideologically motivated and intellectually institutionalised racism, and were not challenged by the intellectual mainstream until much later. I must bring some knowledge of the (beyond simply linguistics) historical development of anthropology and other relevant fields which help me interpret this passage of Pedersen's -- why he said it, and what the implications were, even though he himself might have only been dimly aware of them (as a product of his time, but not having any further interest other than demonstrating that he was up to the general intellectual currents of his time), and nevertheless promoted a point of view and frame of mind that made certain avenues of research *less likely*, e.g., that (Hamito-)Semitic (i.e., Afro-Asiatic) and "negro" languages are more closely related GENETICALLY than the former and Indo-European. It might be enough to say that he stated "the Nubians are not negroes" (without citing authorities to support that view) simply because that was the received intellectual wisdom of that time (and somehow he felt it advantageous for his students to be aware of that), but I will return below to WHY that was the intellectual wisdom of that time. I have already started in this paragraph to explain how that could effect his view on the *likely* wider genetic affiliation of Semitic, so I will cite another passage to amplify that before returning to his racial comment (not necessarily racist -- I seem to have to keep saying -- but emanating from racist motivated theories). p.139, winding up a survey of South and Central African languages in which the term "negro" does not appear -- and I will take on my own the responsibility for saying that it does not appear because it went without saying, and he was IN THIS CASE not interested in making any (more) racial comments: "...The remaining languages, after we have rendered unto the Hamites what is the Hamites', may be mutually related and may be more remotely related to the Bantu group; but these relationships cannot be more than hypothetical until we have further information." The inference to be drawn here is that the "Hamitic" languages, in all probability being most closely related to Semitic cannot be more closely related to these other African languages. Either the latter are remotely related to each other or not; THAT's the direction for further research. Let's now make our way back to Nubian. Same page, prior to the quote I just gave. "...On page 122 above I have pointed out that the boundaries between the Sudan languages proper and the Hamitic family cannot be drawn with certainty, and I have mentioned Nubian, along the Nile, and Haussa [BW: Hausa -- Pedersen follows older German spelling] between the Niger and Lake Tchad, as two of the languages in dispute." "Sudan", in fact, is a geographical reference, while "Hamitic" is an assumed linguistic reference, and he does not refer to the "Sudan" languages on p.122 (even the index gives only p.139 as a reference for "Sudan languages", for what that's worth), but I'm being petty here. The point is that Pedersen recognises, following the debates of his time, that Nubian may turn out not to be "Hamitic" -- and indeed it is currently classified as Nilo-Saharan, a large, diverse and potentially controversial family. This is all fine and well, even admirable, as far as Pedersen's informedness in linguistic concerns. Nevertheless, the genetic affiliation of Nubian does not affect the conventional wisdom of the institutionalised racism of the time, because whatever Nubian turns out to be, the Nubians are not "negro". So back to that issue. Why aren't the Nubians "negro"? The short answer is because they had an ancient LITERATE culture, as Pedersen mentioned back on p.123, and according to the conventional wisdom of that time which formerly was an ingredient in justifying slavery and later colonialism (as "the whiteman's burden") the "negroes" did not. The longer answer is that it would have been inconvenient for institutional racism to accept as "negro" an ancient culture that was so highly developed to even be literate before Western intrusion, and it was easy enough for 19th c physical anthropologists to take advantage of local physical variation (throughout the world) to find physical criteria to classify people racially in whatever way WAS convenient to the societies which supported their work, and/or found it USEFUL. (I can't resist the wry comment here that the "anti-intellectual" Goering who said "when I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my -- pistol", was so impatient with squabbles over criteria for who belongs to what race that he also said "A Jew is who I say is!") Read Stephen J. Gould's book "the Mismeasure of Man" for further insight into 19th c physical anthropology, and indeed even the honesty with which anthropologists of that time did their work, often even unaware of the unquestioned assumptions that guided their measurements (apart from such notorious falsifications as Burt's work on IQ). Then you can see why I appreciate the historiography of linguistics' self-justification as an attempt to understand the historical motives which have led to the linguistic theories of today -- a field that interests me even more than the one I have been compelled to discuss here. For that matter, Chomsky's comments in the late 1960s on the then prevalent interest in comparative IQ testing of blacks and whites in the US is also instructive. He asked: if science is being directed to seriously investigate social stereotypes with transparent sociopolitical motives (in this case that blacks are (even) stupider than whites) then why not also whether Jews are more avaricious than other people or that Italians have a greater talent for criminal organisations, etc etc? OK, let's leave Chomsky. Back to the Nubians and Egyptians. I must admit that in a previous message I conflated two ideas when I made it sound like Pedersen was also EXPLICITLY dissociating the Egyptians from the "negroes". In defense against the charge of libel (in AMR's opinion) I submit that much more than the Nubians the ancient Egyptians and their civilisation have long been admired by intellectual Europe (among others) and their contributions to Western civilisation via the Greeks and various other peoples have been continuously acknowledged throughout "history". Consequently, their "racial" classification was much discussed and debated, even before Darwinism and evolution with its possibilities for institutionalised racism were being explored. An informative book to read here is "The Leopard's Spots" particular for the concern among American scientists both in the South and North, both pre-bellum and ante-bellum. Apart from overt expressions of personal racism which fed into their interests and research questions, the author of this book (I don't want to interrupt myself to look up the author, it's late 60s) concluded much like Gould that many of them were intellectually honest and consciencious in accounting for their research that led to socially acceptable conclusions for their time. Anyway, it was a foregone conclusion that the ancient Egyptian were "not negro" (the unresolved problem was were they "white"?) As for Pedersen, what I conflated was much like what I took it on my own responsbility to interpret for his lack of racial comment on the "Bantus" and other South and Central Africans. It went without saying (for him) that the Egyptians were not "negro" -- one need only look at current artist's illustrations of the ancient Egyptians in recent National Geographics (as opposed to much of the ancient Egyptian portrayal of their rulers and nobles) to see that they do not "look negro". Thus, the history of current popular images of the ancient Egyptians still shows its heritage institutional racism. And I guess I have to make the point again here, that that is not to say that the current illustrators of such articles in the National Geographic are "racists". Finally, with regard to the association between the Nubians and the Egyptians. In 20th century popular culture the Nubians are (only) the SLAVES of the ancient Egyptians (sometimes they were, sometimes in late dynasies they were their Pharoahs -- that's NOT part of popular culture). An example is the "Nubian" slave played by a black ("Negro"?) actor to Boris Karloff's "white" resurrected Ancient Egyptian in the 1933 movie "The Mummy". Pedersen, of course, has no patience with this kind of blatant racist ignorance (based on SELECTIVE reporting); hence, contrary to popular (Western) belief, the Nubians were not only literate (i.e., "highly civilised"), but they're not even "negro". (Now if anybody's "black", the Nubians sure are, but only "ignorant" people classify people on such superficial criteria.) I hope I have made my point, and, at the least, it is that much more can be brought to bear in interpreting the writings of a scholar or the orientation and assumptions of various theories than meets the less informed eye, or enters the less informed mind. There is much more in linguistics, historical linguistics, or any other field that fundamentally studies people (or even other animals, or even ANYTHING) than what any practitioner in any field thinks there is, and that is of some interest to me, and I hope to at least some other readers. I like to know something about the larger motivations for my interests are, how I fit into the currents of human thought, and how that might affect some of the assumptions I make or some of the directions of research I enjoy but ordinarioly take for granted. None of us can know "everything", or let the lack of knowledge interfere with what we think is worth pursuing, of course etc etc, but I am always interested in something that could come from anywhere -- who knows where -- that can help me resolve or dissolve some problem that has gripped my attention. I think most scholars are the same; they just differ in what gives them insight -- and what discomforts them. In view of that, I respond to AMR's following comment: >I really would ask that people be more cautious >about posting attacks on the integrity of great >(and esp. dead) scholars, esp. in areas as touchy >even now as "race", without doing their homework. I stand by what I said about Pedersen, and I stand ready to further discuss any issue that readers find touchy. I invite AMR, or anyone else, to give other interpretations to Pedersen's point in saying that "the Nubians are not negroes" (or to further study the implications). I interpret it as a reflection of institutionalised racism that shows the limits of that GREAT scholar's understanding of the nature of institutionalised racism and its effect on the intellectual climate in which he honestly, competently, and even inspiringly did his work. Back to historical linguistics and its current controversies, and especially to Alice Faber's COUNTER-proposal, I have tried to show in a somewhat profound way how preconceived assumptions, whose motivations we may not even be aware of, can affect the research questions which lead us to try to group language families in one way rather than another (following up on traditional questions inspired by outmoded theories, influenced by outmoded societies and their outmoded myths.) P.S. For those who care, what I said about institutionalised racism can be said of any preconceived taken for granted notion, and, in fact, in the final analysis, the more general observation is a truism in science -- and the history of science. Even after Newton concluded that there was a FORCE of gravity, he remained troubled by the Cartesian criticism that he was invoking "occult forces" into a universe that was supposed to operate on strictly "mechanical" principles, and he spent some time in his later years trying to make gravity more mechanical in papers that are politely ignored by his adorers. From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Feb 6 16:55:53 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 11:55:53 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- At 8:41 Uhr -0500 05.02.1999, Scott DeLancey wrote: >But if you're looking for a clear example of an indisputable >family established without any morphological basis, Tai will >do fine. Actually, I mentioned this to Goddard once when we >were disagreeing about exactly this point, and what I remember >him saying (again, he's not responsible for my memory) was, >essentially, well then, we can never really be sure that the >relationship among these languages is genetic. Since Goddard >hasn't ever looked at Tai, I suppose I can imagine how he might >say such a thing, but really--this is a relationship that is >inspectionally evident. I think this is important, and the matter of the necessity to have surefire morphological comparisons to secure a relationship is as well, but I think some clarifications are possible. First of all, I may recall (one of) Meillet's famous formulation(s) on the issue, from his 1914 "Le probleme de la parente des langues", Scientia XV (accents omitted): La demonstration de parente est parfaite si l'on peut expliquer par la transformation des memes elements anciens l'ensemble du systeme grammatical de deux langues distinctes" Meillet 1914, 93 The crucial word here is, I think, "parfaite", since it seems to imply that, even for Meillet, "less-than-perfect", but still viable and to a degree acceptable demonstrations of relationship might exist. Meillet was of course the leading I.E.'ist of his time, and his experiences with I.E. are palpably reflected in these words. I think now, the Tai example doesn't really make a point against morphology being important, nor should it be interpreted as - since morphology is so indespensable - that Tai is only a weakly demonstrable language family. It isn't, and I know since I have spent that half an hour with Li's textbook. Scott DeLancey says that the relationship is inspectionally obvious, and this also my impression. Since I unfortunately did no more study of Tai than that half of an hour, I may be allowed to speculate that this being inspectionally obvious of the relationship is comparable to that we find in, say, Slavic or Romance. Both language families actually never did have to be proposed for the first time - there being no Slavic or Romance Jones, Bopp, or Sajnovics - there closeness is so great that even prescientific inspection will reveal that some notion of "relatedness" - without necessarily a clear idea about how this may have come about, of course - to even the superficial observer. Semitic may be added to this. And in fact this notion of relatedness is generally part of the linguistically untrained speaker of those languages - if at all s/he has access to other members of these families. I repeat, I don't know whether this is comparable to the situation in Tai, but I suspect it to be (please, correct me). In such a case, i.e. with such a close degree of relatedness, the question of "proof" simply is next to irrelevant, I'd say, i.e. (again I'm suspecting only that this is the case with Tai) if the amount of sared lexical items is so overwhelmingly great, and, possibly, long pieces of texts from lg. A may be made comprehensible for speakers of related lg. B by pointing out a limited set of sound-laws and some explanations of, say, divergent syntax. The more so, if the languages in question do not possess anything in the way of a large quantity of bound affixes, organized in intricate paradigms. Again, I take it Tai is more like Chinese in this respect than like Kiranti, Chukchee or Abkhaz. The point where morphology does gain some importance, and considerable importance, is where a) the relationship is not close enough to be inspectionally obvious, and b) where the languages in question *do* possess such a morphological system. All I want to say at this stage is that, with languages of this kind, I'd expect any claim of relatedness to tell me at least something (the more the better) about the coming-about of these system, since *explaining* things we see is what making hypotheses is all about. I short: we don't need much morphological arguments for any claim of relatedness if a) the languages are as closely related as, say, Slavic, Romance or maybe Tai (for argument's sake, please overlook here that, in the case of Slavic and -less so - Romace, common morphology is of course present and definitely part of the impression of relatedness it makes for the untrained eye - but I suspect it could do without); just as a whim of the moment (please, don't press me anyone on it) : with Semitic, morphology is so close that we perhaps could do without vocabulary ???? b): a) holds and the languages don't have any morphology worth speaking of anyway BUT: if a) doesn't hold and b) doesn't hold either, morphology should play a more important role, at least in the sense of Meillet's formulation. Otherwise, an inevitable consequence would be to say that, while the relationship seems to be sure, all the bound morphology of the languages has been developed after the split-up of the parent language, which then inevitably has to be dated far back in time. Such a scenario is certainly not impossible, one may at times be forced to say this, and believe it, too. But such a demonstration of relationship would be - no, not wrong, misguided, or nonsensical - it would only not so perfect as in other cases. This may even mean that proper reconstruction of the parent language may be so difficult as to border on being impossible (though I don't want to verdict this); S-T may, just may, be an example for this. While languages may be related *closely* or *distantly* ( as Slavic lgs. are surely closer related that I.E. lgs.), a notion of being *more* or *less* rlated seems to make no sense. What does seem to make sense, though, is a notion of *more* or *le* *transparently* related, and for the determination of the latter, morphology - if present in the languages - does play an important role. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 7 17:41:35 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:41:35 EST Subject: Yakhontov In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Just a clarification about what I said about Yakhontov. Yakhontov's work was brought to my attention by Sergei Starostin, replying to me in the pages of Mother Tongue. Sergei affirmed Yakhontov's principle in terms of known cognates in languages known to be related, but then went on to adduce a further version involving nothing but perceived resemblances, and to use this against me. He seemed to present this second version as though it were the same thing as the first version, something for which I took him to task at the time. I then went looking for a published source for Yakhontov's principle, and discovered there was none: Yakhontov had never published it. But Sergei did publish a summary in his book on Altaic and Japanese, and somebody who had this book kindly mailed me the relevant passage. From this passage, which I did not find totally explicit, I gathered the impression that Starostin was imputing *both* versions to Yakhontov, and that's what I said in my posting. I was then contacted by another Russian linguist who knows Yakhontov personally, and who assured me that the second version was not Yakhontov's. At present, then, I conclude that the second version, involving only perceived resemblances, is Starostin's own idea, and not Yakhontov's. My apologies if I've misled anybody, but I was doing my best to find out the truth. That's not easy when the originator doesn't publish his work and the only published source is both unavailable to me in Brighton and not very clear anyway. But I think I've got an accurate account into my dictionary. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Feb 7 17:42:19 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:42:19 EST Subject: Yakhontov In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > Moreover, Larry makes an even bigger mistake (or else someone again > misinformed him about what Starostin says). Specifically, he claims > that the Yakhontov method is to look at superficial phonetic > similarities. However, Starostin (p. 25-26) clearly says that he > (Starostin) is looking at matches based on sound correspondences and > all other claims of the Altaic theory (such as morphological > analysis, etymology, etc.), and indeed relates words which LOOK > nothing alike, but are cognate under the Altaic theory, e.g., Turkic > *yapur-gak : Mongolic *lab-c^in : Middle Korean *nip(h). Since > Yakhontov had not published a detailed description of his method, I > cannot claim that this is how HE would have used it, but this is > certainly how Starostin uses it. > This goes to the heart of the whole fight about what role phonetic > similarity plays in comparative linguistics (Larry claims none at > all. I claim a subordinate but important and indeed probably crucial > one). But note that Starostin is not doing anything that Larry could > object to on this score. He is NOT using phonetic similarity at > all. Starostin in his book may well be doing exactly what Alexis says. I haven't seen the book, only one paragraph of it. However, in the Mother Tongue exchange, Sergei was most certainly working with mere perceived phonological and semantic resemblances, and with nothing else at all. That is obvious to anyone who reads the relevant passage, and that is what got me confused about what Yakhontov was saying in the first place. Not guilty. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From faber at haskins.yale.edu Sun Feb 7 17:43:23 1999 From: faber at haskins.yale.edu (Alice Faber) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:43:23 EST Subject: Nostratic and Nilo-Saharan Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I am an idiot, I confess it. When Alice Faber and Benji Wald attributed > to, respectively, a false notion of a > "Judeo-Christian cultural tradition" and racism the fact that > Nostraticists have sought to connect Afro-Asiatic to Indo- European rather > than to Nilo-Saharan, I said many things, especially about the intolerable > racism charge, which, while true, missed the point that in fact > Nostraticists HAVE looked at Nilo-Saharan. I do not know who precisely > but Shevoroshkin (1989:3) and Kaiser and Shevoroshkin (1988:310) include > not just Nilo-Saharan but also Niger-Kordofanian (another group of > languages spoken by people whom racists call Fblack' rather than Fwhite' > or something in between) in Nostratic and allude to work which has > established it. As I recall, I objected to including this statement in the > paper I coauthored with Shevoroshkin (see below) in 1991 because he could > not provide me with a copy of the relevant literature. I suspect it was > something never published at all or only samizdated, but I do not know > that for a fact. I'm glad to find that I had been mistaken in my impression that Nilo-Saharan and other language families had been ignored in long-range language comparison. I've undergone enough of a career shift since 1988 that I haven't been able to follow the literature as well as I might have earlier. As for my assertion that some of those who search out a link between Semitic and Indo-European being in part motivated by a perspective involving the Judeo-Christian tradition, I'd like to make clear that I'm not including any modern investigators of Nostratic here. I'm thinking of folks who simply don't care (or perhaps don't know) that Hebrew is part of Semitic is part of Afro- Asiatic, but simply look for superficial similarities between Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. There's a big difference between saying that Hebrew and Latin are related and saying that Hebrew and Latin are related because Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European are part of Nostratic. Both are hypotheses that can be discussed, and perhaps refuted, but only the latter is consistent with a wide body of published literature. Many folks who work on the history of Semitic languages are quite sensitive, perhaps over sensitive to the difference. Alice Faber From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Sun Feb 7 17:47:02 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:47:02 EST Subject: Yakhontov Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > > Anyway, Larry also relates two claims supposed to have been by Yakhontov > about these lists in relation to language relatedness, one of which are: > > Claim 1. > If two languages are genetically related, then the proportion of cognates > in the 35-word list will always be greater than the proportion in the > 65-word list. I think it is easy to straighten out this problem. Let's define two variables; P := the proportion in the 35 list is greater than or equal to the proportion in the 65-list R:= The languages are related (genetically) Then claim 1 is R => P where => is the implication sign of logic. > Claim 2 acc. to Larry: > "If the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 35-word list is higher > than the proportion of phonetic resemblances in the 65-word list, then > this is evidence that the languages are related". This makes the claim that; P => R Obviously this is not equivalent to claim 1 above. > Actually, what Starostin (1991) has, though, is something quite different: > > "But if the percentage of matches (Russian: sovpadenij) is identical [sc. > in both sublists--AMR] or the percentage of matches (Russian: sovpadenij) > the 35-word list is less than (or equal to) the proportion of phonetic > resemblances in the 65-word list, then the parallelism (Russian: > skhodstvo) between the languages is accidental (i.e., there exists an > accidental coincidence [Russian: sovpadenie] or the result of active > contacts and borrowings." This makes the claim P' => R' This statement via the contrapositive is equivalent to R => P which is claim 1. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From faber at haskins.yale.edu Sun Feb 7 17:48:34 1999 From: faber at haskins.yale.edu (Alice Faber) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:48:34 EST Subject: Holger Pedersen and "Race" Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Benji Wald: > >I have just had a chance to look over Pedersen's book > >The Discovery of Language, and contrary to the (in > >my view libelous) claims by B. Wald posted on this > >list, it is immediately apparent (pp. 101, 321) > > BW: amazingly enough, decades ago I underlined the very passages in my copy of > Pedersen's book that AMR has in mind. They refer to the utter distinction > between > language and "race", and making inferences about race from reconstructed > language > family. Pedersen is among the linguists I referred to parenthetically > above who > criticise racism WHEN THEY RECOGNISE IT. Institutionalised racism is > deeper than > that. I'm having a little trouble following the above, because I'm reading from my paperback English translation (copyright 1931). I think it's important when committing exegesis, which is, after all, what we're doing with this close textual reading, to bear in mind that this is a *translated* work. > Back to AMR: > > >that the late great Indo-Europeanist explicilty > >and strongly criticizes work (e.g., Mu"ller's) > >which used racial criteria to classify > >languages, that he himself refers to purely > >linguistic criteria as the basis for "Hamitic" > >and for connecting this to Semitic (p. 122 I don't see Pedersen's criticism of M"uller's racial criteria as strong, though he does criticize it (p. 117, for those scoring at home). And he does refer to linguistic criteria for Hamitic and Semitic. Given the state of knowledge at his time (he lists three subgroups of Hamitic, Egyptian, Berber, and "South Hamitic" [=Cushitic, roughly], but no Chadic). He correctly raises the question of whether Hamitic and Semitic are co-ordinate branches. > I hope I have made my point, and, at the least, it is that much more can be > brought to bear in interpreting the writings of a scholar or the > orientation and assumptions of various theories than meets the less > informed eye, or enters the less informed mind. There is much more in > linguistics, historical linguistics, or any other field that fundamentally > studies people (or even other animals, or even ANYTHING) than what any > practitioner in any field thinks there is, and that is of some interest to > me, and I hope to at least some other readers. I like to know something > about the larger motivations for my interests are, how I fit into the > currents of human thought, and how that might affect some of the > assumptions I make or some of the directions of research I enjoy but > ordinarioly take for granted. None of us can know "everything", or let the > lack of knowledge interfere with what we think is worth pursuing, of course > etc etc, but I am always interested in something that could come from > anywhere -- who knows where -- that can help me resolve or dissolve some > problem that has gripped my attention. I think most scholars are the same; > they just differ in what gives them insight -- and what discomforts them. I agree here...I'm bringing something different to Pedersen than either Alexis or Benji is. In the section on Semitic and Hamitic, I find many gratuitous references to Christianity (and some non-gratuitous references, as well). This is, of course, partly Pedersen and partly me, and others might disagree about how gratuitous these references are. The questions Benji is encouraging us to ask are whether these references would have been perceived as gratuitous in the mid 1920s when Pedersen wrote, and if not what cultural presuppositions might have motivated Pedersen to make these references. I'm really out of my depth when it comes to this kind of analysis, so I'll leave it at that. I think it's worth saying that Pedersen's work is an admirable state of the art description of historical and comparative linguistic knowledge for its era. There is little of substance that is inconsistent with the knowledge of its day, beyond the simplification that is inevitable in an introductory survey. There are many prescient remarks. However, much in it is outdated. We have, after all, made progress in the past 60 years. What bothers me in some instances is the *tone*, a tone that reflects cultural assumptions that I find objectionable. This is not to say that Pedersen knew that his work would have such an impact 60 years down the road, or that he would have written differently, if he had known. Alice Faber From Georg at home.ivm.de Sun Feb 7 17:52:44 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:52:44 EST Subject: Yakhontov Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 22:01:56 +0100 >To: manaster at umich.edu >From: Ralf-Stefan Georg >Subject: Re: Yakhontov >Cc: >Bcc: >X-Attachments: > > > >>Actually, what Starostin (1991) has, though, is something quite different: >> >>"But if the percentage of matches (Russian: sovpadenij) is identical [sc. >>in both sublists--AMR] or the percentage of matches (Russian: sovpadenij) >>the 35-word list is less than (or equal to) the proportion of phonetic >>resemblances in the 65-word list, then the parallelism (Russian: >>skhodstvo) between the languages is accidental (i.e., there exists an >>accidental coincidence [Russian: sovpadenie] or the result of active >>contacts and borrowings." >> >>If I am not mistaken, this means that the second claim is not really >>separate claim at all. It says the same thing as claim 1, viz., that >>related >>languages are supposed to look a certain way, but it is not stated or >>logically implied that languages that look that way must be related. >> >> >>Moreover, Larry makes an even bigger mistake (or else someone again >>misinformed him about what Starostin says). Specifically, he claims that >>the Yakhontov method is to look at superficial phonetic similarities. >>However, Starostin (p. 25-26) clearly says that he (Starostin) is looking >>at matches based on sound correspondences and all other claims of the >>Altaic theory (such as morphological analysis, etymology, etc.) > I'm the misinformer. My translation of the crucial passage was : " If two languages are indeed related, the number ("procent") of matches in the 35-words-list has to be higher than in the rest of the 100-words-list. If the number of matches is equal (or higher in the 65-l. than in the 35-l.) the resemblance of the two languages is fortuitous (i.e. either completely fortuitous or the result of active contacts and borrowing)." > >I translated "sovpadenie" by "match" and, towards the end of the sentence, >"skhodstvo mezhdu jazykami" as "resemblance of the languages", since that >is obviously to be understood here. It is not defined in this passage what >a "sovpadenie" means, so "match" is the fairest of translations. If the >test reveals nagative results, then the languages show some "skhodstvo", >but it is not significant, according to Yakhontov, consequently the >translation "resemblance" is warranted. > >That Starostin works within a framework where "resemblances" don't count, >but is looking for regular correspondances is clear from the rest of the >book and, I thought, was well-known. Whether this attempt was successful >is a different question (but, please, don't forget that the book does >*not* contain any morphology, since Starostin says a) that it has been >done elsewhere (although in a framework completely different from his own, >by Baskakov) and b) in a somewhat difficult and possibly garbled passage, >he says that typology is not useful for classification "*and therefore* >I'm not going to treat morphology"; though I could have misunderstood this >passage). > > >I stay out of the discussion of the Yakhontov test, but please note that >his formulation implies what seems to be a method of asserting >non-relatedness, as is quite clear from both your and my translation. If >the percentages work out a certain way, then the languages look similar >fortuitously or due to contact. I'd not subscribe to either part of this >principle, but the stage is yours. > > Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de Sun Feb 7 17:56:17 1999 From: w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de (WB (in Frankfurt today)) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:56:17 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I will not get into the various comments on the quality of Laurent Sagart's work on SIno-Austronesian which have been floating around on this list during the last few days, since most of them were so superficial and based upon hearsay and faint recollections to such an astonishing degree, that I do not consider it worthwhile. Instead, I have forwarded the exchange on ST and AN to Sagart, who, I am sure, is qualified much better than me to reply to the issues raised in the various postings by Alexis, Scott et al. Let me just stress, however, since it is _very_ easy on a general discussion list like HISTLING, which deals with so many different language families and genetic theories, to generate wrong, and possibly, longlived impressions to the effect that the work of Sagart belongs into the cate- gory of "weird speculations", that he is somehow involun- tarily stuck with a "dead-wrong" idea which he fears to withdraw, that he does not know the langugaes he is working on etc. etc., that nothing could be further from the truth (see Sagart's own posting on Sino-Austronesian). As far as the Old Chinese side of the comparison is con- cerned, it should be pointed out that Sagart has written the _only_ serious comment on Baxter's _Handbook_ (_Dia- chronica_ X [1993] 2: 237-260; with the exception of EG Pulleyblank, who does not accept the six-vowel system at all and argues from a totally different perspective), that he is now certainly the most active scholar working on Old Chinese morphology and root-theory (watch out for his forthcoming book, J. Benjamins), and that he has pu- blished widely on a variety of crucial issues in Old Chinese reconstruction (for a list of his publications cf. http:// www.ehess.fr/centres/crlao/crlao.html), which are extremely important, irrespective of what your favorite position on the external relationships of OC might be. I believe to be entitled to say this, since I among the very few people who have ever tried to take Sagart's criticisms of some of the details of Baxter's reconstruction seriously by testing them against a corpus of uncorrupted bronze inscriptional sources, rather than edited texts (for an online-abstract of my dissertation see , for a more extended version cf. _Cahiers de Linguistique ? Asie Orientale_ 26 [1997] 1), and since Sagart's observations have been by and large corroborated by these data. My own views on ST and ST-AN notwithstanding (for which see my review of the volume by WSY Wang, quoted by Alexis, in one of the last issues of _Language_), I would appreciate it if those who think that Sagart's AN -- ST com- parisons are wrong, or who criticize his reassinging certain "classical" ST reconstructions to the layer of TB -- OC borrowings, should present some evidence to substantiate their criticisms. This said, here are a few more impressionistic comments (sorry if this is in a wrong chronological order --- HISTLING messages have reached me in a totally chaotic succession recently): At 16:58 04.02.99 EST, Alexis wrote AMR| [...] so too I think AMR| that the few critics of ST are really reaction to the AMR| unsatisfactory state of the actual work on ST (and AMR| again just as in Altaic to some extent I suspect that AMR| Miller is reacting to ST as it was some decades ago AMR| esp. to Benedict's work much as the anti-Altaicists AMR| are still really responding to the errors of Ramstedt AMR| in the 50s and Poppe in the 60s). True up to a certain degree (Miller's reviews of Benedicts's _Conspectus_, Shafer's _Introduction to Sino-Tibetan_, and Sedlaachek's _Das Gemein-Sino-Tibetische_ etc. are certainly among the harshest specimens of that genre in the whole post- war sinological literature). But Miller's famous article on the subject ("The Sino-Tibetan Hypothesis", _Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology_ 59 [1988] 2: 509-540) does _not_ refer to the work on ST during the 60ies and 70ies, it is in fact nothing more than an extended review article on W. South Coblin's _A Sino- logist's Handlist of Sino-Tibetan Lexical Comparisons_ (Monumenta Serica Monograph Series; 18, Nettetal: Steyler Verlag 1988). Notice that Coblin, the author of many important works and articles on Old and Medieval Chinese as well as Tibetan, has been reported by Victor Mair recently to have joined the ranks of those who believe that there is no such thing as ST, or at least, it can not be recon- structed in any meaningful sense of the word. Ditto for recent advances in the reconstruction of Old Chinese, which are described as "endless rehashing of the same old data", the hermeneutics and general feasability of which have been attacked by Coblin, Norman and some of his students all over the place, so that the climate within OC phonology, is, unfortunately, sometimes not quite as pleasant as Alexis would have it. Anyway, I wonder what a review of Peiros' & Starostins, _ETymological Dictionary of Five Sino- Tibetan Languages_ (5fasc., Canberra, 1997?) would look like ... Alexis continues: AMR| More legitimately, I've heard the argument made (by Chris Beckwith, AMR| I think, among others, though he shouldn't be held hostage to my AMR| imperfect memory) that ST can't be considered *proven* because the AMR| lack of morphology in Chinese makes it impossible to find the kind AMR| of nice syntagmatic and paradigmatic morphological correspondences AMR| that make us so confident of Indo-European or Semitic or Algic. Possible, although Beckwith' position is more along the lines that some of the morphological parallels quoted in favour of ST are depen- dent on seriously flawed Tibetan data (cf. i.e., contra Pulleyblank, "The morphological argument for the existence of Sino-Tibetan", in: _Pan-Asiatic Linguistics; Proceedings of the Fourth Int?l. Symp. on Languages & Linguistics_, vol. 3: 812-26, Bangkok [:Mahidol UP] 1996), that Tibetan has genetic links with IE (cf. an article, co-authored with M. Walter, published in the proceedings of the Graz meeting on Tibetology, the exact bibliographical references of which I cannot check here at home), and that Old Chinese might be genealogically related to Old Japanese (cf. his contribution at the last SIno- Tibetan Conference in Lund, October 1998)! The other anti-Sino-Tibetan scholar who has been quoted widely in the literature surrounding the Xinjiang mummy-findings is Tsung-tung Chang (Frankfurt). Contrary to Pulleyblank, who thinks that PIE is remotely related to OC _as part of ST_, Chang totally rejects the validity of ST (cf. "Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese. A New Thesis on the Emergence of Chinese Language and Civilization in the Late Neolithic Age", _Sino-Platonic Papers_ 7 [1988]: 1-56). Since the controversy around remote connections with IE has been covered in a massive (and in parts rather violent!) exchange between EG Pul- leyblank and Victor Mair in the inaugural issue of _The Int'l. Review of CHinese Linguistics_ (1996, pp. 1-50, including valuable comments by Kortlandt, Sagart, Keightley, Fitzgerald-Huber, WSY Wang; still heavier rejoinders & surrejoinders still forthcoming in the next issue!), I will limit myself to say that Pulleyblank is barely exaggerating when he writes that "[Chang's] ... speculations are, if anything, less soundly based than those of Edkins (1871) and Schlegel (1872) in the middle of the last century. [...] He seems innocent of the principle of regularity of sound change and feels free to reconstruct Old CHinese forms to match his supposed Indo- European cognates without any of the troublesome constraints that respect for that principle would impose ...". At 11:51 06.02.99 EST, Alexis wrote about AMR| ... Austronesian borrowings into Old Chinese. AMR| Am I missing something? Is the question whether anyone AMR| BESIDES Laurent Sagart is finding such borrowings? AMR| I would like to hear if there is. Well, first of all, Sagart is of course not the first scholar who has written about early AN-OC lexical contacts (be they genetical or borrowings), cf. i.e. the early work of August COnrady (1916, 1923) and Konrad Wulff (1942). Secondly, Zheng-Zhang Shangfang (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Pan Wuyun (Shanghai) and some other PRC scholars who are arguing for a Sino-Austric (+- Hmong-Mienic) superfamily have produced & published lists of Sino- Austric comparanda (of _very_ varying quality). There is also an article "A comparison of reconstructed Austronesian, Old Chinese and Austronesian" by Lee C. Hogan, _Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area_ 16 (1993) 2: 1-55. But these are, as far as I can see, essen- tially lists of lookalikes without anything like a serious compara- tive framework behind them. Finally a short historical note re: origins of the debate that shared morphology is crucial for the demonstration of genetical relatedness, Meillet's position on East Asian languages etc. --- The discussion, as far as concerned with Old Chinese and its presumably "isolating" root structure, goes back much further, at least to the middle of the 19th century and Georg von der Gabe- lentz', "Sur la possibilit? de prouver l?existence d?une affinit? g?n?alogique entre les langues dites indochinoises" (_Atti del IV congresso internazionale degli Orientalisti_, vol. 2: 283-95, Florence 1881). Here, the great grammarian of Classical Chinese tries to rebut the widespread misconception of his time (and, indeed, much of the 20th century as well), that the alleged _mono- syllabism_ of Old CHinese and the general "aversion du chinois pour les ?l?ments formels" associated with it would somehow preclude the possibility of internal reconstruction and external copmpari- sons. (On the notion of "monosyllabism", inextricably linked with "isolating" during this period cf. also G. Ineichen, "Historisches zum Begriff des Monosyllabismus im Chinesischen", _Historiographia Linguistica_ 14 [1987] 3: 265-282 and my forthcoming rev. article on J. PAckard ed., _New approaches to CHinese word formation_, Am- sterdam 1998), to be published in the _Int'l. Review for CHinese Linguistics_ (Hong Kong) 1999). Von der Gabelentz shows, how the Old Chinese pronoun system encapsulates certain elements of in- flexion (an idea later inherited by Karlgren), and how these could be possibly matched with similar systems in TB, before concluding, categorically: "Le monosyllabisme, nous l?avons vu, ne prouve rien". Cheers, Wolfgang ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Wolfgang Behr, Lecturer in Chinese History & Philosophy Dept. of East Asian Studies, Ruhr-University Bochum, FRG mail: OAW, Universitaetsstr. 150, UB-5, 44780 Bochum, FRG Fax +49-234-709-4449; ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Feb 7 17:56:55 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:56:55 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <36BC6AE2.95956C15@fs.tufs.ac.jp> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- "Robert R. Ratcliffe" wrote: >Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the Nostratic idea started in >the 19th century as a way to link what was then known about language >families with the Biblical narrative. There were supposed to be three >families corresponding to the three sons of Noah-- Semitic, Hamitic, and >Japhetic (IE). Other families were gradually added. I believe Pedersen coined the term "Nostratic" in the twentieth century, but I'll leave Pedersen aside for two reasons: I have not read him on Nostratic, and I don't think the modern work on Nostratic (Illich-Svitych, Dolgopol'skij, Bomhard) owes very much to Pedersen except for the name. >Now from what (little) I know of the modern Nostratic work, the best, or >at least most obvious argument for a common link are the similarities in >the system of pronouns (including the verb conjugation) of IE, Uralic, >and Altaic. But AA languages show a radically different system. > >[..] > >So who does argue for an IE-AA link and why? Illich-Svitych, Dolgopol'skij, Bomhard, to name a few. Illich-Svitych's and Bomhard/Kerns' Nostratic dictionaries list a large number of proposed Nostratic etymologies including IE and AA reflexes (Illich-Svitych includes only roots that he has recognized in more than two families, so there are none involving *only* IE and AA; Bomhard/Kerns if I remember correctly, does include a number of IE-AA-only proposals). Each of these etymologies (and there are many) should be evaluated on its own merits. I believe a number of them are quite convincing. I don't think it's justified to say that there exist *no* similarities between the verb conjugations of IE and AA. The stative/perfective endings (as found in Semitic, Egyptian, Berber) are readily comparable to the IE perfect and the Hittite hi-conjugation (as well as the related medio-passive forms). The only sound-law that is required is that (pre-)PIE at some stage changed absolute final *-k (which does not occur in PIE at all) to *-H2. We have: Proto-Semitic Egyptian Hittite Indo-European (Lipin'ski) (Loprieno) 1. *-ku -kj -hi *-H2e 2. *-ka ~ *-ta -tj -ti (-*tHi) *-tH2e *-ki ~ *-ti 3. *-0 -j -i *-e *-at 1. *-na -wjn -weni *-me(n) 2. *-kanu ~ *-tanu -twjn -teni *-t(H)e *-kina ~ *-tina 3. *-u: -wj -nzi (*-nti) *-e:r (*-ent) *-a: -tj We can reconstruct Proto-Nostratic *-k, *-tk, *-0; *-wen, *-tkwen, ? (Note that *(s1)tkwen- is the Kartvelian 2p.pl. pronoun). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 17:58:54 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:58:54 EST Subject: Arabic and IE In-Reply-To: <36BC6AE2.95956C15@fs.tufs.ac.jp> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I am curious about something. This whole thread started with Alexis > criticizing me for not paying proper attention to work being done on > "Semitic-IE" comparison. But is there in fact anyone who is now working > on or arguing for an IE-Afroasiatic grouping (either within or out of > Nostratic)? First, I want to thank Robert for taking my criticism seriously enough to pursue the questions it raises. I also want to be careful in responding. The way it is framed I am not sure if it asking whether anyone wants to group IE and AA together as a proper subfamily of Nostratic or whether Nostratic or other scholars are pursuing the idea of IE and AA being related. As to the former, I don't think so, although I myself keep thinking that some of the specific proposals that have been made with Nostratic about the connections between IE and AA verbal affixes for example may point to a closer connection than is normally assumed. Mostly though I am really trying to point out that, even if Nostratic is valid, we really know nothing much about its branching. Overall, it seems as though the lexical comparisons are particularly strong between IE, Uralic, and Altaic, whereas grammatical ones seem to be especially strong between IE, Uralic, and AA. The question I like to pose nowadays in the form I did in my earlier posting: Could it be that IE together with Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber form a proper subfamily of AA itself (which at first sounds absurd until we realize just how different Cushitic and Chadic are from the above) is intended to (a) show just how little we do know and (b) challenge the few of us who work on Nostratic at all to do something substantive about the classification issues. I am not making any claims at all, only asking questions. As to the other part of the question, there are very few people actually working on Nostratic. In fact "Nostraticist" is a very misleading term. Most "Nostraticists" are linguist who strongly support Nostratic but do not at all or at best rarely work on it. This applies to almost all of the Moscow scholars who are usually caled by this term. On the other hand, the people who actually work on Nostratic do not necessarily support it, funny though that they may sound. I myself have proposed several revisions to Nostratic w/o being committed to the theory. In my view, it is wrong to adopt a theory before you know how good it is and before you have worked on it yourself in most cases. Rather you decide that it is good ENOUGH to spend time on and then spend the time. This in my view is the one central problem we face in both theoretical and historiacl linguistics today that people have been taught to sign on before doing any work and contrariwise to refuse to do any work before signing on--where by 'sign on' I mean become a devotee, a followed, an adherent, a supporter--whatever the term is. Finally, there are of course people who ignore Nostratic and work on comparing IE and Semitic, but this strikes as no more scholarly today than it was in the 1920's or even earlier when Pedersen and others pointed out you cannot talk about Semitic and IE w/o talking about AA. > > Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the Nostratic idea started in > the 19th century as a way to link what was then known about language > families with the Biblical narrative. There were supposed to be three > families corresponding to the three sons of Noah-- Semitic, Hamitic, and > Japhetic (IE). Other families were gradually added. > This is in fact incorrect. Nothing could be further from the truth. The man who gave us the idea of Nostratic and the term, Holger Pedersen, in fact spent an inordinate amount of time just trying to show how misleading the term 'Semitic' is precisely because the Biblical assocaitions have nothing to do with the case. The work on Nostratic actually goes back to work, the best and most abundant of which was done by several Scandinavian linguists like Mo/ller, Anderson, Wiklund, etc., on connecting IE to on the one hand Semitic and on the other Uralic (or Uralic and Altaic). Pedersen as far as I know was the first to propose that these efforts point to a far bigger unity which he called Nostratic in or around 1903. He himself did little work on the theory himself, atlhough at the 1933 congress of linguists he did advance some arguments for Nostratic and engaged in a lively debate with such skeptics as Trubetzkoy and others. No, there is no more of a Biblical connection here than there is with Alice Faber's imaginary "Judeo-Christian" or Benji Wald's even more imaginary racist ideas. But I would very much appreciate hearing where you think you picked this up, There are many vicious rumors circulating about Nostratic and the scholars who worked on it, and I try from time to time to deal with some of them in print. So any references would be apprecaited or even any hints as to who spreads this disinformation. BTW, Holger Pedersen's The Discovery of Language (a title imposed by an American publisher, not his own), which was once one of the most widely known basic books in our field, deals with the state of comparative ling generally and hence includes what little as known or thought of Nostratic in the early period, It is in any case a very fine book and an irreplaceable one for anyone with an interest in the history of linguistics. For more recent work on Nostratic, I posted some basic references earlier. > Now from what (little) I know of the modern Nostratic work, the best, or > at least most obvious argument for a common link are the similarities in > the system of pronouns (including the verb conjugation) of IE, Uralic, > and Altaic. Not entirely. IE and Uralic yes but Altaic not so much. And there have been proposals linking IE verb morphology quite intimately with AA and also Kartvelian. > But AA languages show a radically different system. (The > best evidence for AA itself is similarities in this same subsystem). Not necessarily. Dolgopolsky and perhaps others independently have argued that what they take the most archaic parts of the verbal inflectional system in IE and AA are quite strikingly related. I am not endorsing this at least not fully. I am just pointing that this is a point addressed at reasonable length in the literature. Also, re AA, it is true that the relationship of Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, and some but not all of Cushitic (languages like Somali) was noticed early on and argued above on the basis of obvious pronominal and verb-inflectional parallels (Pedersen's op. cit. book, p. 121 is a good quick reference for nonspecialists), there are other groups of Cushitic lgs where this is not the case. And one of the groups often assigned to AA, Omotic, is extremely divergent in this regard, and in fact its AA status still (or agai?) controversial > The > older arguments for a Semitic-IE relation relied, I believe, on things > like presence of a two-gender system and a dual number-- This has nothing whatever to do with Nostratic scholarship of any stripe. There have been and I think still are people who say such things, some of whom are academics with impressive resumes, but not among Nostratic comparativists, not now, not a hundred years ago. > broad > typological properties, Which as you know have nothing to do with language relatedness, a point Pedersen, Greenberg, and so many other fine linguists have had to repeat so much and so often. > which are in any case absent from Uralic and > Altaic (though I recently heard that old Mongolian had gender). > Doerfer talks about gender as an argument against the validity of Altaic, I believe. > So I suspect that the inclusion of AA in nostratic is purely an accident > of history-- a relic of the pre-scientific 19th century roots of the > Nostratic proposal-- That is just not so. And you have to distinguish two kinds of thought about language in the 19th cent AND today (scientific vs. nonscientific rather than prescientific). The scientific comp. linguists who linked AA with IE (or Nostratic generally) were some of the finest scientific comp linguists of the time and I would argue the same is true today. > rather than something that any contemporary > linguist who knows the material and the methodology has seriously > proposed. Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky, who created modern Nostratic studiesin the 1960's and Bomhard, who came up with a similar though distinct approach independently a little later, all did/do. To the extent that I accept Nostratic, I find the AA connection no less compelling than Kartvelian and more than Dravidian, for example. Starostin is the one major Nostraticist (although he actually has done little published work on Nostratic) who has argued that AA is a sister of Nostratic and not a daughter, but this is an issue of branching rather than saying that there is no relationship. > I, for one, am very impressed that Greenberg doesn't include > AA in Nostratic. I did not think he had published his work on the topic, so I cannot judge whether his reasons are something to praise or otherwise. All I know is that he excludes AA from what he calls Eurasiatic, which is similar to Nostratic, but I am rather sure that he, like Starostin, does not reject a relationship but merely thinks it is a more distant one. >So who does argue for an IE-AA link and why? On the basis of the numerous lexical and grammatical forms which are argued to be cognate, to be found in works by Illich-Svitych, Dolgopolsky, Bomhard, above all, and some others. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 17:59:24 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:59:24 EST Subject: Yakhontov In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > Just a clarification about what I said about Yakhontov. > > Yakhontov's work was brought to my attention by Sergei Starostin, > replying to me in the pages of Mother Tongue. Sergei affirmed > Yakhontov's principle in terms of known cognates in languages known to > be related, but then went on to adduce a further version involving > nothing but perceived resemblances, and to use this against me. He > seemed to present this second version as though it were the same thing > as the first version, something for which I took him to task at the > time. Starostin denies that he presented such a second version. But if he did or if anybody did, your critique if absolutely compelling and lucidly presented and I recall criticizing Starostin and the editors of MT in a posting to the list for not acknowledging just how right you were--much as I more recently criticize you for not being fairer to them. > > I then went looking for a published source for Yakhontov's principle, > and discovered there was none: Yakhontov had never published it. But > Sergei did publish a summary in his book on Altaic and Japanese, and > somebody who had this book kindly mailed me the relevant passage. From > this passage, which I did not find totally explicit, I gathered the > impression that Starostin was imputing *both* versions to Yakhontov, and > that's what I said in my posting. But in fact you misread or misinterpreted what he says there. I think Mark Hubey explained the difference quite well in his posting, by the way. > > I was then contacted by another Russian linguist who knows Yakhontov > personally, and who assured me that the second version was not > Yakhontov's. At present, then, I conclude that the second version, > involving only perceived resemblances, is Starostin's own idea, and not > Yakhontov's. But where do we find a clear statement by Starostin of this second version? Certainly not in the 1991 book on Altaic. > My apologies if I've misled anybody, but I was doing my best to find out > the truth. That's not easy when the originator doesn't publish his work > and the only published source is both unavailable to me in Brighton and > not very clear anyway. Starostin's book is entirely clear. Anybody can judge by reading the passage which I have e-distributed. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 18:00:08 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 13:00:08 EST Subject: Yakhontov In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > > Moreover, Larry makes an even bigger mistake (or else someone again > > misinformed him about what Starostin says). Specifically, he claims > > that the Yakhontov method is to look at superficial phonetic > > similarities. However, Starostin (p. 25-26) clearly says that he > > (Starostin) is looking at matches based on sound correspondences and > > all other claims of the Altaic theory (such as morphological > > analysis, etymology, etc.), and indeed relates words which LOOK > > nothing alike, but are cognate under the Altaic theory, e.g., Turkic > > *yapur-gak : Mongolic *lab-c^in : Middle Korean *nip(h). Since > > Yakhontov had not published a detailed description of his method, I > > cannot claim that this is how HE would have used it, but this is > > certainly how Starostin uses it. > > > This goes to the heart of the whole fight about what role phonetic > > similarity plays in comparative linguistics (Larry claims none at > > all. I claim a subordinate but important and indeed probably crucial > > one). But note that Starostin is not doing anything that Larry could > > object to on this score. He is NOT using phonetic similarity at > > all. > > Starostin in his book may well be doing exactly what Alexis says. > I haven't seen the book, only one paragraph of it. Not "may well have", did. I don't see why even on a simple matter of reading a few pages of a Russian text, what I say has to be doubted. > > However, in the Mother Tongue exchange, Sergei was most certainly > working with mere perceived phonological and semantic resemblances, and > with nothing else at all. That is obvious to anyone who reads the > relevant passage, and that is what got me confused about what Yakhontov > was saying in the first place. I think it is rather a case of Starostin trying to say that Bengtson's comparisons, which you are right are based on similarity not rules of correspondence, have a considerable degree of plausibility. He does not seem to go further than that. In fact, does he not say something about the need for correspondences to be worked out before we could say more? I know he has said this to me but I dont have the MT articles at hand. > Not guilty. > Yeah, but one could be a heck of lot MORE innocent. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 18:01:00 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 13:01:00 EST Subject: Wald's continuing accusations of racism Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I have received two versions, one long, the other even longer, of a diatribe from Wald accusing me of ignorance about the history of linguistics, and both Pedersen and by implication me of "institutional racism", though not (necessarily) of being racists at a persona level (something which Wald seems to say he does not care about). I consider these to be very serious charges indeed, both as to ignorance and especially as to racism. Fortunately, in the case before us we are dealing with specifics. Wald's charge is based on a specific book of Pedersen's, which is widely available (The Discovery of Language) and I think it is easy, as I do below, to show that Wald misunderstands the passages at issue and that these passages show precisely the opposite of what Wald claims. As for me, his attacks seem to be based on (a) the fact that I defend Pedersen and (b) that I am associated loosely with work on the Nostratic theory and that all Nostraticists are racists because we do not (supposedly) allow the possibility that the Afro-Asiatic languages are related to Nilo-Saharan ones. As to (a), if I am right about Pedersen, and I am, then that is that. As to (b), the charge is ludicrous because in fact (as I posted earlier) some Nostraticists do in fact claim that Nilo-Saharan is PART of Nostratic. But even if that were not the case, I do not see that it makes sense to say that it is racist to propose a language family including some languages of Africa together with some languages of Eurasia but without other languages of Africa. Finally, it appears to me that it is Wald who is operating with racial categories in a way I find unscientific and immoral, because he appears to ne saying: (a) Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken by members of race A (so-called Black or Negro), (b) Nostraticists do not want to admit that languages spoken by members of race A can be related to languages spoken by members of race B (spo-called White or Caucasian), and THIS is why Nostraticists never have and do not admit that Nilo-Saharan languages are related to Afro-Asiatic languages (which we do put in Nostratic). And this is what makes us racists. Without assuming that the categories Black and White are meaningful, I don't even see how one can formulate the charge of racism against us that Wald lays. Yet it is clearly a matter of scientific consensus among biologists that the human species cannot be meaningful divided into such "races", and given how much harm the insistence on race has done historically, it also immoral in my view to operate with these categories. Further, I dont see how the argument of Wald's can be made without presupposing that Nilo-Saharan is in fact related to AA. For if it is not (or even if we merely do not yet know that it is), then there exists another reason why Nostraticists have (with the exceptions noted in my posting on this, with complete references) not related AA to Nilo-Saharan, which has nothing to do with racism, namely, because we are right. As I noted some time ago, there is another explanation which is that most of the Nostratic work was done when the Nilo-Saharan and even the AA situation was not very well understood and the Nilo-Saharan were not as well known to the few scholars who did the seminal work on Nostratic as were for example Altaic or Afro-Asiatic. I for example do not know almost anything abotu Nilo-Saharan. Does this make me a racist? But then why do I know something about AA? or about Dravidian? Does Wald have in mind some new form of racism which treats AA speakers (e.g., Hausas) or Dravidian speakers as "White" but Nilo-Saharan speakers as "Black"? But that is inconsistent with the racist underpinning of his argument as stated. So it turns out that to make sense of the reality of what various Nostraticists have done Wald would have not only believe in a racist taxonomy of humankind but indeed in at least two distinct and mutually exclusive such taxonomies. Finally, what do we do with those Nostraticists who loudly proclaim that ALL the world's languages are related, like Shevoroshkin? In what way is this racist? Is it because he has failed to consider the further relationship to the languages of extraterrestrial "races"? Seriously, I can think of few charges against a body of scholarship more serious in our society than that of racism (although in other societies sexism, ageism, and others could be equallyu or more serious, of course). The charge of ignorance is of course no laughing matter either. Wald's charges are false and contemptible. His insistence on repeating them over and over, and on attributing to person X the views of entirely other persons, is something very familiar to us but none the less dangerous for that. It is certainly true and well-known to those who have studied the history of our and other sciences that scientific racism has been a very major force in the 19th and 20th cent. It is certainly also true that the Nostratic theory has always been (as recognized by Pedersen) a major argument against, and not for, the linguistic racism which has existed in this period, inasmuch as it is precisely this theory which shows the linguistic and hence historical and cultural unity of peoples whom Wald no less than the old-fashioned racists apparently regards as belonging to different "races". As for me, I prefer to classify people according to their moral and intellectual characteristics, among which elementary honesty and attention to facts I count very highly. I hope Wald does too and will take it back and apologize. Below I address in painful detail the tortured misinterpretations of Pedersen by Wald. On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, bwald wrote: [snip] > > Pedersen, p.122: > > "Nubian is interesting because of its ancient literary monuments. ... > There are also Nubian inscriptions dating from imperial Rome, in an > alphabet based on Egyptian characters. But we still do not understand much > of them. *The Nubians are not negroes; but to the negro *race** belong the > Haussa, who language is also disputed..." > [snip] > OK?! What's a "negro"? How does Pedersen KNOW that Nubians aren't negro? I dont know how he knows that (because many people who operate with racial categories do consider Nubians "black"). But you are missing the whole point of what he is saying. Which is that (and this in the very same paragraph) even though the Hausa PEOPLE are "negroes", he accepts as possible though not yet proven the theory that they speak a Hamitic language. This demonstrates that he does not associate race with linguistic classification, since otherwise "negroes" would not be speaking a Hamitic language. How much plainer can he speak? He is saying that race in this case is not relevant. And the reason he says that IN THIS CASE is because throughout he argues against the use of race as a criterion for linguistic classification. That is one of his main methodological points throughout the book. > What's his POINT in mentioning any of this RACE stuff anyway? Precisely what I said just now--and before. Pedersen's point is to underline that the racial criterion (which a reader in his age would likely have immediately grasped at) is NOT relevant to linguistic classification. > I gave my > interpretation, based on my knowledge. AMR, DO SOME WORK on the history of > your discipline and the intellectual climate which fed it, and give an > alternative opinion. My work on the history of comparative linguistics is on the record, in the Journal de la Societe finno-ougrienne, Anthropological Linguistics, Ural-altaische Jahrbu"cher, etc. > Explain why his comment is not gratuitous, Because as I just said he KNEW that contemporary readers would assume that the linguistic distinction between Hamitic and non- Hamitic languages (I think he called the latter 'Sudan' languages or some variation on that) was to be determined by racial criteria, and he was emphasizing that this was not a valid way to proceed. > and how it > is critical of the institutionalised racism of his time. It was critical of the common view that linguistic classification correlates with race, a point he states in general terms and by way of example over and over. But I do not see that he addressed racism, institutionalised or private, at all. He may have been a racist or an opponent of racism, I do not know. I do know that he staunchly, emphatically, categorically, and consistently opposed LINGUISTIC racism, i.e., the belief that people of different "races" spoke different and unrelated languages. > Don't just give me an "I-don't- know". > I can say what I know but not what I donot. I do know he opposed linguistic racism. I know nothing of his views on race in any other context. > Also, about the Egyptians. I did not mean to imply that Pedersen > explicitly said that the Egyptians weren't "negro". You did not imply it, you said it. I quote what you said: "(With regard to racism, Pedersen's discussion makes a particular point of > denying that the Egyptians or EVEN the Nubians were "Negro"..." Now, this is a list is by and for linguists. Can anyone tell me that this sentence does not say that Pedersen was explicitly denying that the Egyptians were "negroes"? That is most clearly what it does say. > That had already been > established to the staisfaction of the conventional wisdom in the 19th > century. So it went without saying -- as opposed to the NUBIANS. This is like saying that just because conventional wisdom TODAY says that the Nostratic theory is bunk you should be free to say that I think Nostratic is bunk and make a partciualr point of this, even though I have never said anything of the sort. Mind you, I do not deny that Pedersenmn probably did think that Egyptians were other than "negroes". But he did not say anywhere in the book in which you said he said it. And it makes no difference to his views on the classifiction of the langauges of Africa. > You can > tell the Egyptians aren't Negro, just look at the illustrations of Ancient > Egyptians in the National Geographic. > I myself don't operate with racial categories at all, so I canNOT tell that. All I can tell is that of the people who have operated with categories of human beings based on skin color it was not only 19th century Europeans who classified the Ancient Egyptians differently from most other native Africans. But I personally accept the results of molecular biology (not to mention common sense) to the effect that "races" do not exist within out species (Pan sapiens). Unlike some other species, we do not have SUBspecies. Hence, words like "negro" or "Negro" or "Black" have only relevance as sociological constructs. Pedersen almost certainly did believe in "races" but he did a fantastic job of arguing aganst the linguistic relevance thereof. > P.S. I sent my last message to the list, because it is part of the argument > I was making (which has to do with institutionalised racism and the > intellectual climate in Pedersen's times, not with his personal feelings.) Yes, but Pedersen is not guilty anyway,as just discussed. He was on YOUR side, the was Greenberg before Greenberg was in college probably. > Don't you see how pervasive institutional racism was? Sure, still is, though it is quite diferent now. But this has nothing to do with Pedersen's view of linguistic classification. > The same person can > give the usual (Boasian) high-minded homily about dissociating language and > race and yet pass on ideas with racist implications without recognising it > (they come from another source, anthropometry, cf. phrenology; the Nubians > are not "negro" because it is not ideologically convenient for them to be, > so we take advantage of local physical variation to define them out of > "negro" while leaving presumed non/ "pre"-literate black people in. Goering > made it even simpler, "A Jew is who *I* say is.") > This is certainly possible, but in Pedersen's case it obviously is not the case. > I suppose the least you can say is that Pedersen is illustrating the > homily by indicating that some "Hamitic" speakers ARE "negro" (e.g., the > Haus(s)a). But what did they WRITE (in ancient times)? Nubian, of course, > is NOT Hamitic/Afro-Asiatic, but Nilo-Saharan (according to current > classification). But Pedersen did say that he did not know whether Nubian was or was not Hamitic. Hence what you say once again is not true. Since he knew that Nubian had been an ancient written language, Pedersen is again on YOUR side of the argument, sayng that for all he knows this ancient written language may be a Sudan (i.e., Nilo-Saharan) rather than a Hamitic language. > And, you and Pedersen can say, so what? No, Pedersen and I do not say so what. We say that this is very important as precisely an argument that the racial categories "negro" vs. "hamite" (even if they WERE valid in some other context) would have NOTHING to do with linguistic classification OR with ancient written languages. > If Nubian is > Nilo-Saharan that doesn't mean their speakers are "negroes". I'm not gonna > argue that way. One more time from the top. Pedersen is arguing precisely the opposite, viz., that even though they are (acc. to contemporary views) racially "Hamites" rather than "negroes", this does not tell us whether their language is "Hamitic" (our AA) or "Sudan" (our Nilo-Saharan). > > Now, don't get all indignant (instead of looking deeper into the historical > forces that propel our interests). I take it this is offlist discussion. > So I don't expect to see your last message on the list. If it is, then > this has to go there too (except this PS), and we'll continue. Too late. I did read this in time. But I did look into it and I have now answered all your arguments. What you have to realize is that you are attributing to Pedersen the views of the contemporary Africanists that you justly like to criticize, and that his real views were the opposite!! But I still don't know what he thought of race in any other context. AMR From martha_ratliff at wayne.edu Sun Feb 7 18:01:45 1999 From: martha_ratliff at wayne.edu (Martha Ratliff) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 13:01:45 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > You're right, of course. But I was sure, when I wrote, and still > am, that I remember someone in those days turning up Austronesian > etymologies as well. Can anybody jog my memory on this? > Scott DeLancey >Sagart is, of course. The Chinese words he cites as evidence >of Chinese being related to Austronesian are presumably, for >those of us who do not accept his conclusion, not mere >coincidences but Austronesian borrowings into Old Chinese. >Am I missing something? Is the question whether anyone >BESIDES Laurent Sagart is finding such borrowings? >I would like to hear if there is. >AMR The first thing that comes to mind is the section in Benedict's 1975 _Austro-Thai Language and Culture_ on "Austro-Thai and Chinese") pp. 75-133, which first appeared as an article in Behavior Science Notes. You don't have to buy A-T to appreciate (some of the) data here. Then Sagart gives references to two others who wrote about the Chinese- Austronesian connection before him: 1) Conrady, A. 1923. Neue austrich-indochinesische Parallelen. Hirth anniversary volume (Asia Major introductory volume), 23-66. 2) Wulff, K. 1942. Ueber das Verhaeltnis des Malayo-Polynesischen zum Indochinesischen. Det Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab. Historisk-filologiske Meddelser XXVII, 2. Kobenhavn: Ejnar Munksgaard. 157 pp. I second Sagart's recommendation of his articles to you. They are careful, scholarly papers which provide a reasonable interpretation of correspondence patterns that emerge from the close study of massive amounts of language data. I can't see how anyone could fault him on methodological grounds. Whether the patterns he reveals are due to inheritance or contact, he has certainly made a discovery of historical significance. Martha Ratliff Wayne State University martha_ratliff at wayne.edu From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Sun Feb 7 22:29:43 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 17:29:43 EST Subject: Phonetic Resemblance, Birthday Prob. Regular Sound change and Yakhontov Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Larry Trask wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > > This goes to the heart of the whole fight about what role phonetic > > similarity plays in comparative linguistics (Larry claims none at > > all. I claim a subordinate but important and indeed probably crucial > > one). But note that Starostin is not doing anything that Larry could > > object to on this score. He is NOT using phonetic similarity at > > all. > However, in the Mother Tongue exchange, Sergei was most certainly > working with mere perceived phonological and semantic resemblances, and > with nothing else at all. That is obvious to anyone who reads the > relevant passage, and that is what got me confused about what Yakhontov > was saying in the first place. I would like to point out some quick facts; 1. The so-called Birthday Problem is about showing why quick guesses are wrong in prob problems. Computations show that for 23 persons selected at random, the odds that at least two have the same birthday is 50-50. 2. Suppose we are comparing two languages A and B; and we have a batch of candidate words. For simplicity let A and B have about 20 consonants each and let our comparison be a simple one of matching up consonants. There are 380 possible sound changes (ignoring the no-change). Naturally, we are looking for regular sound correspondence/change (RSC) 2.i) In the worst possible case, if we find 380 words with sound changes, each one could be unique and hence there is no sign of regularity. Thefore even in this worst case if we find 381 sound changes, according to the Pigeonhole Principle of counting, there will be at least one sound change that is repeated and hence "regular" in this restricted sense. 2.ii) However this worst-case scenario is very unlikely to happen. Its probability is near zero. What is more likely to happen is something similar to the Birthday problem. IF we find ~25 words which seem to correspond, the odds are 50-50 that at least one sound change will be repeated. As the number of matches increases to about 100 or so more and more sound changes will be repeated. IT is not difficult to compute the distributions of the sound changes. I have done some of these. So we can always subtract out this baseline due to chance. The first conclusion we can draw is that what really counts (especially in languages like IE and AA for which plenty of samples exist going back thousands of years) is really "quantity" because if we find quantity we will find due to laws of probability "regular sound change". This means that even established families, with say 400 RSC should be tested rigorously by substracting out the baseline RSC that could occur purely due to chance. IT is easy enough to do this via simulation. Linguists who try this kind of simulation as evidence against proto-worlders forget to apply this criteria to their own language families. When "regular sound correspondance" (RSC) is really important is if we find it for small samples. AFter all, we get RSC with large numbers even due to chance because it cannot be avoided. Then again, most linguists ignore small number of correspondences even if the sound changes are "regular" because they claim that the numbers are too small, but this is exactly when RSC is significant. That means that if we found only 5-6 words and saw regular sound change then it is really significant because the laws of chance dictate that for small numbers of correspondences the odds of repetetion (RSC) is small. So Yakhontov is apparently trying to do something like this. I say "like this" because I do not see any clear reasoning that this is being done. OF course, after this, since the justification for RSC is probabilistic anyway, there is no reason to attack the use of statistics which is based on probability laws. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 22:30:58 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 17:30:58 EST Subject: Nostratic and Nilo-Saharan In-Reply-To: <99020612112549@haskins.yale.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, Alice Faber wrote: > > I'm glad to find that I had been mistaken in my impression that Nilo-Saharan > and other language families had been ignored in long-range language > comparison. I've undergone enough of a career shift since 1988 that I haven't > been able to follow the literature as well as I might have earlier. But we need you back! > > As for my assertion that some of those who search out a link between Semitic > and Indo-European being in part motivated by a perspective involving the > Judeo-Christian tradition, I'd like to make clear that I'm not including any > modern investigators of Nostratic here. Thank you. I am assuming that you are including Pedersen, Collinder et al. under 'modern'. > I'm thinking of folks who simply don't > care (or perhaps don't know) that Hebrew is part of Semitic is part of Afro- > Asiatic, but simply look for superficial similarities between Hebrew, Latin, > and Greek. There's a big difference between saying that Hebrew and Latin are > related and saying that Hebrew and Latin are related because Afro-Asiatic and > Indo-European are part of Nostratic. Both are hypotheses that can be > discussed, and perhaps refuted, but only the latter is consistent with a wide > body of published literature. Yes indeed and I am sorry if I gave the impression of anything else. > Many folks who work on the history of Semitic > languages are quite sensitive, perhaps over sensitive to the difference. > I can see why. They do have to put up with a lot of silly misconceptions among the (as Michael Silverstein would say) "ignoranti". Since those of us who work on Nostratic (and ipso facto have to deal with Semitic too) have to put up with a similar burden, I think we can all agree to empathize. But the bigger question is how do we fight the misconceptions that seem to be SO darn prevalent? AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 22:32:50 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 17:32:50 EST Subject: Holger Pedersen and "Race" In-Reply-To: <99020612355815@haskins.yale.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, Alice Faber wrote: [inter alia] > > I'm having a little trouble following the above, because I'm reading from my > paperback English translation (copyright 1931). I think it's important when > committing exegesis, which is, after all, what we're doing with this close > textual reading, to bear in mind that this is a *translated* work. Yes, I would love to be able to brave the snow and get the Danish out of the library but am not allowed to by my doctors. Still, Pedersen is supposed to have vetted the English translation. But there ARE a few places where I definitely need to see the Danish for myself. If anybody out there reading this has the Danish version with them and would not mind helping out, please let me know by email to my address above. > I don't see Pedersen's criticism of M"uller's racial criteria as strong, > though he does criticize it (p. 117, for those scoring at home). Good enough. I won't quibble about "strong" on this page. Would you agree that elsewhere in the book, esp. the last chapter he does use rather emphatic language about the invalidity of using such racial criteria? > And he does > refer to linguistic criteria for Hamitic and Semitic. Thank you. But let us go further: do you agree he uses no OTHER criteria for Semitic and Hamitic but linguistic ones? > Given the state of > knowledge at his time (he lists three subgroups of Hamitic, Egyptian, Berber, > and "South Hamitic" [=Cushitic, roughly], but no Chadic). Not quite. He mentions "Haussa" twice and refers to Lepsius's work on Hausa as a Hamitic language, which he regards as a possible but still unproven thesis. But Hausa is a Chadic lg and as far as I know the only reasonably well-known one at the time. > He correctly raises > the question of whether Hamitic and Semitic are co-ordinate branches. > He does more, doesn't he? He raises the question of whether Hamitic is a branch, i.e., a valid taxon at all, thus anticipating Greenberg by a half-century. This is particular important because it show just how far Pedersen was from accepting ANY version, even a purely linguistic one, of the theory of a "Hamitic" language group. This bears directly on the racism issue raised by Wald,for obvious reasons, and shows yet again how wrong he is. [snip] > I'm bringing something different to Pedersen than either Alexis > or Benji is. In the section on Semitic and Hamitic, I find many gratuitous > references to Christianity (and some non-gratuitous references, as well). This > is, of course, partly Pedersen and partly me, and others might disagree about > how gratuitous these references are. The questions Benji is encouraging us to > ask are whether these references would have been perceived as gratuitous in > the mid 1920s when Pedersen wrote, and if not what cultural presuppositions > might have motivated Pedersen to make these references. I'm really out of my > depth when it comes to this kind of analysis, so I'll leave it at that. > The answer is obvious: Pedersen is addressing conceptions and ideas which he expected his readers to have, but he is NOT endorsing them. On the contrary, he seeks throughout to refute any ideas about any connections between language and race much less religion. > I think it's worth saying that Pedersen's work is an admirable state of the > art description of historical and comparative linguistic knowledge for its > era. There is little of substance that is inconsistent with the knowledge of > its day, beyond the simplification that is inevitable in an introductory > survey. There are many prescient remarks. Ah, how nice to hear that someone agrees. Indeed, I can see how anyone could disagree. > However, much in it is outdated. We > have, after all, made progress in the past 60 years. What bothers me in some > instances is the *tone*, a tone that reflects cultural assumptions that I find > objectionable. I don't say there are not. But what do you have in mind? And would you not agree that he does a brave and masterful job of combatting many (though not all) of these cultural assumptions, a half century before most Africanists and other linguists, historians, etc., were forced kicking and screaming to give them up by the combined forces of Greenber, other scholars, and the growing disguist with racism and a priorism that swept through many social/human sciences decades AFTER Pedersen's book was written? > This is not to say that Pedersen knew that his work would have > such an impact 60 years down the road, or that he would have written > differently, if he had known. > I am sure he assumed that comparative linguistics would progress much more smoothly than has been the case and so like Jefferson re the American Constitution I am sure he thought he would quickly be supplanted. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Sun Feb 7 22:33:55 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 17:33:55 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, WB (in Frankfurt today) wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- [snip] > Let me just stress, however, since it is _very_ easy > on a general discussion list like HISTLING, which deals > with so many different language families and genetic theories, > to generate wrong, and possibly, longlived impressions to > the effect that the work of Sagart belongs into the cate- > gory of "weird speculations", that he is somehow involun- > tarily stuck with a "dead-wrong" idea which he fears to > withdraw, that he does not know the langugaes he is working > on etc. etc., that nothing could be further from the truth > (see Sagart's own posting on Sino-Austronesian). > I emphatically said how much I admire him and his work, and I suggested nothing of the sort. I dont think Scott Delancey did either. It is merely that we do not agree that he is right. > As far as the Old Chinese side of the comparison is con- > cerned, it should be pointed out that Sagart has written > the _only_ serious comment on Baxter's _Handbook_ (_Dia- > chronica_ X [1993] 2: 237-260; with the exception of EG > Pulleyblank, who does not accept the six-vowel system > at all and argues from a totally different perspective), > that he is now certainly the most active scholar working > on Old Chinese morphology and root-theory (watch out for > his forthcoming book, J. Benjamins), and that he has pu- > blished widely on a variety of crucial issues in Old Chinese > reconstruction (for a list of his publications cf. http:// > www.ehess.fr/centres/crlao/crlao.html), which are extremely > important, irrespective of what your favorite position on > the external relationships of OC might be. I believe to > be entitled to say this, since I among the very few people > who have ever tried to take Sagart's criticisms of some of > the details of Baxter's reconstruction seriously by testing > them against a corpus of uncorrupted bronze inscriptional > sources, rather than edited texts (for an online-abstract > of my dissertation see html/17534.html>, for a more extended version cf. _Cahiers > de Linguistique ? Asie Orientale_ 26 [1997] 1), and since > Sagart's observations have been by and large corroborated > by these data. My own views on ST and ST-AN notwithstanding > (for which see my review of the volume by WSY Wang, quoted > by Alexis, in one of the last issues of _Language_), I would > appreciate it if those who think that Sagart's AN -- ST com- > parisons are wrong, or who criticize his reassinging certain > "classical" ST reconstructions to the layer of TB -- OC > borrowings, should present some evidence to substantiate > their criticisms. > I refer you to Baxter's and Starostin's responses to Sagart. Heck, you know the relevant literature far better than I do. I am NOT claiming to have any NEW arguments against Sagart. If you think that there is need for such, I could try to think about the issue. > This said, here are a few more impressionistic comments > (sorry if this is in a wrong chronological order --- HISTLING > messages have reached me in a totally chaotic succession > recently): > > > At 16:58 04.02.99 EST, Alexis wrote > > AMR| [...] so too I think > AMR| that the few critics of ST are really reaction to the > AMR| unsatisfactory state of the actual work on ST (and > AMR| again just as in Altaic to some extent I suspect that > AMR| Miller is reacting to ST as it was some decades ago > AMR| esp. to Benedict's work much as the anti-Altaicists > AMR| are still really responding to the errors of Ramstedt > AMR| in the 50s and Poppe in the 60s). > > True up to a certain degree (Miller's reviews of Benedicts's > _Conspectus_, Shafer's _Introduction to Sino-Tibetan_, and > Sedlaachek's _Das Gemein-Sino-Tibetische_ etc. are certainly > among the harshest specimens of that genre in the whole post- > war sinological literature). That is no more than I am claiming. [snip] > the climate > within O[ld] C[hinese] > phonology, is, unfortunately, sometimes not quite > as pleasant as Alexis would have it. [snip] I meant only that it is far far better than the way that the way in which Greenberg's proposals or Illich-Svitych's or even mine are treated. I don't recall anyone saying the kind of things that Delancey and I said about Sagart, about Greenberg or I-S or me. As I recall, Dr. Thomason could not bring herself to admit that Greenberg's work the classification of American Indian languages is historical linguistics, even. The contrast is very stark. > Alexis continues: [No that was Scott Delancey, not me.] > > AMR| More legitimately, I've heard the argument made (by Chris Beckwith, > AMR| I think, among others, though he shouldn't be held hostage to my > AMR| imperfect memory) that ST can't be considered *proven* because the > AMR| lack of morphology in Chinese makes it impossible to find the kind > AMR| of nice syntagmatic and paradigmatic morphological correspondences > AMR| that make us so confident of Indo-European or Semitic or Algic. > [snip] > Finally a short historical note re: origins of the debate that > shared morphology is crucial for the demonstration of genetical > relatedness, Meillet's position on East Asian languages etc. --- > The discussion, as far as concerned with Old Chinese and its > presumably "isolating" root structure, goes back much further, > at least to the middle of the 19th century and Georg von der Gabe- > lentz', "Sur la possibilit? de prouver l?existence d?une affinit? > g?n?alogique entre les langues dites indochinoises" (_Atti del IV > congresso internazionale degli Orientalisti_, vol. 2: 283-95, > Florence 1881). I know a fair amount of Gabelentz's work but this is something I didnot know. Thanks a lot. However, this appears to deal with the question of typology vs. classification. But that is not Meillet's problem. His problem was the idea that only morphology can be used to demosntrate linguistic relationship. As I pointed out in Anthro Lx in 1996, his own later work shows that he did not any longer accept this as an absolute rule. THIS idea about the role of morphology also has an earlier history, going back to Pott and his critique of Bopp's comparisons of Austronesian and Kartvelian with IE. So there are two separate issues here, each with its own history, although there may have been some interpenetration of ideas at some points. AMR From delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu Sun Feb 7 22:35:29 1999 From: delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott DeLancey) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 17:35:29 EST Subject: Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE) Message-ID: Prof. Sagart apparently takes exception to my very brief representation of his views on Sino-Tibetan. I confess I don't understand why. Sagart (indirectly) writes: > That is not, and has never been, my view. I have never claimed that ST is a > chimera, does not exist, is an invalid construct, etc. In fact, right from > the beginning of my work on on Chinese and Austronesian, I have repeatedly > cautioned readers against that interpretation of my views. In the conclusion > of my first paper (titled =93Chinese and Austronesian are genetically > related=94), presented in 1990 at a Sino-Tibetan conference in Texas, I wrote (p. 29): > > our claim (i.e., of a genetic unity between Chinese and Austronesian), it > must be noted, should not be taken to imply that there exists no genetic > relationship between Chinese and the TB languages (or, for that matter, > between AN and Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, etc.), but simply that, if such > relationship exists, it is in any case less close than that between AN and > Chinese (...). This problem--which should be just a rhetorical one, but doesn't always seem to be--keeps coming up in one form or another, on this list and elsewhere. As has just been discussed on the list, if someone asserts that Semitic is more closely related to Indo-European than to Chadic or Cushitic, they are denying the reality of Afro-Asiatic, and acknowledging that all four groups may be (or, even, asserting that they certainly are) related at some higher level doesn't change that. Likewise, the claim that Chinese is more closely related to Austronesian than to Tibeto-Burman denies the reality of Sino-Tibetan. Sino-Tibetan refers to the hypothesis that Sinitic, Tibeto-Burman, and Karen (for those who aren't sure that Karen is T-B proper) form a genetic unit: S-T | ------------------ | | T-B Sinitic If T-B and Sinitic are not each other's closest relative, then there is no such genetic unit as Sino-Tibetan. To argue that the genetic position of Chinese is: ?? | --------------------------------- | | | ---------------- | | | T-B Sinitic Austronesian is to deny the reality of Sino-Tibetan, pure and simple. Surely this must be obvious to everybody--why do we need to keep arguing about it? Then further: > On p. 301-302 of the same paper (Oceanic Linguitics 33, 2, 1994), I > discussed the evidence for Sino-Tibetan, concluding p. 302 that the > relationship, though not implausible, is less well demonstrated than is > usually assumed, due to evidence of long-term intimate contact, and >poorly > understood sound correspondences, this despite evidence of shared basic > vocabulary and limited shared morphology. and > Since 1994, then, my view has been that Chinese and TB *are* genetically > related, but not as closely as most Sino-Tibetanists think (because the > genetic layer in the lexicon is thinner than usually assumed), That is, as of this week, Sagart's claim is a) that there is no genetic unit corresponding to Sino-Tibetan, and b) that a significant part of what the rest of the field regards as evidence for S-T as a genetic unit, when correctly understood, is not evidence for it. Obviously it was careless of me, in my first posting, to write "the Chinese-TB link" rather than "Sino-Tibetan", though in the context of the discussion, and with the definite article, that still does not seem to me to admit of the interpretation which Sagart apparently wants to put on it. Still, I should have been more careful in my choice of words. To be sure, Sagart has never argued that Chinese and TB are not related at all. But he is very explicitly arguing, in his published work and in his communication to HISTLING, that Sino-Tibetan is a chimaera--which is in fact the issue that we were discussing. Scott DeLancey Department of Linguistics University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html From BMScott at stratos.net Mon Feb 8 12:37:35 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 07:37:35 EST Subject: Phonetic Resemblance, Birthday Prob. Regular Sound change and Yakhontov Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- H. Mark Hubey wrote: [snipped, and reformatted for legibility] > 2. Suppose we are comparing two languages A and B; and we have a batch > of candidate words. For simplicity let A and B have about 20 consonants > each and let our comparison be a simple one of matching up consonants. There > are 380 possible sound changes (ignoring the no-change). Naturally, we are > looking for regular sound correspondence/change (RSC) > 2.i) In the worst possible case, if we find 380 words with sound > changes, each one could be unique and hence there is no sign of > regularity. Thefore even in this worst case if we find 381 sound > changes, according to the Pigeonhole Principle of counting, there > will be at least one sound change that is repeated and hence > "regular" in this restricted sense. It's a *repeated* sound change; it isn't regular in the linguistic sense. Indeed, the extreme situation that you describe can hardly fail to be a clear example of lack of regularity, since each consonant will be associated with every other consonant. > The first conclusion we can draw is that what really counts (especially > in languages like IE and AA for which plenty of samples exist going back > thousands of years) is really "quantity" because if we find quantity we > will find due to laws of probability "regular sound change". Here again you're confusing repetition with regularity. Brian M. Scott Dept. of Mathematics Cleveland State Univ. From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 8 12:49:34 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 07:49:34 EST Subject: Pedersen's role in Nostratic studies In-Reply-To: <379ce630.2337307914@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I believe Pedersen coined the term "Nostratic" in the twentieth > century, but I'll leave Pedersen aside for two reasons: I have > not read him on Nostratic, and I don't think the modern work on > Nostratic (Illich-Svitych, Dolgopol'skij, Bomhard) owes very much > to Pedersen except for the name. > [snip] He did coin it in this century, but the rest I don't think is quite accurate. It is true that he did very little substantive work on Nostratic (while doin incredible amounts of work on IE, of course). But his role was important for more than one reason. (1) He made it clear that if there is going to be Nostratic work done, it should NOT merely compare IE in a pairwise (binary) fashion to AA or to Uralic or to Altaic or whatever, but to all of them, something which I-S and Dolgopolsky were the first to take to heart. (2) He was such an influential IEnist in his time (and he lived a VERY long time) that his support of Nostratic helped to keep it alive. His debates with Trubetzkoy and other naysayers at the 1933 Congress were an important occasion, since lesser or younger' scholars who did more Nostratic would not have been able to stand up the way he did to largely obscurantist and a prioristic rhetoric from the other side. (3) He was quite cautious in what Nostratic comparisons he accepted and he helped to set a standard which was largely adopted by I-S and Dolgopolsky which, while as I have argued in many places not nearly stringent enough, did make them much more selective than other authors who like to compare these languages. I would trace I-S's emphasis on disitnguishing borrowings from one Nostratic lg into another, on the one hand, and presumed cognates, on the other, in particular to the benign influence of Pedersen's views. However, I have done no careful study of the history of these issues, and I could be shown wrong by such a study. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 8 12:51:30 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 07:51:30 EST Subject: On some distinctions not to be conflated, in comp lx Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It occurs to me that it might be useful to review some elementary distinctions (based on a paper of mine which has been languishing for some time) which have a tendency to be conflated. First, it is a simple thing to verify (by looking at the relevant literature) that different linguistic families (I now include only ones which are almost universally accepted) were established in very different ways. For example, the fact that Celtic is part of IE was established on the basis of a comparison involving a rather specific rule of correspondence between certain morphological elements. The unity of the Niger-Kordofanian languages was also established by a comparison involving (sets of) morphological elements but without the need for rules of correspondence (some simple notion of similarity was enough). The unity of the Comecrudan languages was established, as I have discussed earlier, by a comparison of lexical and not morphological elements and without the statement of a single explicit regular rule of correspondence (so once again similarity was deemed sufficient to make what Goddard called a "strong case"). And I believe that the unity of Tai was established on the basis of lexical comparisons but using rules of correspondence and not merely notions of similarity. Hence we can see that there are (at least) two features (morphological vs. lexical and correspondence-based vs. similarity-based) which are entirely independent of each other (orthogonal alias cross-classifying in more technical lingo), yielding (at least) four different methods that have been used successfully and w/o any objection on record (e.g., no one has ever objected to the Comecrudan comparison on methodological grounds). Keeping these distinctions straight may help unconfuse some of the recent (and not-so-recent) confusions. For example, Stefan Georg says that the method of looking at phonetic similarities only works correctly in the case of languages which are "obviously" related, which he takes to be the case of the Tai languages to be. But he fails to make the crucial distinction between WHAT it is we are looking at to find similarities, lists of words or rather morphological paradigms. But as I said you can apply the method of looking for phonetic similarities to morphology, and then you find language families which certainly have not been historically obvious and which in fact have only been recognized within living memory. This not to say that I accept his assertion that comparing lexical items by the same method only works in obvious cases. I mean you can make this circular by saying that any language relationship established in this way is by definition "obvious". This will not do. 'Obvious' has to mean something that has always been recognized and never rejected by people working on language classification. And I think that by this criterion Stefan is wrong. Of course, the case of lexical comparison using rules of correspondence is one where almost by definition he canNOT be right. Simply because if the relationship was obvious why would anyone bother establishing the correspondences. At any rate it seems to me that Ken Hale's magisterial demonstration that the Pama-Nyungan (did I spell this right?) languages are related to the other languages of Australia relied on the discovery of an amazing set of rules of correspondence which made the two groups of language LOOK totally different in places where in fact historically the relationship was a close one. Clearly no one can say that morphology was crucial in this work (though grammatical morphemes may have been mentioned), only the rules of correspondence. Nor will anyone say it was obvious. It was to my mind one of the greatest single feats of comparative linguistics of any age and one which some still do not quite seem to get. So we have at least four different methods, and I would argue that actually there are additional distinctions that have to be made, e.g., ones having to do with quantitative issues (with a nod here to Johanna Nichols), such as how many comparisons (in relative OR absolute terms) are actually being made. A lot of people seem to forget that there are many cases of, especially extinct and poorly attested, languages whose classification rests on a handful of items. There are certainly Australian languages known to us only from brief word lists which no one doubts are Australian. There are, yes Virginia, there are Indo-European languages whose Indo-Europeanness was discovered on the basis of a handful word and/or morphemes simply because that's all there was. I don't how many IE-origin items we NOW know for Messapic or Lydian or Lycian, but when they were recognized (and I do not mean by one or two visionarieis but by the whole field) as IE, the number was trivial (se the index to Pokorny's IE etym. dict., for an easy and instructive demonstration of this, though of course he does not deal with most grammatical elements). The poorly attested Comecrudan languages are thus NOT an exception. On the other hand, the relationship between Greek and Sanskrit involves thousands of lexical AND morphological comparisons of incredible intricacy and beauty. But this does not make Sanskrit MORE of an IE language than the much less well attested and more divergent Lycian, say. There is yet another set of distinctions that needs to be observed in any serious discussion of this whole topic. Namely, we must recognize that just saying "I have here a rule of correspondence" does mean that you really have one. Many of the correspondences (and reconstructions implied by them) in many diferent areas of comp lx (I would single out Kartvelian, Dravidian, Newman's Zuni-Penutian work, much of the work on Uto-Aztecan, etc.) are not really so. They are merely described as rules of correspondence but are not treated as such in actual work, in which the "rules" are ignored. On the other hand, in addition to making more and more distinctions, we must also recognize that the distinctions are not always absolute. For example, the distinction between a rule of correspondence and a "mere" observation of similarity is (or at least often is) one of degree. Sometimes the rules of correspondence are so obvious that one does not bother stating them. When Goddard compares the form kem 'woman' across two or three Comecrudan languages, he obviously assumes that k : k : k, m : m : m, etc. At other times, the similarities so-called are simply patterns of correspondence which are not fully specified. That is, if phoneme X in language 1 can correspond to phonemes Y and Z in language 2 and we cannot tell (yet) when Y and when Z is to be expected, that is not a sign of the moral turpitude of the linguist who nevertheless related the two languages. After all, we know of precisely such cases in all well-established language families, with the best-known examples being from IE. But whether we say that this a case where we would LIKE to know the rule or whether we say that we are simply observing a similarity, the fact remains that we do not know when Y and when Z are to be expected and yet we CAN know that the relationship is valid. Which brings up two more points. One, "similarity" is a misleading term, since sometimes the "similarities" do not involve segments that are phonetically all that similar. The so-called similarities are rather patterns which one notices which are not necessarily more superficial but which are rather less precise (and less easy to articulate) than the regular rules of correspondence which we would prefer but cannot always have. Two, as Eric Hamp pointed out twenty years ago, and was right to point out, rules of correspondence are often (usually, maybe even always) easier to discover if there is some obvious superficial pattern (including but not restricted to phonetic similarity). The relation of Armenian berem to Skt. bhara:mi 'I carry' was noted long before that of Armenian erku to Skt. dva was, and of course Armenian had long been recognized as IE before the etymology of erku was established. So, in practice, there are relationships between methods that LOOK in theory quite distinct. The moral? Simply that there is not a single comparative method but a whole complex bunch of methodS and that it would (if I may quote myself) behoove people to study the methods and the history of the discipline before trying to read other people out of the discipline, ruin their careers and reputations, and stifle the serious examination of their proposals. For which one of us can be free in our intellectual quest and safe in our chosen life if even someone of the standing of Joseph Greenberg can openly, and without any challenge from the audience, have most of his life's work peremptorily dismissed as "not historical linguistics" by people in positions of considerable influence and sometime power who appoint themselves censor and whom we as a profession confirm in that position? AMR From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Feb 8 12:53:04 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 07:53:04 EST Subject: Yakhontov In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: [on the "second version" of Yakhontov's principle, the one depending on miscellaneous resemblances] > But where do we find a clear statement by Starostin of this > second version? Certainly not in the 1991 book on Altaic. OK. I quote from Starostin's letter, published in Mother Tongue. Sergei states Yakhontov's principle, quite properly, in terms of cognates, and asserts that he knows of no counterexamples among established language families. He then dismisses my joke Basque-English comparisons because they apparently fail to satisfy Yakhontov's principle. I might query this, but I'm not interested in it here. He then turns to Bengtson's Basque-Caucasian comparisons, and I quote: "Let us take Bengtson's Basque-Caucasian list again. Here we have, out of 19 items on the 100-word list, 13 items belonging to the 35-word list [snip list], which gives us 37%, and leaves us with only 9% matches within the 65-word list. This certainly seems like a significant result to me." Now, recall Yakhontov's principle, which is based upon Yakhontov's division of a modified version of the Swadesh 100-word list into a 35-word sublist and a 65-word list: When two languages are genetically related, the proportion of cognates in the 35-word list is always greater than the proportion of cognates in the 65-word list." OK? This is part of Yakhontov's efforts to identify those vocabulary items which are maximally resistant to replacement. But now see what Starostin has done. First, Basque is not known to be related to any version of Caucasian, and not a single cognate pair is known to exist in Basque and Caucasian. Therefore, Yakhontov's principle, apud Yakhontov, has *nothing whatever* to say about Basque and Caucasian. Second, what Bengtson presents is no more than a collection of *miscellaneous resemblances* between Basque and Caucasian. Starostin, by attempting to apply Yakhontov's principle to Bengtson's comparisons, is therefore silently replacing the crucial word `cognates' with the entirely different term `miscellaneous resemblances'. This is clearly illegitimate. Third, having done this, Starostin is turning the (now altered) Yakhontov's principle on its head. In effect, he is arguing as follows: if the proportion of miscellaneous resemblances in the 35-word list is greater than the proportion of miscellaneous resemblances in the 65-word list, that constitutes evidence that the languages are related. But Yakhontov himself apparently never said any such thing. And this is why I took Starostin to task in my response, and this is why I got confused about Yakhontov himself was claiming. I find it impossible to make the slightest sense out of Starostin's remarks here without concluding that he is appealing to a principle which is very different from what Yakhontov himself proposed. Moreover, there is yet another flaw in Sergei's reasoning. Whatever Sergei is trying to claim, he is claiming it in terms of Yakhontov's 35-word list and his 65-word list. *But Bengtson has not presented these 100 words.* By Starostin's count, Bengtson has presented only 13 words from the 35-word list and an unknown number of words from the 65-word list. If we have only a modest subset of each of the two lists, then *no version* of Yakhontov's principle can even be contemplated. All we have to look at is Bengtson's *self-selected* data. Therefore, the final version of what I will now call "Starostin's principle" is this: If the proportion of miscellaneous resemblances in a modest subset of the 35-word list selected by John Bengtson for his own purposes is greater than the proportion of miscellaneous resemblances in a modest subset of the 65-word list selected by John Bengtson for his own purposes, then this constitutes evidence that the languages are related. Anybody want to defend this position? Anybody still want to maintain that Starostin is proceeding entirely according to Yakhontov's principle? > Starostin's book is entirely clear. Anybody can judge by > reading the passage which I have e-distributed. Maybe it is, but I have never seen that book. All I had was Sergei's remarks in Mother Tongue -- and those remarks show clearly that Sergei was doing something entirely different from Yakhontov. The prosecution rests. ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From oldgh at hum.aau.dk Mon Feb 8 14:59:46 1999 From: oldgh at hum.aau.dk (George Hinge) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 09:59:46 EST Subject: Holger Pedersen and "Race" Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The passage about Nubian and Hausa which Benji Wald is referring to is in the Danish version (p. 111): "... Dette giver en lille forestilling om, hvor fj?rnt de forskellige hamitiske sprog st?r hinanden, og hvor vanskelig den sammenlignende behandling m? v?re. Den er da heller ikke endnu gennemf?rt, og man m? derfor ikke undre sig altfor meget over, at der ikke er enighed om, hvor den hamitiske ?ts gr?nse g?r. Et av de omstridte sprog er nubisk. Det stilles i reglen udenfor den hamitiske ?t, men den udm?rkede kender av de sydhamitiske sprog Leo Reinisch har i 1911 med stor styrke h?vdet, at det er hamitisk (nubisk er i?vrigt interessant ved sine gamle sprogmindesm?rker; man har i beg. av 20. ?rh. fundet nubiske tekster av kristeligt indhold, som er 1000 ?r gamle; der eksisterer ogs? indskrifter fra Nubien fra den romerske kejsertid, skrevne med en bogstavskrift, som er bygget p? ?gyptiske tegn; vi forst?r dog endnu ikke meget av disse indskrifter). Nubierne er ikke negre; det er derimod en anden stamme, hvis sprog ligeledes er omstridt, stammen Havsa mellem Nigerfloden og Tsads?en. Havsa-sproget (det mest udbredte av alle Afrikas negersprog, brugt som handelssprog i Sudan langt ud over sin egen hjemstavn) blev allerede av ?gyptologen Lepsius erkl?ret for hamitisk, og det kan ikke n?gtes, at et eller andet virkelig synes at tale derfor. Men sp?rgsm?let m? indtil videre st? hen b?de for nubisk og for havsaisk." Having stated that the Hamitic language family has a huge variation, Pedersen first presents a non-Negro (so he thought) language, Nubian, which was traditionally *not* considered Hamitic, but has lately been suggested to be so, then a Negro language, Hausa, that has for a long time been considered Hamitic. He is sympathetic to including both dialects in the Hamitic family ("har med stor styrke h?vdet" and "det kan ikke n?gtes, at et eller andet virkelig taler derfor"), but he finds neither case sufficiently proven. I do not see any racism in this passage. Pedersen does not make the point that Nubian is likelier to be Hamitic because it is spoken by non-Negroes, and that Hausa is likelier not to be because it is a Negro language; on the opposite he considers both likely but unproven candidates. The (now rejected) fact that the Nubians are not Negroes are *not* connected with their ancient literacy as Wald suggests. The remark about the inscriptions are parenthesised and can not be seen as an argument for their race. The race issue is introduced to make a transition to the other disputed language, Hausa, and to strengthen the point of the high variation of the region. B. Wald comments on the spelling 'Haussa': >Pedersen follows older German spelling but Pedersen has consequently 'Havsa' and 'havsaisk' in the Danish version. Furthermore, Wald criticises the term 'Sudan languages' for being >geographical reference, while "Hamitic" is an assumed linguistic > reference, but that is exactly the point of Pedersen: "Nord for den klare og vel avgr?nsede bantuiske sprog?t str?kker der sig mellem ?kvator og Sahara fra Afrikas vestkyst helt over til Nilen et bredt b?lte av sprog, som kan sammenfattes under den geografiske betegnelse Sudan-sprogene. At finde rede i sl?gtskabsforbindelserne i dette meget brogede b?lte er en yderst vanskelig opgave, som endnu aldeles ikke er l?st. Vi har ovenfor s. 111 omtalt, at gr?nsen mellem Sudansprogene i sn?ver betydning og den hamitiske ?t ingenlunde kan tr?kkes med sikkerhed, og vi har n?vnet nubisk (ved Nilen) og havsaisk (mellem Niger og Tsads?en) som to av de omstridte sprog. At de sprog, der bliver tilbage, n?r man har givet Hamiterne, hvad Hamiternes er, indbyrdes er besl?gtede og m?ske endnu l?ngere ude er besl?gtede med Bantu-?tten, er indtil videre ikke andet end en hypotese." Pedersen's point is exactly that the socalled Sudan-languages are not necessarily genetically related, and he has not found convincing arguments for the hypothesis that the non-Hamitic dialectes of that region should be related to one another or to the Bantu family. Thus he does not conclude from racial affinity to linguistic relations. George Hinge From manaster at umich.edu Tue Feb 9 18:13:20 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 13:13:20 EST Subject: Deja vu In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I have more than once referred to Pedersen's talk at the 1933 Congress of linguists, but it now occurs to me that, aside from its historical interest, it (and the discussion that followed and some of the other discussions at that congress) actually were very much like what we face today, esp. on the negative, anti-Nostratic, side, whose views came out in the discussions (the same a prioristic, uninformed, and pretentious posturing, combined with a staunch refusal to actually look at the relevant literature, data, arguments, etc.), whereas the Nostratic side (represented by Pedersen and Collinder) was not nearly as advanced as it has been since the 1960's. Except for the IE-Uralic comparison, the Nostraticists in 1933 did not have much to say for themselves. This does not mean that Nostratic is therefore right. But I think it helps to place our modern discussions in context. To me, the main thing is precisely that the nay-sayers have not progressed much (in some ways they have regressed actually) whereas the proponents have advanced enormously, both with regard to data and theory. This STILL does not mean Nostratic is right, of course. Reference: Atti del III Congresso Internazionale dei Linguisti (Roma, 19-26 settembre 1933-XI), Florence: Le Monnier (1935). Reprinted (1972) Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus. See papers by Pedersen and Collinder and the comments from the audience on each. From harry.perridon at hum.uva.nl Tue Feb 9 14:19:06 1999 From: harry.perridon at hum.uva.nl (Harry Perridon) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 09:19:06 EST Subject: Pedersen's alleged racism Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Re: Benji Wald's comments on Pedersen's alleged racism. The Danish text was published in 1924, and copied in 1978 (with an introduction by Jens Juhl Jensen): Holger Pedersen Videnskaben om sproget. Historisk sprogvidenskab i det 19. ?rhundrede , reprinted in 1978 (Aarhus: Arkona). The relevant passage about Nubian and Hausa (actually spelled with a single s in the Danish version) is on p. 111. Specially interesting for the current discussion on this list is the following passage on p. 92: "Herav m? man ikke slutte, at der er nogen inderlig sammenh?ng mellem sprog og rase. Det er tvertimod en av de forste iagttagelser, man ved en gennemgang av sprogene vil g?re, at sprog og rase ikke har de samme gr?nselinjer." etc. Pedersen exposes time and again nationalistic and possibly racist ideology in linguistics, e.g. when describing the finno-ugric language family: "Men Ungarerne f?lte sig ikke just smigrede over sl?gtskabet med Lapperne: det lugtede dem for meget av tran. De ville megete hellere v?re i sl?gt med Tyrkerne, s?rlig med de ber?mte Hunner," etc. Probably Pedersen believed in 'races', but I don't think he can be called a racist for that reason. In fact, he actually demolishes part of the foundation of racist theory by showing that there is no connection between "race" and language-type. Harry Perridon Scandinavische talen Universiteit van Amsterdam Harry.Perridon at hum.uva.nl From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp Tue Feb 9 13:47:28 1999 From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 08:47:28 EST Subject: Arabic and IE Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- manaster at umich.edu wrote: > The question I like to pose > nowadays in the form I did in my earlier posting: Could it be > that IE together with Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber form a > proper subfamily of AA itself (which at first sounds absurd > until we realize just how different Cushitic and Chadic are > from the above) As long as we are in the business of dispelling myths, we should also dispel this one. The notion that the sub-saharan Cushitic and Chadic languages are radically different from the Afroasiatic languages to the north and east is a widely held received idea. But it is not widely held by those who have done comparative work on these languages. As you should know several different sub-classifications of AA have been proposed, none has won general acceptance, and probably several others could be proposed depending on what criteria you base your classification on. I am inclined to see Egyptian (along with Omotic, if it really is a separate branch) as the most divergent of the branches, because so many of the characteristic Afroasiatic features are lacking (the prefix-conjugation, object-clitic pronouns, quantitative stem ablaut as a marker of verbal aspect) or are found only in ambiguous traces (the system of marking verb valence with the prefixes or suffixes s (causative), t(reflexive) and n/m (passive), and quantitative stem ablaut as marker of noun plural). +++++++++++++ Robert R. Ratcliffe Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku Tokyo 114 Japan From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Tue Feb 9 13:30:14 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 08:30:14 EST Subject: Which is more important? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I already wrote that I am interested mostly in methodology, and the latest exchanges involving what comparative linguistics has given me yet another opportunity to learn how "real linguists" do it. One of the reason I do this is because I am doing research on AI and the second is because I also do linguistics. I know that over the years many kinds of AI programs have been written to do many kinds of things. ONe of the biggest problems in many fields is that many "experts" don't know how they do things. I mean that they are not clear enough to produce an algorithm which is expected; after all they are not computer scienists. One of the biggest problems in this field is that nobody ever wants to admit that what they do can be written up as an algorithm (except those that already know it is so). Even after evidence is given that even such allegedly nonalgorithmic and creative processes as painting and composing music are algorithmic and that computer programs can be written to mimic humans, there is still a very strong human tendency to deny the obvious. The reason I write this so I don't have to say it later. The latest exchanges involving how comparative linguistics is apparently done has given me a chance to surreptitiously observe how real linguists would have done it by reading writings of real linguists. Since the best way is to observe people actually doing things instead of asking them what they would do in such and such a case, I am posting something at the end of these few lines. What I want to know is how important is what part of language in the determination of genetic relationships and why. IT does not matter that I already think I know how linguists do it, at least how some, or most do it. The discussion of this list below, should teach me many times more than what I have learned reading books. This list, I hope, is enough to create real problems for this mailing list. It should be. After all, there are so many different versions of how comparative linguistics should be done, according to so many authors and practitioners, that it is natural that this fight should exist. Here it is: Please read the whole thing before cursing me out :-) ==============================start========================== 1. Meroitic -k, Barea -ge: Fenno-Urgic -k 'to' (e.g. Ingrelian ala-k 'down'. 2. Meroitic -te, Nubian -do locative suffix 'in': Old Turkish -ta, -da 'in' Finnish -ta 'in' 3. Meroitic -k feminine suffix: Mongolian -k-chin feminine of adjectives; Meroitic kdi 'woman': Turkish kari 'woman' (correspondence d:r looks better than d:ss but to make the matter even more surprising, there is one Eastern Turkish language, where the word for woman is kissi!) 4. Meroitic t demonstrative, Nubian ter 'he' etc. Mongolian tere 'he' 'that', Finnish 'te' 'this one' (I used te instead of ta-unlaut) 5. Old Nubian -ka accusative suffix: Old Turkish -g, -ig, Mongolian -g, -gi accusative suffix. 6. Old Nubian -ka dative suffix: Old Turkish -qa, -ke dative suffix 7. Old Nubian -n(a) genitive suffix: Mongolian -in, -n, Fenno-Ugric -n genetive suffix. 8. Old Nubian -r 'intentive' verbal suffix; Old Turkish -r, Finno-Ugric -r factitive verbal suffix. 9. Meroitic tar 'give' causative verbal affix (according to Dr. Priese) Old Nubian tir 'give' causative verbal affix: Old Turkish -tur 'give' causative verbal affix 10. Old Nubian -a participle, conjunctive converb: Old Turkish -a conjunctive converb 11. Old Nubian -ra predicative converb: Mongolian -ra final converb 12. Old Nubian -sa verbal participle praeteriti: Mongolian -san participle praeteriti 13. Old Nubian -s verbal suffix, praeteritum: Fenno-Ugric -s verbal suffix, praeteritum (cf. Old Nubian ki-s-in 'you came' with Wogulian min-s-en 'you came') 14. Old Nubian -men (-m-en) negation of verbs: Old Turkish -ma negation of verbs 15. Old Nubian -in,-en verbal suffix, 'you' 2 sg: Wogulian -en verbal suffix 'you' 2. sg. 16. Old Nubian possessive pronoun=genetive of personal pronoun (ir 'you', in-na 'your'): Old Turkish the same ('sen' 'you', san-ing 'your'), Mongolian the same (chi 'you', chinu 'your') 17. Old Nubian -t, -it deverbal nouns: Old Turkish -t, -it,-id deverbal nouns 18. Old Nubian -ki deverbal nouns: Turkish -ki abstract nouns, Finno-Ugric -k deverbal nouns 19. Old Nubian min 'what', Mongolian men 'what': Wogulian men 'what', Hungarian mi 'what'; 20. Old Nubian -guria 'because of': Turkish -gore 'because of' ========================end======================================== This connects Eastern-Sudanic (Old Nubian) with Uralo-Altaic. OK. I spill the beans: these are from Fritz Hintze's article. That is the reason for the strange spellings. And in this article, according to some, Hintze wanted to show that one should not pay attention to morphemes. I read the article, after having looked for it for months, and then having waited for weeks after having found where it was. I think Hintze, contrary to what others say, in this article shows how intelligent he is by writing in a completely bland manner and letting the chips fall where they may in the future. As one joke has it, a rational person believes in God. If he does not exist he has lost nothing, but what if he does exist? That is probably how Hintze wrote this, but some think otherwise. PS. Notice old Turkish tur (give) and Etruscan tur (give). -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From oldgh at hum.aau.dk Wed Feb 10 12:20:30 1999 From: oldgh at hum.aau.dk (George Hinge) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 07:20:30 EST Subject: Pedersen's alleged racism Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Harry Perridon wrote 10 February 1999 >The relevant passage about Nubian and Hausa (actually spelled >with a single >s in the Danish version) is on p. 111. cf. my letter of 9 February >Pedersen exposes time and again nationalistic and possibly >racist ideology in linguistics, e.g. when describing the finno-ugric >language family: >"Men Ungarerne f?lte sig ikke just smigrede over sl?gtskabet >med Lapperne: det lugtede dem for meget av tran. De ville >megete hellere v?re i sl?gt med Tyrkerne, s?rlig med de >ber?mte Hunner," etc. When you say 'exposes', do you mean that he shares those feelings? It is obvious to me that Pedersen accuses the Hungarians of rejecting the Lapps with racist (or chauvinistic) motives. Pedersen himself believes that the Hungarians are closer related to the humble Laplanders than to the glorious Turks. > Probably Pedersen believed in 'races', but I don't think he can >be called a racist for that reason. In fact, he actually demolishes >part of the foundation of racist theory by showing that there is >no connection between "race" and language-type. It would have been quite extraordinary for a scientist of the early 20th c. not to believe in races. If race it is relieved for its socially and historically conditioned burden and is understood only as the recurring of some typical features, I am ready to accept the term, too (without being a racist, I hope). [Indications such as "the black race" or "the white race" are however nonsense, at least from an anthropological point of view.] I don't believe we'll get rid of racism by banishing words describing human differences. Mr. Perridon is right in emphasising Pedersen's arguments rather than his terminology. George Hinge From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Thu Feb 11 04:00:17 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 23:00:17 EST Subject: Which is more important? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Mark Hubey writes: >As one joke has it, a rational person believes in God. If he does not exist he has lost nothing, but what if he does exist? It's not a joke to everyone. It was proposed in all seriousness by the (great) 17th c French mathemetician, computer scientist, and Janesenist philosopher Blaise Pascal, who called it a "bet" (pari) you can't lose. We see why Pascal is celebrated for his work on probability theory. Now the stuff about resemblances among various languages. Seems relevant to Pascal's probability theory. You're finding out that you can spend your life collecting such things (or collecting previous collections of such things), and you'll never live long enough to collect them all. Probability theorists, recycle your messages. From DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Thu Feb 11 23:33:13 1999 From: DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (DISTERH at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 18:33:13 EST Subject: announcement Message-ID: Return-Path: Received: from UNIVSCVM (NJE origin SMTP at UNIVSCVM) by VM.SC.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 5224; Thu, 11 Feb 1999 14:06:49 -0500 Received: from *unknown [137.73.66.6] by VM.SC.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R4a) via TCP with SMTP ; Thu, 11 Feb 1999 14:06:28 EST X-Warning: VM.SC.EDU: Could not confirm that host [137.73.66.6] is mail.kcl.ac.uk Received: from pc107.eng.kcl.ac.uk (pc107.eng.kcl.ac.uk [137.73.108.107]) by mail.kcl.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id SAA16089; Thu, 11 Feb 1999 18:26:22 GMT From: "jane.roberts" Sender: jane.roberts at kcl.ac.uk Fontes Anglo-Saxonici=20 A Register of Written Sources Used by Authors in Anglo-Saxon England=20 Fifteenth Open Meeting=20 Tuesday, 30th March 1999=20 Programme=20 10:30 a.m. =09Coffee in the Council Room of King's College London=20 11:15 a.m.=09Welcome by Professor Joyce Hill, Chairman of the Management = =09=09=09Committee of Fontes Anglo-Saxonici, and report on the year's work= =20 11:30 a.m. =09 =91The Sermons of St Augustine in SASLC and Fontes=92: Profe= ssor F. M. =09=09Biggs (University of Connecticut) 12:00=09=09=91Some remarks on the sources of =C6lfric=92s Preface to Genesi= s=92: Dr =09=09=09Mark Griffith (New College, Oxford) 12:30 p.m. =09Discussion=20 12:55 p.m. =09Buffet lunch=20 2:15 p.m. =09"A Welter of Orientals": Katharine Scarfe Beckett (Gonville = & Caius =09=09College, Cambridge)=20 =09=09 =91Diagrams and sources in Byrhtferth=92s Enchiridion: Dr Philippa = =09=09=09Semper (University College Dublin) =09=09=91Vergilian Commentaries and the Anglo-Saxonist: Well Worth the =09= =09=09Trouble=92: Dr. Helen Conrad-O'Briain (Trinity College Dublin) 3:45 p.m. =09The seminar ends with tea. *********************************************************************** Reply Slip I shall attend the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici Open Meeting on Tuesday 30th March= 1999, and I enclose a cheque for =A313, made out to King's College London.= (Please note if vegetarian food is required.) Name Address:=20 Please send replies to: Jane Roberts, Department of English, King's College= London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS.=09Email: jane.roberts at kcl.ac.uk ---------------------- Jane Roberts Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature King's College London From ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp Fri Feb 12 13:27:55 1999 From: ratcliff at fs.tufs.ac.jp (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 08:27:55 EST Subject: Arabic and IE(subdivisions in AA) Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- manaster at umich.edu wrote: > On Tue, 9 Feb 1999, Robert R. Ratcliffe wrote: > > > As long as we are in the business of dispelling myths, we should > also > > dispel this one. The notion that the sub-saharan Cushitic and > Chadic > > languages are radically different from the Afroasiatic languages to > the > > north and east is a widely held received idea. But it is not widely > held > > by those who have done comparative work on these languages. As you > > should know several different sub-classifications of AA have been > > proposed, none has won general acceptance, and probably several > others > > could be proposed depending on what criteria you base your > > classification on. > > > Yet but I don't see why you have to assume that I don't know this. > But the view I am referring to is not one that I mentione merely > because > I picked it from some obsolete reference work as you seem to be > suggesting. Well, then, what is the basis for your the claim that Berber, Egyptian, and Semitic are particularly close within AA? > As you say yourself, there are a number of different classifications > that have been or can be proposed. But ultimately the only thing > that matters is that the classification reflect historical reality. This is really the nub of the issue as I see it. And it is why you can't have classification without reconstruction of language history. Similarities among languages within an established family may be due to retention, shared innovation, subsequent contact, or commn drift. You can't get a reliable classification if you can't sort these things out. You can't sort these out if you don't have some idea of what the situation of the proto-language was, some idea of what the drift patterns in the family are, and ideally some idea of when and where contact may have occurred. Since there is still a lot of disagreement about these issues in AA, there is also a lot of room for disagreement on subclassification. > It is by no means obvious that we can in fact arrive at that goal. > What you say about "criteria" suggests that you do not share this > goal, i.e., that you view classification as having no obejctive > historical reality. No nothing so drastic. I wasn't talking about the goal, so much as the way things are. Different scholars may find different subclassifications, depending on what kind of reconstruction they adopt, that is on what features they regard as innovative. > > I am inclined to see Egyptian (along with Omotic, if it really is a > > > separate branch) as the most divergent of the branches, because so > many > > of the characteristic Afroasiatic features are lacking (the > > prefix-conjugation, object-clitic pronouns, quantitative stem ablaut > as > > a marker of verbal aspect) or are found only in ambiguous traces > (the > > system of marking verb valence with the prefixes or suffixes s > > (causative), t(reflexive) and n/m (passive), and quantitative stem > > ablaut as marker of noun plural). > > > This is not methodologically sound. Sure it is. I am not proposing an Egyptian/non-Egyptian primary split within AA. I am just taking issue with the viewpoint, also expressed by Miquel Carrasquer Vidal, that Egyptian, Semitic, and Berber look similar to each other, while Chadic and Cushitic look quite different. Similarity is in the eye of the beholder, of course. So I thought it would be best for me to lay out the reasons why for me Semitic, Berber, Chadic, and Cushitic (i.e, Beja, Agaw, Afar-Saho, and Somali, at least) look similar and it is Egyptian which looks quite different. It is still open for debate, by the way, whether all of what I am calling "characteristic features" really are conservative features. Egyptian seems to me to pose the same kind of problem within AA as Hittite does within IE. It's the oldest language by attestation, but it seems to be surprisingly innovative. Of course maybe it is all the others which are innovative, in which case we would have to propose a primary split. -- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Robert R. Ratcliffe Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics, Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku Tokyo 114 Japan From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Feb 15 17:02:29 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 12:02:29 EST Subject: Arabic and IE(subdivisions in AA) In-Reply-To: <36C499BC.183C0EE7@fs.tufs.ac.jp> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- "Robert R. Ratcliffe" wrote: >Sure it is. I am not proposing an Egyptian/non-Egyptian primary split >within AA. I am just taking issue with the viewpoint, also expressed by >Miquel Carrasquer Vidal, that Egyptian, Semitic, and Berber look similar >to each other, while Chadic and Cushitic look quite different. Did I say that? I know Ehret does ("Boreafrasian"), but I have never taken such a position, mainly because I tend to trust Newman when it comes to Chadic, and he links Chadic with Berber. I *am* on record for proposing the following branching tree: PAA / \ Omotic "Erythraic" / | | \ S. E. C. Beja-Northern Cushitic / | Beja Northern __________/|\________ | | | Berber-Chadic Egyptian Semitic ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From Paula.Fikkert at uni-konstanz.de Tue Feb 16 01:06:41 1999 From: Paula.Fikkert at uni-konstanz.de (Paula Fikkert) Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 20:06:41 EST Subject: Conference announcement Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Conference Announcement DGfS99 The 21st annual meeting of the German Society of Linguistics/ 21. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft f?r Sprachwissenschaft University of Konstanz, Germany February 24-26, 1999 Theme: Language change/Sprachwandel Invited speakers: Bernard Comrie (MPI Leipzig) Morris Halle (MIT) Paul Kiparsky (Stanford University) Ilse Lehiste (Ohio State University) The meeting hosts the following workshops/Arbeitsgruppe: AG1 Bedeutungswandel - Bedeutungsvariation AG2 Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction AG3 Change in Prosodic Systems AG4 Morphologischer Wandel AG5 Kontinuitaet, Wandel und Reform von Schriftsystemen/Orthographie AG6 Werden Sprachen besser? Praeferenzen, Optimalitaet und Output-Orientierung in Sprachwandel AG7 Varietaetenwandel AG8 Adding and Omitting AG9 Klitika/Clitics AG10 Korpora als Verifikationsmittel linguistischer Analysen AG11 Pragmatische Schlussverfahren AG12 Competition in Syntax More information on the Meeting and on the individual workshops can be found on the conference website (http://dgfs99.uni-konstanz.de/). Dr. Paula Fikkert Job: FG Sprachwissenschaft, Universitaet Konstanz, Fach D 186, D 78457 Konstanz Deutschland Tel: +49-7531-882622 Fax: +49-7531-883095 Privat: Alte Bergstrasse 14, CH 8280 Kreuzlingen, Schweiz Tel: +41-71-6722387 Fax: +41-71-6722740 From manaster at umich.edu Tue Feb 16 13:21:59 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1999 08:21:59 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Before we got sidetracked, I thought we had seen the beginning of a really interesting and useful (and indeed potentially revolutionary) debate about how languages really get classified. And since it is impossible to talk about these things in a vacuum, I had suggested that, contrary to what some have said, it IS perfectly easy to find cases of (proposed) language families where all the data and all the issues can be posted and discussed electronically. And in response to my posting the entire Goddard (1979) argument for a Comecrudan language family, together with all the known data from two of the three languages, several people did seem interested in pursuing the substantive issues, incl. Larry Trask, Stefan Georg, Sally Thomason, and Johanna Nichols. But as I say we then got sidetracked. I don't know how many people are interested in this, so I will not pursue this any further here if there is no interest, of course. But, for now, I think three issues have been raised in response to my posting: (a) Sally Thomason tried to minimize the contradiction between the views on "Comecrudan" of Goddard, who proposed "Comecrudan", and Campbell, who discusses it in his recent book as an established and uncontroversial language family, and these same two authors' criticism of other proposed language families, for which the evidence is much stronger than for "Comecrudan". So let me cite specifics. Campbell (1997:107) begins his chapter 4 by saying that in this chapter "Only well-established and generally uncontested families are treated...", and on pp. 144-145 in this same chapter he lists Comecrudan and offers some discussion of why the "Recognition of the Comecrudan family is important" and specifically cites Goddard as well as a paper by another Campbell, T. Campbell, for the fact that "the Comecrudan relationship ... is now recognized". As for Goddard, it is true that he does explicitly say that "Comecrudan" HAS to be accepted merely that he has a "strong case", but his conclusion reads (1979:380): "The available data from South Texas and the Lower Rio Grande point to the existence of seven at present unrelatable languages or small families: Tonkawa, Coahuilteco, Karankawa, Comecrudan, Cotoname, Solano, and Aranama". OF COURSE, Goddard is a cautious scholar and expresses himself cautiously, BUT first of all in fact of the seven all are single languages EXCEPT "Comecrudan", so he is putting "Comecrudan" in the same list with individual languages, which to me is saying that he is taking as established, and, second, supposing I, for example, used the same language about "The available data from X point to the existence of Y ... families" and then listed families which are NOT to Campbell's or Thomason's liking. They would immediately denounce for proposing something methodologically untenable, some of them would say that I am not a historical linguist, etc.. In fact, this is what Campbell does with regard to my Pakawan (= Comecrudan + Cotoname + Coahuilteco) proposal. Or, they would take a cautious formulation, such as Goddard's, but on my part as an indication that, since I am asserting but merely proposing, they can simply ignore my proposal (as Campbell does with my Coahuiltecan (= Pakawa-Karankawan) proposal, again in the same book). So it seems clear to me that the opinion-makers in our field are simply applying a double standard, in addition to contradicting themselves about what is and what is not acceptable methodology. Larry and Stefan apparently concede that I am right about the contradiction between the methodological stance of Goddard, Campbell, et al., and their acceptance of "Comecrudan", but raise another issue. (b) They say in effect that while I am right all this means is that Goddard, Campbell, et al. are wrong about accepting "Comecrudan" (and hence can still be right about methodology). I don't want to dwell on this, but to me the points here are two. One, as I know Stefan agrees and is clear to any historian of comparative (especially Indo- European) linguistics, methodology has always come second in our field to the actual linguistics. The methods we use emerged and were tested in the course of work on actual languages. If there is to be a discussion of methodologies, then we should look at language families that have proposed on the basis of specific methodologies and see what we find, not start out by a priori accepting some completely arbitrary methodological assertion made up from whole cloth and then rejecting any language family whose recognition would force us to abandon that assertion. I am referring of course to the two assertions: (I) Language relatedness can only be shown by reference to morphology (falsified by the history of how Tai, Comecrudan, and (an example I forgot to cite earlier) how Uto-Aztecan was discovered), (II) Language relatedness can only be shown by establishing a system of sound laws (falsified by the history of how Niger-Kordofanian, Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and indeed probably most of the currently accepted language families were established). But even more important is the fact that, as I maintain, it is NOT reasonable to take a quick look at some proposed linguistic family and immediately take either a negative or a positive stand and then hold on to it for dear life. Rather, a new theory, if correct, will over time undergo considerable refinement and, crucially, find more and more evidence to support it--and will explain more and more data. My position on "Comecrudan" when I saw it was neither yes nor no, but rather "Maybe, let's see what we can do with this", and I have since then (in work published already as well as forthcoming work) assembled more and more evidence for and found no evidence against. It helps that more data have become available to me when I got a hold of an unpublished ms. which Goddard had used but failed to exploit at all fully. And it helps even more that "Comecrudan" is, as I hold, a part of a bigger family, Pakawan, about which much more is known simply because we have more data. So that the "Comecrudan" problem becomes more or less like the problem of showing that some very poorly attested IE lg, like Messapic, is indeed Indo-European. Even though "Comecrudan" is smaller than Pakawan, it is easier to argue for the latter than for the former, in effect. But to see if this is really so, people must be willing to examine the data and the arguments without prejudging the case. (c) I agree with Johanna Nichols, pace what Larry and Stefan seem to say, that, when dealing with languages of which we know only a small number of words, it matters not just that we can only, therefore, only find at best a small number of cognates with other languages but also it matters how percentage of the attested forms we can explain. This is why I posted the entire Garza and Mamulique corpus, to see whether she (and others) would agree with me that the Comecrudan hypothesis (which links these two with Comecrudo) is a reasonable one. I say Freasonable' because as stated I think the proof of "Comecrudan" lies in the broader Pakawan comparison. AMR Campbell, Lyle 1997 American Indian Languages. Oxford Univ. Press. Goddard, Ives 1979 The Languages of South Texas and the Lower Rio Grande. _In_ The Languages of North America: Historical and Comparative Assessment, edited by Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, 355-389. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. Manaster Ramer, Alexis 1996 Sapir's classifications: Coahuiltecan. Anthropological Linguistics 38:1-37. From wolfskil at MIT.EDU Wed Feb 17 02:06:31 1999 From: wolfskil at MIT.EDU (Jud Wolfskill) Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1999 21:06:31 EST Subject: Book Announcement Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1511 bytes Desc: not available URL: From compling at juno.com Wed Feb 17 16:48:25 1999 From: compling at juno.com (Christopher Hogan) Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 11:48:25 EST Subject: likeness of Modern Polish to that of 12th c. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I received the following request from a friend. Would anyone be willing to comment on the degree to which Polish has changed since the 12th c.? In message <01BE59BE.40C58F60 at Bluegrass3> "Marion K. Bryant" writes: > >Recently I read a novel about a modern day Polish man who was >transported to 12th century Poland. According to the author, the >language spoken by modern day Poles is basically the same as that >spoken by Poles in the 12th century. The modern day guy had >no trouble understanding the locals or they him. This situation >was contrasted with English, which has changed dramatically over >the same time period. > > Does anyone know if this is true about the Polish language? Is >it true of other languages? I read somewhere that in a northern >country (Iceland? Norway? Finland?) the people could read the sagas >written centuries ago without any trouble. What about Italian or French? >Could a Frenchman of today understand the French spoken in the 12th century? > > Marion --chris ___________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Feb 17 13:46:42 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 08:46:42 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Comecrudo) is a reasonable one. I say Freasonable' because as stated I > think the proof of "Comecrudan" lies in the broader Pakawan comparison. > In this brief final remark I think Alexis draws attention to an important methodological point which has not figured at all prominently during the discussion of method in comparative linguistics over the last few months. There is ideally some feedback relationship between hypotheses of subgrouping and hypotheses of broader comparison. Thus the (or a) Nostratic hypothesis, if true, might be expected to throw light on the problem of Afroasiatic subgrouping which has been raised recently. It would do this by making clearer what is an archaism and what is an innovation, a distinction which may not often be possible just by looking at the lower level. Is it the case...? or should it be the case, that the fruitfulness of a hypothesis carries more weight than the reliability or generality of the sound correspondences it is based on? I take it that this is in line with Alexis's argument. Max Wheeler ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From hubeyh at Montclair.edu Thu Feb 18 21:03:46 1999 From: hubeyh at Montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 16:03:46 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > Before we got sidetracked, I thought we had seen the beginning > of a really interesting and useful (and indeed potentially > revolutionary) debate about how languages really get classified. > I don't know how many people are interested in this, so I will not pursue > this any further here if there is no interest, of course. I am interested in this, so here are my $0.02. > > work on actual languages. If there is to be a discussion of > methodologies, then we should look at language families that have proposed > on the basis of specific methodologies and see what we find, not start out > by a priori accepting some completely arbitrary methodological assertion > made up from whole cloth and then rejecting any language family whose > recognition would force us to abandon that assertion. I am referring of > course to the two assertions: > > (I) Language relatedness can only be shown by reference to morphology > (falsified by the history of how Tai, Comecrudan, and (an example I forgot > to cite earlier) how Uto-Aztecan was discovered), > > (II) Language relatedness can only be shown by establishing a system of > sound laws (falsified by the history of how Niger-Kordofanian, > Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and indeed probably most of the currently > accepted language families were established). Some comments here. 1. In order to do (I) they have to have morphology. 2. In order to do (II) there are two issues to be settled. 2.1) If data is plentiful, then finding sound laws is easy. 2.2) If data is scarce, then one may still find sound laws even if doing nothing else but brute-force methods using computers. 2.3) if we do use brute-force methods, we still have to compare them against some baseline effects due to chance. 3. Executing (I) still requires some kind of sound-laws. If that were not the case, then languages could be said to be related for having the same kind of morphology but not having sound laws among bound morphemes. 4. So, in both cases, we are still working with morphemes (whether they are free or bound). The bound-morpheme method will only work on languages that have morphology, but again sound-laws are required. 5. In both cases, we are attempting to determine if probability of the existing situation can be attributable to chance. If the answer is no, then we go to the next step. 6. If the existing situation cannot be easily attributable to chance, then can it be borrowing? In order to remedy this situation, we put other rules into action: 6.1) The morphemes in which we see the realization of sound laws must be those that cannot be attributable to copying/borrowing. The heuristic that is employed here is that some special set of words are resistant to exactly this kind of borrowing/copying. The formalization of this concept first attempted by Swadesh is in the so-called Swadesh list. 6.2) The rules in (6.1) are further modified by not allowing words that are phonetically similar to a specific set of word {ata, ana,ama,...} Now, we have to justify these laws. The attempt to justify certain words that are apparently resistant to copying/borrowing/diffusion has to be backed up by some kind of evidence that is not circular. It can't be only IE languages. The circularity can be seen in the fact that these words are among the first that would exist in any language and can thus point to Protoworld. Therefore, (6.2) has to be fully justified and justifiable from empirical evidence that is not circular but independent of historical linguistics, especially of the IE-kind. Other problems: i)We need a measure of complexity. ii) We need a measure of semantic distance. ii) We need a measure of phonological/phonetic distance. A. (i) is necessar in cases like this: Does Kabardian have 1 or two vowels? If some brute-force computer program changed all the known words of some language (say Etruscan, or some other language with only a few known words) by using regular changes to some other language, then how many of these regular sound changes are we willing to tolerate. If the rules become very convoluted, do we throw up the towel and disallow it, or do we continue to insist on regular sound change, no matter how complex? B. (ii) is neeeded because we have to be able to determine if two words are cognates. We can't allow 'foot' and 'wagon' to become cognates, in general unless we can trace the word accross time extremely accurately. This could only occur if we had writings from the language stretching back thousands of years. Lacking that we have to guess, as we always do. And this guessing has to have some validity so that we can compare guesses against other guesses and be consistent. C. (iii) is the easiest thing to do and has been done. There are many such distance metrics (in my book), but we have to clearly define what is meant by phonetic, acoustic, perceptive and phonemic distances. There is a lot of utter confusion in the literature. There is no way, except to produce some number in some normalized interval like [0,1] even if the first attempt is not good, to be able to create a consistent comparison of attempts of linguists to create 'genetic' trees. Eventually, even this concept can be more clearly explained, after we've taken the bugs out of the simpler constituent concepts. > > (c) I agree with Johanna Nichols, pace what Larry and Stefan seem to say, > that, when dealing with languages of which we know only a small number of > words, it matters not just that we can only, therefore, only find at best > a small number of cognates with other languages but also it matters how > percentage of the attested forms we can explain. This is why I posted the > entire Garza and Mamulique corpus, to see whether she (and others) would > agree with me that the Comecrudan hypothesis (which links these two with > Comecrudo) is a reasonable one. I say Freasonable' because as stated I > think the proof of "Comecrudan" lies in the broader Pakawan comparison. And that is why I posted the material from Hintze on Meroitic, Altaic and Uralic. There has to be a consistent way to evaluate all such data. Historical linguistics has to be taken out of the realm of gut feelings. It is almost 21st century, and that kind of gut feeling will not hold up. There are computer programs that "compose music like Bach" and that paint. It is not believable to claim that historical linguistics is less structured than music or art, or that it has to stay at the level of intuition and black magic expertise. It is not. -- M. Hubey Email: hubeyh at Montclair.edu Backup:hubeyh at alpha.montclair.edu WWW Page: http://www.csam.montclair.edu/Faculty/Hubey.html From DSCOOPE at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU Thu Feb 18 16:48:02 1999 From: DSCOOPE at UNIVSCVM.SC.EDU (Donald S. Cooper) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 11:48:02 EST Subject: Polish In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 18 Feb 99 09:47:59 EST Message-ID: The inquiry about Old Polish raises interesting general questions about mutual intelligibility of related dialects of a given language. First, one may address the question on a practical level. A modern Pole transported into 12th century Poland would find a language partly intelligible, from which his own speech differed approximately to the same extent as modern Ukrainian from Modern Great Russian, or a Scots rural dialect does from the informal speech of South Carolina. The modern Pole would have to learn a number of phonological/phonetic correspondences, he would have to learn some vocabula ry which differed from modern Polish, and he would find some forms rather baffl ing, because they are not retained in Modern Polish, such as finite past verb forms. These he would have to learn with a certain degree of real labor, and initially they would be quite unintelligible. His position would be similar to that of a Russian-speaker set down in a Ukrainian village - at first he would understand a certain amount, he would improve rapidly as he learned sound correspondences, and it would take a year or two for him to learn to converse fluently with his interlocutors. The situation of English is quite different because of the flood of foreign words, mostly French and Latin, which followed the Norman invasion. The modern speaker would have no way of dealing with earlier Germanic lexicon which has been replaced, apart from the moderate degree of phonological change which has taken place in English since the 12th century. The author of your novel has made his life easier because actually we have only fragments of the Polish of the 12th century, such as the glosses and proper names contained in the "Golden Bull" (Polish: zlota bulla) issued by Pope Innocent II in 1136. We do not have a Polish text until the 13th century, if I recall correctly. A good deal can be learned from the study of Polish form s in Latin manuscripts,as was done quite early by the great Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay in his master's thesis published in Leipzig in 1870 (in Russian) "On the Old Polish Language up to the 14th century". Of course, such work is not very much in style now, and even Baudouin de Courtenay later commented about this meritorious thesis that he "wondered that such an occupation did not damage a young mind". The broader context of the degree of mutual interaction between speakers of different dialects, and possibility of spread of linguistic changes across other existing major isoglosses, of course, relates to broader questions regarding the assumptions of comparative linguistics. The Slavic written tradition began with the creation of translations into the Macedonian Slavic dialect called Old Church Slavonic in the 9th. c. One of my teachers, Horace Lunt, author of the first major modern linguistic study of modern Macedonian, commented after a couple of glasses of sherry once "It's really Bulgarian"; wars have been fought over these issues. The Old Church Slavonic texts were intelligible to the residents of Moravia in the mid-9th century, to the extent that OCS was adapted as a literary language of which we have traces, such as the Kiev and Prague Folia; this is described in a classic form in the monograph of Milos Weingart "The Czechoslovak Type of Church Slavonic" (in Slovak). Traces of such linguistic usage are found in the broader set of Old Church Slavonic manuscripts whiich reflect primarily the dialectal forms of Macedonia (e.g. Codex Zographensis and Marianus, Assemanianus, etc.) and those of Bulgaria (the Savvina kniga, Codex Suprasliensis). In the modern period the degree of mutual intelligibility of Slavic languages can be startling. At a medical meeting in Prague in 1989, I listened to a Serbian physician describe her hospital work on electrophysiology in Serbo-Croatian, to Czech speakers who did not know Serbo-Coatian. A couple of years later, at a medical meeting in Kiev, I listened at one point when a Bulgarian physician from Sophia was discussing modern Balkan history with another physician from Belgrade. Each spoke his own language, with good understanding. Neither, of course, was a linguist or professional polyglot; they simply followed a path of least resistance. Of course political factors may intervene; at a medical meeting in Cairo, the present writer noted that a Polish physician in converse with a Czech one preferred to speak German, the common cultural language of Central Europe. Without extending this discussion, such practical phenomena illustrate the complexity which may lie behind the lines demarking linguistic change, both in the modern world and in earlier reconstructed stages of language. Speakers of different closely related forms of language do learn to communicate fluently, although the process may differ in its nature and complexity in different situations. Sincerely, Donald S. Cooper Dept. of Speech/Language Pathology and Audiology University of South Carolina From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Thu Feb 18 14:20:23 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 09:20:23 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Only because of recent exchanges, I feel the need to disclaim that I have appointed myself AMR's nemesis in commenting on an argument he made about language-relatedness. In fact, my comments repeat things I have already said on this list in responding to other scholars. The point that interests me starts where AMR wrote: ".... If there is to be a discussion of methodologies, then we should look at language families that have proposed on the basis of specific methodologies and see what we find, " That's an excellent idea, but the sentence continues: "not start out by a priori accepting some completely arbitrary methodological assertion made up from whole cloth and then rejecting any language family whose recognition would force us to abandon that assertion". The part about "some completely arbitrary methodological assertion" has to be defended, since there is a traditional consensus view that has been accepted over time, and, because of the tests it has passed in its development and its successes, does not appear to the field as a whole to be arbitrary. To be sure, not all languages are thought to have single ancestors, but the notion of "language family" does seem to rest on the notion of the related languages having a single common ancestor, and a demonstration of reconstruction of that ancestor and diversification of its descendents is the consensus that banishes skeptics to the sidelines. The continuation is: "...I am referring of course to the two assertions:(I) Language relatedness can only be shown by reference to morphology (falsified by the history of how Tai, Comecrudan, and (an example I forgot to cite earlier) how Uto-Aztecan was discovered), (II) Language relatedness can only be shown by establishing a system of sound laws (falsified by the history of how Niger-Kordofanian, Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and indeed probably most of the currently accepted language families were established)." The two assertions are opposed to each other, when I think they should be presented as cooperative properties of the consensus view. Of course, morphology is vulnerable to phonological erosion and syntactic reorganisation, but demonstration of relationship should eventually be able to account for the grammatical structure of the ancestor -- otherwise, what's the point of assuming a single gramatical ancestor whose properties are unknown?. Apart from that, the "falsification" referred to has to do with the first HUNCHES that these were families -- of the same kind as those families that no one would dispute, -- not how SUBSEQUENTLY they came to be "established" as families. In this context, I want to comment on AMR's claim that Niger-Kordofanian (and probably various other families) falsifies the traditional claim of how language-relatedness is ESTABLISHED. These statements remind me of what I wrote in reference to Merritt Ruhlen's argument that language-relatedness is "established" prior to such things as the above; he was pushing mass comparison as sufficient to "establish" relationship. He argued speciously that if relatedness was not already being "accepted", what would be the point of further mining the data for sound correspondences, etc.? I think we all agree that the way we understand (genetic) relatedness, if languages are indeed related then we expect systems of sound laws, and diversification of syntax and morphology to eventually be demonstrable. In view of that, I objected to Merritt's obscuring the "acceptance" (if you will) of a HYPOTHESIS (that mass comparisons, including some grammatical morphemes, suggest that a set of languages are related) and a METHOD OF DEMONSTRATION to TEST the hypothesis (which involves sound correspondences and whatever else). My scare-quotes above call attention to tricky words like "establish" and "accept". Further repeating comments I think I have already made on this list, let's take the case of Niger-Kordofanian (which generally reverted to the earlier label Niger-Congo, NC, in a manner similar to the way "Indo-Hittite" reverted to "Indo-European".) It is absolutely true that concerned scholars "accept" the notion of an NC family as the most reasonable HYPOTHESIS (yet offered, and over the dead bodies of previous hypotheses) for the massive similarities among various NC languages. However, in the absence of DEMONSTRATION by classical methods, there is disagreement about membership in that family -- and the skepticism is JUSTIFIED until such demonstration is forthcoming. The greatest victory in the establishment of the NC family was the "acceptance" that Bantu is a sub-sub...branch of NC, i.e., that it is related to numerous West African languages. Demonstration has proceeded quite easily with respect to Bantu and its nearest relatives in Cameroon and Nigeria, and by linkage, between various Nigerian languages and many (but not all) more eastern and northern NC languages. The situation is not so clear for some hypothesised branches of NC. Mukarovsky in Vienna has doubted the Northern Atlantic (?sub-)branch and the Mande branch. While I, for one, find it quite likely that both these groups will turn out to be bona fide NC ( most NC-ists seem to agree), I look on with great interest to the demonstration that will relieve the doubts of critics like Mukarovsky. I am particularly interested because NC-ists tend to consider Mande to be among one of the earliest separations from NC as a whole, and if demonstration of relatedness is successful, I want to see what it indicates about the nature of NC at that stage in its history. Indeed I am more interested in that than the "fact" of relatedness itself. (Actually, I suspect that the commonalities of the less problematic NC branches might already tell us more about early versions of NC, and that Mande has diverged from those commonalities more than most languages -- but that's just a suspicion, not even a hypothesis, and still of great interest to me: how and why has Mande diverged so much?) I think I have already mentioned in earlier discussions that Kordofanian also has problematic aspects, and that is involved in general reversion to the label "Niger-Congo". It was originally assumed that the Kordofanian languages were all related. On the basis of the evidence in SOME of these languages, it was hypothesised that it was also related to NC, as a sister. Some of the Kordofanian languages, however, showed more striking apparent resemblance to Nilo-Saharan than to Niger-Congo. On the basis of mass comparisons it was hypothesised that Kordofanian was a link between Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan. Gregersen, in particular, published a paper with this proposal (he was a student and admirer of Greenberg, a teacher of mine at Columbiaand highly knwoledgeable, as he would have to be, to argue for such a proposal). On closer inspection, however, esp. by Schadeberg, it turned out that this proposal was not sustainable, and that the similarities among the Kordofanian languages were the result of convergence. Some of them (the ones mainly used as the NC-NS link) turned out to be more likely to be Nilo-Saharan languages, while others still seemed most likely to be Niger-Congo. Hence the backoff on "Niger-Kordofanian", and reversion to "Niger-Congo". "Mainstream" opinion is still hesitant about whether Mande or "Kordofanian" split off first. All of these things are HYPOTHESES guiding and propelling further research. Terms like "accepted" (NC is an "accepted" family) must be understood in this context. Terms like "established" (NC is an "established" family) is open to misinterpretation, because of the blurring of "hypothesis" and "demonstration". AMR immediately continues: "But even more important is the fact that, as I maintain, it is NOT reasonable to take a quick look at some proposed linguistic family and immediately take either a negative or a positive stand and then hold on to it for dear life. Rather, a new theory, if correct, will over time undergo considerable refinement and, crucially, find more and more evidence to support it--and will explain more and more data." There is nothing I disagree with there. I do not object to AMR arguing that there may be sufficient reason to further consider the possibility that certain languages are related, for which the standard statement is "further research is needed". I only object to blurring the lines between a hypothesis (which may be "accepted" due to "opinion-makers" -- and turn out to be wrong) and a methodically acceptable demonstration (which "establishes" the relatedness beyond reasonable skepticism/criticism). On the basis of earlier friendly conversations with AMR I do not think he will disagree. I think I am doing more than mincing words to bring to attention the need for an argument in defense of more speculative relationships to be more carefully and precisely laid out, esp what makes a speculative relationship more or less promising (for eventual demonstration). If that is all that is being proposed -- great! Leave out the part about the consensus view being "arbitrary" or "made up from whole cloth", or defend it. -- Benji From manaster at umich.edu Thu Feb 18 14:10:56 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 09:10:56 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Max is exactly right about what I intended by saying that "the proof of "Comecrudan" lies in the broader Pakawan comparison". I think quite generally that one of the reasons the debates over language classification have not been as fruitful as they might have been is that people on one side insist that whatever evidence they have published for a given language family should be enough and no further discussion should be required, while people on the other side insist that if they can find any flaw, no matter how small, in the other guys' work, that suffices to refute the work in question. Neither side wants to look beyond what has already been done and ask whet MORE can and should be done. My approach here is based on the example of what Edward Sapir did when he decided that the preexisting arguments for Uto-Aztecan were inadequate: without dwelling on all the problems with the earlier work, he simply did his own work and established the reality of Uto-Aztecan to everybody's satisfaction. Nor is it necessary, or even desirable, for an individual scholar to make a definite commitment for or against a given theory before making an honest effort to studying and perhaps improving on it. What little I have been able to do with regard to Nostratic was done not because I had ALREADY decided that Nostratic is right but rather as part of the process of trying to see for myself WHETHER it is right, a process which I am still dedicated to pursuing. I simply cannot understand the people who declare that Nostratic, say, is an established fact any more than I can those who pronounce it dead. AMR On Wed, 17 Feb 1999, Max W Wheeler wrote: > In [his] brief final remark I think Alexis draws attention to an > important methodological point which has not figured at all prominently > during the discussion of method in comparative linguistics over the last > few months. There is ideally some feedback relationship between > hypotheses of subgrouping and hypotheses of broader comparison. Thus the > (or a) Nostratic hypothesis, if true, might be expected to throw light > on the problem of Afroasiatic subgrouping which has been raised > recently. It would do this by making clearer what is an archaism and > what is an innovation, a distinction which may not often be possible > just by looking at the lower level. > > Is it the case...? or should it be the case, that the fruitfulness of a > hypothesis carries more weight than the reliability or generality of the > sound correspondences it is based on? > > I take it that this is in line with Alexis's argument. From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Thu Feb 18 13:53:17 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 08:53:17 EST Subject: Wald's continuing... Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Unfortunately, I feel compelled to respond to AMR's ad hominem posting of 7 Feb, 1999. I would have preferred to remain silent, but that runs the risk of some onlookers thinking that unrestrained emotion is an acceptable or effective substitute for rational argument in our field. Behind AMR's posting, I have come to realise, was a great deal of personal pain. I did not foresee that my criticism of some of Pedersen's statements would be taken by AMR as a personal insult to himself, and a direct threat to a line of inquiry he holds dear. So, recognising all the sensitivities engendered in any issue remains a human problem that we can only continue to work on without expecting that a solution is just around the corner. Fortunately, Dorothy intervened, though a little late, when it came to her attention that AMR's posting was threatening to transform the list into the moral and "intellectual" equivalent of the "Jerry Springer Show", with AMR doing the verbal equivalent of throwing a chair at me. She wrote to me: >>> .... I should have >>been more careful about vetting submitted postings and should not have >>distributed that one from AMR. In addition, I'm trying to keep postings >>shorter -- this is one of the reasons some things that shouldn't be posted >>slip by me. ....Would you be willing to shorten this and reduce the >>>level of your outrage? Then I'll post it. In return, I sympathised with her plight, in view of the work that would have to be done to vet the irrepressible barrage of often lengthy (and often equally worthwhile) messages that AMR submits to the list. I also noted that my immediate reply to AMR's posting, which she suppressed, was as long as it was, because I analysed the posting in considerable detail and quoted lengthy portions of that posting as evidence for my analyses. In any case, writing the suppressed message and the time that has passed since has absorbed some of the emotion AMR's posting inspired in me -- which is no doubt a good thing -- so I approach the task of shortening my reply with less -- enthusiasm and spontaenity. And even with some embarassment for AMR for the way his posting exhibited a self-inflicted but undoubtedly ephemeral distortion of his usually keener thinking and judgment. Given that, I hope it can be clear that my following points are addressed to AMR's TEXT, and not to the person of AMR, who most often produces texts which earn our respect. At an early point AMR wrote: >>>I have received two versions, one long, the other even longer, >>>of a diatribe from Wald accusing me of ignorance >>>about the history of linguistics, and both Pedersen and >>>by implication me of "institutional racism", >>>though not (necessarily) of being racists at a persona level >>>(something which Wald seems to say he does not care >>>about). I had a lot to say about that, but for present purposes my reply to the last point was that discussion of expressions of (witting or unwitting) institutionalised racism *in scientific discourse* is all that is relevant. If one wants to attack the proposition that "2+2 = 4", it is irrelevant to allege that the author of the proposition is a "racist". Similarly, the comparative method of reconstruction developed by the 19th c IE-ists does not stand or fall on the religious, or nationalistic or later nstitutionalised racist motives that may have encouraged their work (whether or not they were aware of such forces inside or outside of themselves). Similarly, for Nostraticists and anyone else. Certainly my understanding of the historical context in which the IEists forged their principles of reconstruction and fundamental vision of linguistic change does not diminish in the slightest my admiration and USE of their basic methods, without which this very list would hardly be of any interest to any of us. With regard to well-intentioned statements against blatant racism, the arguments adduced by early 20th c American dialectologists against the notion that the nature of African American English had any historical connection with anything but English offers an interesting and complex example. A common position in that period was that African American English was nothing but an accretion of non-standardisms of "Anglo-Saxon" pedigree. The point was used to assail the blatant racist assumption that African American English reflected the inability of African Americans to acquire "English" due to some congenital mental defect (an empirically falsifiable assumption). The motive of the dialectologists was "good", but the details of the argument were "bad". One was that even Southern "whites" use the same linguistic features as African Americans (only partially true). This, of course, was criticised by the non-racist argument that pointed out that there was an unexamined assumption by the dialectologists that "whites" would not pick up linguistic features from African Americans, the direction of influence was unsoundly assumed to go only the other way. And so on, e.g., for the "cafeteria" principle that any dialect feature found somewhere in the British Isles that superficially resembled an African American English feature had to be evidence for the European origin of that feature, regardless of socio-historical plausibility. (Note, at least, that the cafeteria principle could be aimed at diffusing the "defect" interpretation of whatever AAE feature was at issue).The overarching assumption was that African cultures were such flimsy things that transport and exposure to "Western" culture had effectively eliminated any traces of it from African American culture (except, contradictorily, music and dance, which had become America's most admired cultural import to Europe, and which the Europeans did not interpret as "derivative" of their own cultures.) I find Pedersen's comments on distinguishing language and race no less well-intentioned (and, of course, they are sound) than those of the early 20th c American dialectologists, though list discussion has shown that he also made them with situations closer to (his) home in mind, but that does not make his uncritical conveyance (and thus endorsement) of a larger spurious framework of racial classification less objectionable as a matter for scientific discourse. Later in the posting, AMR wrote: >>>Finally, it appears to me that it is Wald who is >>>operating with racial categories in a way I find >>>unscientific and immoral, because he appears to ne >>>saying: >>>(a) Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken by >>>members of race A (so-called Black or Negro), I saw this as part of an ill-considered and not-entirely-serious attempt to turn the tables on me; "reverse racism"? I was, of course, discussing and criticising what I see as the motivation lurking behind the racial classification referred to by Pesersen (not that he realised it). I cannot discuss and criticise the motives for the racial classification without mentioning the framework. That does not mean I accept it (and was only arguing about its details) -- and I don't. It is distasteful to me to even have to respond to such a silly argument. If AMR's point is taken seriously, then it leads to the conclusion that we must ignore such constructs, rather than mention them in order to criticise them and expose their historical motives, i.e., that what he was fundamentally saying was "SHUT UP!" He went on at great lengths about this, and I quoted him at length in my suppressed response, but I think what I have just said is sufficient. Later, he states: >>Wald's charges are false and contemptible. >>His insistence on repeating them over and over, >>and on attributing to person X the views of >>entirely other persons, is something very >>familiar to us but none the less dangerous for that. I had much to say about this too, but here I will only single out the "to US" portion. This looks like posturing and playing to an audience, in the hopes of engaging their sympathy and support, instead of more straightforwardly standing on one's own in responding to an imagined personal insult. Evidently, as I said earlier, AMR chose to personally identify more closely with the entire issue than I would have expected him to. Finally (I mean it), AMR takes advantage of my attempt at sarcastic humour in the following exchange: I wrote: >>>> You can >>>> tell the Egyptians aren't Negro, just look at the illustrations of Ancient >>>> Egyptians in the National Geographic. AMR responded: >>>I myself don't operate with racial categories at all, so I canNOT >>>tell that.... Well, humour is a matter of taste. We all take chances when we display it in public, but we all do it nevertheless. I take the response as an example of petulant posturing, but I concede that it can be interpreted at another level, where it is a legitimate retort. That is, if we dismiss the outmoded physical construct in which the term "Negro" was meaningful, and the social construct to which it was applied as a label, we can refuse to acknowledge my point. Incidentally, the whole discussion of "Nubians" and "Negroes" gives much insight into why African Americans in the 60s objected on political grounds to the term "Negro", so that it was eventually removed from even ordinary social discourse. Similarly, though less completely, the same happened with its cognates in other European languages -- except the Romance sources, in which it simply means "black", and does not masquerade as a "technical" term. It was a much more significant step in exposing and dismantling "scientific" racism and its contribution to social racism than most people at the time (the late 60s) realised. Interestingly, in an exchange I had with Harry Perridon, he pointed out to me that Norwegian authorities decided to retain cognate "Neger" as a standardised ethnic term, maybe in deliberate contrast to Swedish authority, which adopted the same position as the ex-colonialist West -- to replace the term; the Norwegian decision may be an indication of the local political transformation of a broader international political issue as symbolised in a WORD. In closing, I think it is appropriate to quote, with his permission, the following passage I received from George Hinge, in an exchange I had with him about Pedersen's original passage ""Nubierne er ikke negre": >>>Basically, we agree - and Alexis Manaster Ramer, too. The difference lies in >>>how to use a text, philologically or heuristically; AMR and I hold Holger >>>Pedersen in a high veneration (and AMR nostraticsm, too), whereas you are >>>primarily interested in showing how racist axioms can be deeply rooted in >>>the scientific discussion. But even if the root is sick, the trunk and the >>>branches may be healthy and strong. George stated it better than I could. It stands in marked contrast to AMR's indignant comments to the effect that "how DARE I raise the issue of "racism" in connection with criticising anything that Pedersen wrote?" Once again, I regret the pain that the entire discussion from beginning to end caused AMR personally; it was beyond anything I could have imagined beforehand. Nevertheless, in my opinion, it was a perfectly legitimate issue to raise, and it did precipitate some interesting and scientifically relevant responses. I was even informed that some Nostratic theories did or do indeed consider Nilo-Saharan as a candidate for membership (interesting since it is not yet clear that it is a coherent family -- but that's how that line of research works at present). So maybe in the end, "Nostratic" will become the Latinate substitute for "proto-WORLD". Similarly, I felt I had to respond to AMR's unfortunate posting, at least as a text directed ad hominem against me. End of discussion! --- Benji Wald From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 19 16:40:00 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 11:40:00 EST Subject: Help with References Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I would appreciate any help with references to recent published work which cites with approval Don Ringe's "probabilistic" critiques of Nostratic. Please send those to me not to the list. Thank you. AMR From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 19 16:39:50 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 11:39:50 EST Subject: Mark Hubey's comments on lg classification Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I don't have much to say (for once), except re Mark's comment on lgs with no (historically significant) morphology. Mark appears to be saying that the mere existence of such lgs suffices to refute the claim that it is only by comparing morphologies that we can establish lg families. But this is not so: the alternative would be to say that for such languages we cannot ever determine what families they belong to. Some linguists at the turn of the century and later held precisely this view--or something very close to it. From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 19 16:39:32 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 11:39:32 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, bwald wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- [snip] [quotes me as rejecting the following:] >> (I) Language relatedness can only be shown by >> reference to morphology (falsified by the history of how Tai, >> Comecrudan, >> and (an example I forgot to cite earlier) how Uto-Aztecan was >> discovered), >> >> (II) Language relatedness can only be shown by establishing a system of >> sound laws (falsified by the history of how Niger-Kordofanian, >> Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and indeed probably most of the currently >> accepted language families were established)." > > The two assertions are opposed to each other, when I think they should be > presented as > cooperative properties of the consensus view. What I dispute is that (I) and (II) represent "the consensus view". They are widespread misconceptions, and they have become something that a lot of people who typically do not know much about the subject proclaim loudly AS THOUGH they WERE the consensus view. But that is a different matter. > In this context, I want to comment on AMR's claim that Niger-Kordofanian > (and probably various other families) falsifies the traditional claim of > how language-relatedness is ESTABLISHED. > > These statements remind me of what I wrote in reference to Merritt > Ruhlen's argument that language-relatedness is "established" prior to such > things as the above; he was pushing mass comparison as sufficient to > "establish" relationship. [snip] I object to guilt-by-association arguments. My view is simply that to establish the validity of a language family, e.g., Indo-European, requires far less work than does the correct reconstruction of the corresponding proto-language. That is all. > > Further repeating comments I think I have already made on this list, let's > take the case of Niger-Kordofanian (which generally reverted to the earlier > label Niger-Congo, NC, in a manner similar to the way "Indo-Hittite" > reverted to "Indo-European".) > > It is absolutely true that concerned scholars "accept" the notion of an NC > family as the most reasonable HYPOTHESIS (yet offered, and over the dead > bodies of previous hypotheses) for the massive similarities among various > NC languages. However, in the absence of DEMONSTRATION by classical > methods, there is disagreement about membership in that family -- and the > skepticism is JUSTIFIED until such demonstration is forthcoming. I don't know what "classical methods" here refers to, unless it is again the imaginary consensus view. The point I am making is that the relatedness of Bantu (together with its most obvious relations) with (at least some of) the Kordofanian languages, based on the congruence of the nominal class prefix markers, is not something that, to my somewhat limited knowledge, is questioned by any sane person. If I am wrong, please provide me with the relevant references. On the other hand, the fact that there may be disagreements about SOME lgs is not surprising or interesting. Even after Hittite was accepted as IE, many IEnists continued to doubt that some other Anatolian lgs (Hittite's closest relaitons) are IE. [snip] > > I think I am doing more than mincing words to bring to attention > the need for an argument in defense of more speculative relationships to be > more carefully and precisely laid out, esp what makes a speculative > relationship more or less promising (for eventual demonstration). I agree. This is just what I said myself, that we need not decide (in fact, should not decide) whether a given hypothesis is correct before doing a great deal of work. My problem is with people who try to preempt such work or any serious discussion of it. > If that > is all that is being proposed -- great! Leave out the part about the > consensus view being "arbitrary" or "made up from whole cloth", or defend > it. I have discussed in print, in easily accessible journals, why this is NOT the consensus view and why it IS arbitrary and invented. Am I to assume that my work is not being read? AMR From manaster at umich.edu Fri Feb 19 16:37:15 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 11:37:15 EST Subject: Wald's continuing... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I have nothing to add to what I said earlier about Wald's attacks on Pedersen and on other Nostratic scholars, and his latest posting does not add any new evidence to substantiate his charges of racism. But I would like to object to his statement: "So maybe in the end, "Nostratic" will become the Latinate substitute for "proto-WORLD"." The confusions of Nostratic with "proto-worlds" is a widespread one, and it is often used to make fun of Nostratic. Since Wald has apparently had some slight acquaintance with Pedersen's work, though, he at least should know that this IS a preposterous confusion. AMR From bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Sun Feb 21 19:08:53 1999 From: bwald at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (bwald) Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 14:08:53 EST Subject: The Significance of Comecrudan Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- AMR ventures: "I don't know what "classical methods" here refers to, unless it is again the imaginary consensus view. The point I am making is that the relatedness of Bantu (together with its most obvious relations) with (at least some of) the Kordofanian languages, based on the congruence of the nominal class prefix markers, is not something that, to my somewhat limited knowledge, is questioned by any sane person. If I am wrong, please provide me with the relevant references." [does the comment suggest that some insane person has questioned whatever is being referred to above?] OK, for me, the consensus view and "classical methods" are those that virtually EVERYBODY accepts as demonstrating relationship -- and, as I said, marginalising skeptics (but not necessarily calling them "insane"; that is superfluous). What is wrong with calling that the consensus view? [I thought consensus is the point of departure from which further progress must be made. That the intent of the program is to try to push consensus further, NOT to trivialise what consensus already exists. However, the rhetoric of the reply suggests that trivialising it is indeed intended -- presumably, because those methods fail to "establish" more distant relationships -- even though, ON THE BASIS OF THOSE METHODS HAVE ACHIEVED, we infer that there ARE more distant relationships] As for the rest, I don't know what "congruence" means in this context. Does it mean that the singular and plural class prefix pairs are formally unrelated, as is typical of NC. Or does it also mean that an etymological connection between Kordofanian class prefixes and those of the rest of NC is "accepted" (or "established"?)? For the general picture, carefully REread (I assume) Thilo Schadeberg's article on Kordofanian in "The Niger-Congo Languages", ed. John Bendor-Samuel (1989). Note the importance (I think) of Schadeberg's comment p.72 with regard to the class system: "...similarities between the Niger-Congo and Kordofanian noun class systems are not only typological but can be extended to proper sound-meaning correspondences as well." So he is well within what I called "classical methods"; not typology, but sound-meaning correspondences. [And those sound-meaning correspondences are "accepted" as likely, not "established"; we don't dismiss them from further use just because they are accepted; an attempt will continue to establish them, because the attempt itself might lead to an unexpected insight, and the responsibility to establish them is taken seriously.] Next, the Kadugli group (Greenberg's Kadugli-Krongo branch of Korodofanian) ALSO has languages with similar class prefixes and/or class concord. However, Thilo states, p.74: "...I maintain that it has not been shown that Kadugli is part of Kordofanian, nor that it should be classified as Niger-Congo" and he refers to his 1981 paper in a volume dedicated to Nilo-Saharan for further discussion. Therefore, whatever "congruent" noun class system means, it was insufficient for him to include the Kadugli group in Korodofanian, or even NC. And yet no one has accused Thilo of insanity, and no "sane" person would. For his latest thoughts, get in touch with him at the Linguistics Dept at the University of Leiden. (He has much more data than he has had the opportunity to exhaustively analyse.) BTW, noun class systems typologically similar to NC also occur in some branches of Khoisan. Yet no one connects Khoisan with NC (or anything else for that matter -- well, I vaguely recall some early volume on a library shelf that prematurely? connects the Khoi branch with Indo-European). Aren't we all waiting to find out how the "clicks" arose from more widespread consonant types? [Again, I vaguely recall hearing about somethin in the phonetic literature, how they could have arisen, maybe in Ladefoged & Maddieson, but the Khoisan click systems have not yet been shown to have non-click origins. ANYBODY GOT ANY FURTHER INFORMATION ON THIS?] "I have discussed in print, in easily accessible journals, why this is NOT the consensus view and why it IS arbitrary and invented. Am I to assume that my work is not being read?" In my case the assumption is correct. The more you are interested in motivating readers to actually read your detailed published discussions, the more you will be specific about what you have in mind -- in LIST discussion. P.S. Can I guess that the proposal has something to do with the suggestion that some very specific features of compared languages are unlikely to be due to chance because of their specificity and/or general rarity among languages, and the question arises; how can such features be enumerated, justified and measured with respect to significance beyond sampling error? The typological and even etymological fact of a prefixal noun class system in NC has not been deemed sufficient in itself. These are indeed examples of the kinds of things that need to be discussed. From manaster at umich.edu Mon Feb 22 01:47:34 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 20:47:34 EST Subject: Niger-Kordofanian Message-ID: Benji Wald now says I want to classify languages on the basis of typological parallels. I never have, and I don't understand how this misunderstanding could have arisen. For the record, I was referring to the Niger-Kordofanian relationship as being based primarily on striking agreements between the paradigms of nominal classes. A good discussion of this appears in the relevant chapter of the collective work Die Sprachen Afrikas. There is also some brief discussion in Baxter's and my review of Ringe (1992) in Diachronica. About "consensus" views and "classical" methods, Wald appears to mean the views and methods espoused (but not actually used!) by authors such as Goddard and Campbell. The very fact that they recognize Comecrudan w/o the use of said methods is enough to show that I am right to say that there is no such "consensus" and the methods at issue are only a small subset of the "classical" methods. My published work on the history of language classification work (esp. on Strahlenberg and Sapir) offers more evidence that the the set of "classical" methods is much larger than these authors, or Wald, seem willing to grant. Since I just recently posted a discussion of the four (or more) different methodologies that have been and continue to be used in real work on language classification, I don't think I need to add any more--except that if we took Goddard or Campbell or Wald at their word, we would have to conclude that the Indo-European language family was discovered some time in the 1960's or later. A "consensus" view of linguistic classification would have to be which is held by at almost all scholars who work in this field--and which they actually follow in their own work. And if we go striclty by what people actually do and not what they say, then I think that there IS a "consensus" view, namely, the one I have been defending. It is almost only people who do no work on classification themselves but like to preach to those of us that do (I won't name names) or those who actually do one thing and preach something quite different (as we have discussed here over the last few weeks) who make claims along the lines of what Wald calls the "consensus" view. AMR From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Mon Feb 22 12:11:45 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 07:11:45 EST Subject: Mark Hubey's comments on lg classification Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote: > > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > I don't have much to say (for once), except re Mark's > comment on lgs with no (historically significant) morphology. > Mark appears to be saying that the mere existence of such > lgs suffices to refute the claim that it is only by comparing > morphologies that we can establish lg families. But this No. That is not what I wrote. 1. Some languages were classified on the basis of morphology and that can't be done if they have no morphology. 2. Some languages were classified on the basis of words/lexemes. Now, both of the above cases fall under the category of "morphemes" (because some are bound morphemes and some are free morphemes). On the basis of this we can conclude; 0) Language family classifications are based on morphemes. i) Statements to the effect that typology has no bearing whatsoever on language family classification are false since in order to use bound morphemes it is required that both languages have morphology and that requires that they have similar typology. ii) Statements that words (free morphemes or concatenations of free and bound morphemes) have nothing to do with language family classification are false. We can add more to this; iii) Statements to the effect that phonetic resemblance has nothing to do with language family classification are false. Statements of this type only reveal incapacity for comprehension. iv) Statements to the effect that some match-ups are merely "phonetic resemblance" and others are "cognates" are based on nothing more than confusion as to the meaning of "phonetic" and "resemblance" and confusion as to the relationship of "cognatehood" to "phonetic resemblance". Furthermore most statements referring to "phonetic", "phone", "phoneme", "acoustic" are totally vague, confused, or at worst, ignorant. > is not so: the alternative would be to say that for such > languages we cannot ever determine what families they > belong to. Some linguists at the turn of the century > and later held precisely this view--or something very close > to it. I don't recall saying anything similar to this. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From manaster at umich.edu Thu Feb 25 20:26:06 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 15:26:06 EST Subject: Help Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I would like to ask if there is anybody out there who would like to help do some actual work on language classification and/or methods of language classification and/or mathematical methods of language classification. Although I have several collaborators, I could use several more. Alexis MR