Few Etymologies/Implausible Dinosaurs

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/14/99 6:09:51 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu quoted
"Don Ringe's book on the relative chronology of the sound changes in
Tocharian":

<<....But this circumstance creates a methodological paradox: we cannot
propose reliable Tocharian etymologies until we have discovered the sound
laws, yet we can only discover the Tocharian sound laws by the analysis of
reliable etymologies!

<<The paradox can be resolved only by adducing support of another
kind for our etymologies, and for most the only available support is
inherent plausibility....  we must not forget that the core of "plausible"
etymologies on which it is based constitutes an inherent weakness, and that
weakness must be minimized by keeping the basic etymological core to a
minimum...>>

This approach of course seeks to increase certainty by only using those
"etymologies" that are really, really certain.

I do not know what was considered "inherently plausible."  But a notable
problem with this approach might be mentioned.  (I'll by-pass the glaring one
of how one determines "inherent plausibility.")

When you put all your eggs in just a very few baskets, you are betting
heavily that you've picked the right baskets.  If your system is built on
very few examples, your system if wrong will be a lot more wrong than if you
use a broad base.  That's easy enough to understand.  You haven't hedged your
bets.

What's even more risky is to choose those few baskets as if the others don't
exist.

If you for example were sampling geologic strata, you'd rather have a few
pure mineral samples than a lot of mixed ones, of course.  But you may not
have that luxury.  And PREJUDGING samples to favor the pure ones will make
things simplier and "elegant," but most definitely not accurate.

Prejudging samples on the basis of "inherent plausibility" might become a
little like tossing out the big dinosaur bones because nothing that big could
have "plausibly" existed.  So that we get a nice tidy normal size dinosaur
and therefore can reconstruct what all dinosaurs were like - nice, tidy and
normal sized.

The fact is that EVERY WORD in Tocharian has an etymology.  And Tocharian is
a bit implausible to begin with.  And because of the circumstance of that
oddly placed culture, many of those etymologies should predictably seem
implausible in the context of the rest of the IE language group.  (And
certainly to someone living in the 20th Century ace.)  In fact, perhaps it is
the plausible ones that should give pause - precisely because they are too
easy a way to understand a very alien situation.

It might be further pointed out that if you pick your etymologies based on
what seems "plausible", the sound laws you derive will be "plausible".  And
when you later apply those sound laws to exclude other etymologies, you are
just getting a preordained result.  Your sound laws just reflect your
judgment of what you decided in the first place.  And you run the risk of not
recognizing what may be in your eyes "implausible," BUT is NEVERTHELESS much
more reflective of the truth.

If you eliminate the improbable beforehand, you can be sure you will never
identify the improbable when it happens.  And it is a rule of probability
that the improbable will happen.  So one might expect this approach to miss
the improbable, even if it is at the very core of Tocharian.

The smaller your sample, the greater your chance of a very large error.
Particularly if you choose your samples based on what's "plausible" - if the
plausible is not what actually happened all those years ago.

Implausibly, it turns out, dinosaurs were not normal-sized at all.

Once again, if limiting etymologies in this way is necessary to make the
comparative method work, then it has to be done.  The only thing to remember
is that the results - no matter how elegant - must carry a built in measure
of uncertainty.  And it may be rather improper to say your findings are
certain or absolute or anything more than perhaps an educated guess.

Regards,
Steve Long