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[Alice Faber]

James A. Landau said:
>In a message dated 8/14/02 11:14:48 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
>mam at THEWORLD.COM writes:
>
>>  The LINGUIST List gets the occasional crank posting
>>   announcing a website / mailing list /  book  about
>>           Nostratic-Uralic-MacroDinean /
>>           [other examples]
>
>Is Nostratic considered a crank theory?  My understanding is that Russian
>linguists in particular consider it worth further work.

Without getting into the strengths and weaknesses of the Nostratic or
Ural-Altaic theories, let me make two points. First, there can be
crank postings or websites about defensible hypotheses. Second, the
further back you go in time, trying to relate various macro-families,
the greater the paucity of possible evidence. As a result, the
quality of evidence adduced in support of a priori plausible
groupings is very shaky, and tends to be of the sort that many
historical linguists dismiss out of hand. The picture is made even
murkier by attempts to collate this *necessarily* threadbare
linguistic evidence with evidence from archaeology and population
genetics. So there's a big difference between the evidence available
for a Nostratic hypothesis and a hypothesis relating an already very
hypothetical Nostratic with other language groupings at comparable
time depth.

For what it's worth, the most rancorous scholarly gathering I've ever
been at was a symposium on genetic relationships, specifically the
Indo-European panel. And, to get back to where *this* discussion
started, the participants were virtually all trained linguists.

--
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Alice Faber                                             faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                                     fax (203) 865-8963