on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics...

[Larry Trask]

Oh, I don't really think that HL necessarily attracts more
dilettantes, cranks, and basket cases than other disciplines.  But I
*do* suspect that these misguided souls may find it somewhat easier
to get their stuff published, at least in book form, when they've
chosen to rave about language, rather than, say, about physics.
 
I don't think linguistics has yet succeeded in imposing itself upon
the public consciousness as a fully respectable scholarly discipline,
an understanding of which requires years of painstaking study.
Whereas physics, I suspect, is widely perceived as a priesthood whose
mysteries are closed to outsiders, *everybody* is entitled to an
opinion about language.
 
Among other consequences of this difference, I suspect that a crank
manuscript on physics is more likely to be passed to a physicist for
scrutiny and shredding than a crank book on language is to be passed
to a linguist for comparable treatment.
 
Nevertheless, crank work on physics *does* get published.  A splendid
recent example is a book entitled _Has Hawking Erred?_, which is not
about Hawking at all, but about Einstein's special and general
theories of relativity, and which consists of about 350 pages devoted
to saying "I don't understand any of this.  How can it be right?"  An
even more wonderful example, whose title escapes me, is a book
arguing that the earth is only a few thousand years old.  I made a
point of reading a few pages of this thing every time I was in the
bookshop, because it made me laugh out loud every time.  Among other
gems, the author announced that he had *carbon-dated the atmosphere*
and found it only a few thousand years old!  (If you know anything
about carbon-dating, you'll appreciate how wonderfully lunatic this
idea is.)  Another of my favorites is the helium problem.  Helium is
constantly seeping out of the earth, and the author calculated that
there was far too little helium in the atmosphere to be consistent
with the great age commonly assigned to the earth.  Apparently he's
never seen a helium balloon, or wondered why it does what it does.
 
Both these books were published in the guise of serious science, and
both were placed on the science shelves of the bookshop, instead of
where they belonged, in that distressingly large section labeled "New
Age", but more accurately to be labeled "Brain-dead Garbage".
 
That said, I agree that it is worrying to see just how much
linguistic garbage gets published and promulgated.  Even the new
coffee-table atlas of the world's languages, nominally edited by
Bernard Comrie, no less, shows a distressing tendency to treat with
great seriousness not only the more forgettable vaporings of
Greenberg, Ruhlen, and company, but even Ruhlen's "Proto-World
etymologies".  I suspect that Bernard didn't really have that much to
do with the content of the book, but I intend to have a word with him
anyway when I see him.
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
England
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk