on the epistemological nature of historical linguistics...

[Gonzalo Rubio]

I keep thinking there is a big difference between the scenario of our
field(s) more than a century ago and now. Grassmann taught Mathematics in
a Gymnasium, and he was an excellent scholar in IE linguistics. How could
he? First of all, he did have an excellent background in Latin, Greek, and
Sanskrit. Secondly, at that time the discipline was still in its initial
stages, so one was able to master most of the published material. And even
more important, teachers in the 19th century German Gymnasien were, for
instance, the editors of most volumes of the Teubner series, and not all
of them were professors of Greek or Latin.
 
Nowadays, even among professional scholars who do learn the languages they
talk about, there is no Noeldeke (one of the last Semitic scholars who
produced excellent works on Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, etc.). Nobody can
really master all the ancient and modern IE or Semitic languages we know
now. When Grassmann wrote his _Woerterbuch zum Rig-Veda_ (1873, ?), the
amount of secondary literature published by scholars and the number of
original texts available in Western countries, were far smaller than what
we have now.
 
Of course, there exists the possibility of having an amateur producing an
excellent idea or a masterpiece. However, day by day this possibility is
less and less likely, just because of the growing amount of bibliography
and materials one has to deal with. And, in this situation, dilettanti
have a much harder time. Sometimes, I dare think Ventris' decipherment of
Linear B was a sort of "disaster"... since it encouraged hundreds of
individuals to "try" to do the same. Unfortunately, most of these persons
(even if, for some strange reason, their crazy books get published by
Brill) have more to do with Athanasius Kircher than with Ventris...
 
Most (if not all) of the proposals concerning Sumerian and other languages
I have read, present a very basic problem:  the authors happen not to know
Sumerian at all, and rely on very all (and frequently unreliable)
secondary sources. Thus, one can see a verb "be" or "bi"  meaning "to say"
in some of those lists. However, that verb does not exist at all, although
one can find it in some old books (Deimel's and so on).  It is a case of
incorrect analysis of forms like mu-na-be. The verb dug4 (or du11
--du-eleven), "to say", is a "complementary verb", whose sg.  and pl.
maru^ and pl. hamTu forms (hamTu and maru^ are the names given by Akkadian
speaking scribes to the two Sumerian tenses/aspects, but that's a
different topic) are e, just e and not be. In 1997, absolutely no
Sumerologist would talk about a verb "be", but these well-intentioned
amateurs keep including in their lists of look-alikes --and, the funniest
thing is that, if you point this fact to some of them, they call you
"ignoramus", "arrogant boy", etc. Weird. The list of "unreal presences"
(paraphrasing Steiner) would be neverending. Somehow those dilettanti are
a sort of unreal presence too.
 
Isolated languages are there, we don't know why there are so few
(historical and geographical reasons could be mentioned) and probably,
centuries ago, they did have "sister" languages, nowadays dead or lost (as
seems to be the case of Basque). I'm the only child my parents had, so I
can undersdant linguistic isolation.
 
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Gonzalo Rubio
Near Eastern Studies
Johns Hopkins University
gonzalor at jhu.edu
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