Vovin on Nostratic and other things

[Ralf-Stefan Georg]

Alexander Vovin wrote:
 
>I don't know anything about the Southern branches of Nostratic:
>Kartvelian, Afrasian, and Dravidian (and I have grave doubts about
>Nostratic validity of the latter), but there are very few doubts in my
>mind that IE, Uralic and Altaic are related -- I have an article in a
>forthcoming volume on Nostratic from John Benjamins. Anyway, I believe
>Nostratic is not yet finally established, but I wouldn't call it "very
>far".
 
Well, Sasha, please let's not get into another soap-opera over this, but
maybe you will wish to rephrase your first sentence. How is it possible
that you "don't know anything" about Kartvelian, Afrasian and Dravidian,
yet feel entitled to voice doubts about the proper classification of the
latter (and not on the former two). Come on ...
Did I ever tell you, btw, why I'm not a Nostraticist ? Because I lack the
first-hand knowledge of Dravidian, that's why (sounds elitist, I know, but
that's the way I've been educated here).
 
And, just to join in with what Larry Trask said earlier this day: there is
*absolutely no reason whatsoever* why the burden of proof should rest on
the shoulders of people doubting a proposed relationship. Absolutely no.
Never. The major reason being of course that this is, as Larry Trask
pointed out before, logically impossible (and you wouldn't expect anybody
to do a logically impossible thing, would you?). The burden of proof is
always, only, and exclusively on those who *assert* something. Seems hard
to swallow, but such is life. And another bitter pill: those who assert
something cannot at the same time define the criteria by which skeptics are
to judge those assertions. If it were so, you could just wave away *any*
criticism by merely saying "That's irrelevant". Irrelevant to you maybe,
but not necessarily to others. There is no such thing as a "universally
applicable criterion for truth" or sth. like that (not only in linguistics,
btw, I prefer the constructivist outlook on things, anyway). Especially in
our trade, where argumentations cannot be totally kept free from
hermeneutic procedures  (however hard we try to, and I'm nothing less than
an adherent of hermeneutics, to be sure !), where we cannot trust on
experiments as falsifying instances etc., you can *never* expect to
persuade everybody in the field that a - let's call it non-trivial -
relationship really holds. You will, however, be successful to persuade
those collegues in the field, to whom you can show that your assumptions
are actually *useful* for their independent purposes, e.g. if you can show
me that the assumption that, say, Mongolian is ultimately related to -
among other languages - Japanese (in a meaningful way, i.e. allowing
reconstructions) actually allows me to *understand* certain facts of
Mongolian better (or *at all*) than it would be possible working with
Mongolian data alone, you'll have won me over *in that very moment* into
the pro-Altaic trenches (provided I find nothing to mouth about your data
;-)  ...).
That's - in short - the success story of Indo-European linguistics. There
is an *awful* lot of things I begin to understand about, say, Slavic or
Greek Morphology only after I start looking at other I.E. languages or at
the Proto. Whether Altaic (Micro- or Macro) will look like that in - say -
twenty years, remains to be seen, but I remain, as you will expect -
skeptical.
In order to say something irenic (sic!, not "ironic") on the eve of the
(Western) Easter holidays, I'd like to add that I myself - without being a
specialist in neither Japanese nor Korean - find the progress which has
been made recently in the comparison of those two languages quite
impressive and I'd like to see the efforts at reconstructing the underlying
proto prolongued. And I *am* sympathetic to the idea of that Proto being
related to Proto-Tungusic - for the simple reason that there - provided the
Japanese and Korean reconstruction I've seen are correct, which I am in no
position to assert - seem to be some systematic correspondences in
morphology between them, so we may expect something interesting from this
side in the future. My opinion on Turkic and Mongolian as members of that
same "Altaic" language family is known to you (skeptical, what else ?).
 
Serdechnyj privet,
 
Stefan Georg
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