Why IE is no paragon (WAS: Penutian (and Sino-Tibetan)

[manaster at umich.edu]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Sun, 22 Feb 1998, bwald wrote (inter alia):
 
> Why?  What is wrong with the PRINCIPLES / METHODS upon which IE is based?
>
> What is DIFFERENT about the PRINCIPLES / METHODS upon which Uto-Aztecan is
> based?
>
> In conjunction with the last question, why do you use a standard that is
> much less widely known (conceding that your answer to the first and second
> questions may be sufficient to answer the third question).
 
Brilliant!  But the first point is that IE is not really all that widely
known: I am above all trying to combat the tendency of too many people
to cite little undigested bits of IE they picked up from textbooks of
Hist Lx w/o actually anything about IE and IE lx.  If someone is really
speaking with knowledge about IE, that's fine, of course,except that--
 
(a) IE journals historically have been very lax in what they publish, so
that stuff that would never be published in other fields becomes public
and makes the record both vast and essnetially meaningless, since EVERY
craziness does get published.
 
(b) This in turn means of course that the supposed methodological
standards of IE only exist in some virtual sense, that is, in the
sense that every IEnist learns to ignore most of the published stuff
and somehow decides for him/herself what to pay attention to.  But
this is very tricky, because it is not a matter of public record.
As far as what does get published, and even sometimes acceptedby
at least some readers, it is plain that IEnist literature abounds in
proposals far more fantastic than anything Greenberg or Ruhlen have
ever suggested in their work.  For in point of fact much IEnist work
completely ignores the demands of regularity of sound change, semantic
responsibility, etc.  If anybody does not believe me, I can furnish some
examples.
 
(c) IE is atypical of the problems we face in comparrative and esp.
classificatory lx because Proto-IE is reckoned by those who like
to play with numbers (e.g., Watkins) to be less than 2000 years, maybe
only 1000 years, older than the oldest attested languages (OLd Latin,
Mycenean Greek, Hittite, Vedic, etc.), so it is a very YOUNG
family.  Almost every other nontrivial linguistic grouping involves
much greater time depth.   This in turn has all kinds of otehr
implications.
 
(d) IE is atypical also in the sense that it is one of the few
lg families which was originally established largely if not wholly on
the basis of MORHOLOGICAL parallels, rather than LEXICAL ones.
Uto-Aztecan, Finno-Ugric, Samoyedic, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic,
are all examples of the reverse (although Afro-Asiatic is like
IE in this regard, I think).
 
(e) Most of what passes for the lore of IE (this goes back to
my first point) reflects only a part of IE (esp. the classical
languages so-called and ignoring Anatolian, Albanian, etc.).
For example, the familiar numerals 2-10 and kinship terms
like pater, mater, etc., are indeed found in immediately recognizable
form in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and in some recent languages
(e.g., English and Persian), but the situation is more complicated
if we really look at the fullr ange of IE data, e.g., in Albanian
the cognate of mater means 'sister', in Anatolian the word for
'4' is completely unrelated to quattuor, four, etc., and several
of the numerals remain unknown, and so on.  Indeed, very many
traditionally posited IE etyma are certainly innovations of
ceertain subrgoups only and not PIE at all, and on the other
hand, a lot of what is classically felt tobe IE has been lost in
certain languages.  There is very little if any IE morphology in
colloquial Sinhalese, for example.  All of this is ignored by those
who get their idea of IE from old-fashioned textbooks, which were
written on thebasis of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrti with little
bits of Lithuanian, early Germanic, and Slavic, basically, and which
assumed that whatver is missing in Anatolian was lost there rather
thanbeing an innvoation of the other languages (a debatable assumption)
and ignored Albanian and even Armenian and largely Celtic.  And
even within the professional IE community, this problem is not
really solved.  Cowgill somewhere says explicitly that he did not
know enough about some IE brnaches to make use ofthem, andthis is
quite typical.  At the same time, the problem of winnowing out
things which are innocvations of some part of IE only is very far
from being solved, in large measure because no one agress on the
subclassification of IE.  EX: many though not all IEnists would
posit *mes as one of the 1st pers. nonsg. nom. pronouns of PIE,
yet this is only attested in Baltic, Slavic, and Armenian, and if
these three form a subgroup of IE (as I think) or even part of
one (i.e., if they share an ancestror younger than PIE, which seems
obvious, then *mes would not be PIE at all).
 
And so on and so forth.  In short, IE lx is not a model for comparative
lx necessarily, and the IE family is much too shallow (because its
oldest representatives are so anciently attested) to be a good model
for other work in the field anyway.  Of course, the BEST work on
IE is awe-inspiring, but then so is the best work in any other
language family--and work on much deeper families is I think
more awe-inspiring still.
 
 
>
> (P.S. "Pace Benji Friend Wald..."  AMR is being truculent or insensitive.
> He should have realized from my last message that the "Friend" thing struck
> me as condescending -- like a pat on the head.
> You wanna explain the point of your rhetoric, AMR?  ... I didn't think so.)
 
>
> NB.  My point of view is that we're not "proving" or "disproving"
> something.  We're "testing" it.
 
This is a very important point, which is lost on the extremists
of both kinds in our field.
 
AMR