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

[manaster at umich.edu]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I thank Bneji Wald for a very thoughtful discussion and good
questions, and above all for his civil and constructive tone
even while we do not (as yet) agree AND his pointing out
flaws in my earlier statements--which I hope can be excused
given my precarious state of health (which in turn is why
I have not been able to discuss most of these things in print
as quickly as I had hoped).  I propose that he and I discuss
some of this offlist before continuing here, so as to avoid
controversy wherethere is no genuine disagreement, as I strongly
suspect.  So I will avoid discussing all the details here.
 
All I want to say is that I do NOT deny that IE is a perfectly
valid model of a language family or that there are universal
methodological principles which all of us must use whether dealing
with IE, Uto-Aztecan, Altaic, or Nostratic.  I strongly agree with
Benji in fact.  My point is not, as he fears, that the criteria
of IE lx are too stringent for the rest of us either.  On the contrary,
I have repeatedly argued that it is quite often IEnists (even good
ones, and not just the "fringe") who are incredible lax in every
possible way (my paper in JIES on Armenian -kh cites a litany of
such examples from the IEnist literature on that subject), and so
the standards of published IE work are simply not good ENOUGH.
In addition, IE is of course quite young in terms of years B.A.
(before attestation) rather than B.P. (before the present)--and
only B.A. age matters.  This may be a novel idea, but it is right
and I have never had anyone disagree once they thought it through.
 
 
But above all my concern is with the sociology and rhetoric
of the field: as I see it, people who talk about IE in this
context rarely actually know IE or IE lx at first hand, and even
many practicing IEnists re very bad at the history of their own
field (again, see my paper for startling examples of this; see
also my paper with B. Nilsen in the next issue of HS, for even
more startling examples), and so what we get in these discussions
of methodology is utter misinformation.  One way to deal with it
would be of course to correct each mistake, but another is to simply
insist that we use other languages families, whether Uto-Aztecan
(which I know and love) or Austronesian (which I know very poorly
if at all) or whatever, in other words to start the process of
educating everybody about the history and methods of hist lx
from scratch, on a more solid basis than the misapprehensions
most textbooks conevy on the basis of undigested bits of incomplete
and often plainly incorrect claims about what was perhaps believed
by some not very good IEnists in 1885 or thereabouts.  Does that
make sense?
 
If not, I am fully prepared (assuming I can hold out) to talk
about IE and its confusions and complications.  But it does seem
more useful--IF our goal is to decide on methods of ling.
classification--to skip that morass and use clearer, simpler,
neater, less spoiled (if you will) examples.  But it is up to
y'all, of course.
 
AMR
 
PS. I dont think that most English-speaking linguists today know
more Latin, Greek, Hittite, Vedic (not to mention Sinhala, Armenian,
Albanian, Irish, etc.) than they do non-IE languages anyway, so
I do not see that using IE has the practical advantage of starting
with the familiar.  Or am I wrong?