The good Dr. Tuna

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, H.M.Hubey wrote:
 
> > >Let us not forget that Sumerian for two is "imma"
 
[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]
 
> > The Sumerian for "2" is actually <min> or <minu>.
 
> As Tanenbaum writes in one of his books; "if you don't like this year's
> standards wait until next year." :-)
 
> The word is 'imma' according to the books and journal articles used by
> Tuna. If next year, it is changed from 'min' to 'bobooo', then we can
> discuss that too. The strange thing is that there are others who are
> making these changes (one of them on the WWW) and as they change things
> they keep changing things to other cognate forms :-) There is no escape
> :-)
 
I do not know Tuna's work, and I do not know if he is a specialist in
Sumerian.  But apparently he is not, if he has indeed had to extract his
Sumerian forms from other people's publications.  And relying on
secondary sources for languages you are not personally acquainted with
is a very dangerous practice: you often wind up merely repeating and
propagating other people's errors, as well as perhaps introducing a few
more of your own, through misunderstanding.
 
Here's a brief example, which is all too typical of so many of the
attempts I have seen at comparing languages carried out by investigators
not personally familiar with the languages they are comparing.  Please
note that I am *not* trying to get at any of the people named below.
I am merely pointing out the dangers of such work.
 
In 1985, V. Chirikba published a comparison of Basque with various North
Caucasian languages, mainly Abkhaz, arguing that his comparisons
constituted evidence for a genetic link.  Chirikba's work was cited in
part by Shevoroshkin and Manaster Ramer in their article in the 1991
Lamb and Mitchell book.  S and M-R conclude that there is "some
plausibility to many of [C's] comparisons".  By this I suppose they mean
that the comparisons look good on the page.  Fine, but unfortunately the
Basque *data* on the page are mostly wrong.  C is a specialist in
Caucasian, but he doesn't know Basque, and he has relied upon various
secondary sources for his Basque data.  Bad move: these sources,
whatever they were, were clearly anything but reliable.  Moreover, C has
introduced some further errors of his own, mainly in his erroneous
segmentations.
 
The 34 of C's comparisons repeated by S and M-R are numbered 78-111.  On
the Basque side, some of the forms are correct.  However.
 
(When I say that a Basque word is "arbitrarily segmented", I mean that C
has arbitrarily extracted a portion of it which does not match and
thrown it away without explanation.)
 
[78] is cited wrongly, badly wrongly.
 
[80] does not exist.
 
[81] is hopelessly misglossed.
 
[84] is slightly misglossed.
 
[89] is a bimorphemic form containing a case-suffix but wrongly cited as
monomorphemic, even though the case-suffix itself constitutes item [83].
 
[90] consists of another bimorphemic (case-suffixed) form wrongly cited
as monomorphemic, plus a second truly monomorphemic item unrelated to
the first (and wrongly glossed).
 
[91] does not exist, but obviously represents a garbled attempt at
citing a stem whose meaning is utterly different from what is suggested.
 
[92] does not exist.
 
[93] does not exist.
 
[95] is wrongly glossed and assigned to the wrong part of speech.
 
[96] is wrongly cited.
 
[98] is cited only in a secondary sense.
 
[99] does not exist, and is moreover arbitrarily segmented.
 
[100] is wrongly glossed.
 
[101] is cited only in a secondary regional form, and is arbitrarily
segmented.
 
[102] is arbitrarily (and impossibly) segmented.
 
[104] is a transparent compound wrongly presented as monomorphemic.
 
[105] is cited only in a regional secondary variant, and it is both
wrongly glossed and assigned to the wrong part of speech.
 
[108] does not exist.
 
[109] is cited only in a regional variant lacking the initial /g/ found
elsewhere, and is glossed only in a secondary sense.
 
[111] is cited as monomorphemic, even though the second half of it is
precisely the item cited separately as item [80].
 
So, of the 34 Basque items compared, 21 are erroneous or non-existent.
Of the remaining 13, three are single segments, seven are monosyllables
in which only a single segment matches anything in Caucasian, and one
more contains a sequence of three segments unmatched in the Abkhaz
comparandum.  The case therefore rests almost entirely upon the
erroneous Basque data, while the real Basque data lend no support.
 
It is very, very dangerous to try to do comparisons on languages you do
not have a specialist knowledge of.  You have to assume that everybody
who has intervened between the native speakers and you is virtually
infallible.
 
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk