The good Dr. Tuna

Tue Nov 10 23:21:07 UTC 1998

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Larry Trask wrote:

>
> 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
>

1. You mean you would not believe me if I said 2+2=4 because I am
not a mathematician?

2. There's a thing called "Argument from Authority". It is one of
the classic fallacies of logic.

3. What exactly is there to not being a Sumerian except that you
spent N years more on it than someone else? Either the words
published in the "scholarly journals" are close to the sound and
semantic shape or are not?  I have seen people on the WWW do similar
things. I noted one cognate and sent email. he changed it. Now there's
another one that I noted, which is a cognate, and if I send email to
him, he will probably change that too :-)

4. On the ANE list, scholarly discussion is defined as discussion of
ideas published in scholarly journals. Scholarly journals are journals
in which scholars publish. Scholars are those who publish their ideas
in scholarly journals. What is the point of all this? Either what is
written uses commonly accepted reasoning or it does not.

5. The simple facts are that there are simple rules in linguistics and
it does not take longer than a few minutes to get the hang of the basic
idea, but the justification is often missing, and the practice is usually
pretty muddled. So far I have found no book on historical linguistics
in which there is a clear algorithm for reconstructing protoforms. And
i have asked many people about this. They don't know either. Sometimes
they can justify it easily sometimes it is a guess and sometimes it is
no more than a concensus.

You can't get scientific truth by a vote unless it can be clearly
explained and backed up by scientific methodology. Some of the worst
linguists are those who merely repeat what they have managed to memorize.

It's better to become a gardener than to get a PhD in that manner.
Let us also recall some of the things done by amateurs. Gauss, one of the
greatest mathematicians of all time, had to publish his own book on
Arithmetic and Group theory. You can find similar stories in every field.

Either you should get your own copy of Tuna's book or get it from a
library and xerox it and then make up your mind instead of using the
IBM FUD factor (fear, uncertainty, doubt) in the minds of the readers.

> 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.

That is pretty useless. Nobody can learn every language and nobody can
be a mathematician, physicist, engineer, computer scientists, chemist,
economist, etc. That is not how it works at all. In fact, there is a
thing called "specialization of labor" and has been around for a long
time. In fact, it is used by linguists all the time, since they defer
to specialists all the time, even to the point of committing the
"argument from authority" fallacy.

Where are the books on Sumerian?

Where are all the books on Hittite? I have a batch of them. It took
be 6 months to collect some and xerox the others. Does this mean that
I must not trust that the OI has done poor work and that I should not
rely "on others". What if I start to look at the original text?

What exactly is there that is going to take 12 years to learn? Some symbols
arranged in some order with some presumed meanings which can be gleaned
from multilingual transcriptions. What is there to gain? Sure, maybe I can
spot some things, or maybe I can fit another set of words to the original.
But something that has gone on for a long time and which creates such long
sentences must be, in the main, correct. One does not need to know much
more than simple probability theory to know that. And that is exactly what
people use to reach their conclusions, even if they use probability theory
only intuitively.

>
>
> 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.
>

Maybe you are a poor linguist and not Manaster-Ramer :-)

That is why so many people fight all the time in linguistics.

And there is a way to make sure that things can be done so that they
are comparable. That way obviously is to present the results in  a way
in which all scientists do. That is why they use math, and that is why
eventually it will be used in linguistics.

Finally, once again, you are arguing by pseudo-induction. Let me ask
if this argument works:

    Once, I broke my leg going up an escalator. So don't go up escalators.

This is not even induction which itself does not work for science.
Here is a case of 'bad induction":

    The farmer feeds the goose 35 days in a row. So he will feed it on the
    36th day. No. He might decide to have roast duck instead.

Here is another bad case of induction:

    Every saturday for the past 10 weeks it rained. So it will rain on
    the 11th.

Wrong.

So why do you think that I would take your argument seriously?

Surely, there are bad linguists as well as bad engineers. And there is
bad linguistics as well as good. So what? How do you propose to fix
this problem?

Let me guess. You want to have a stamp by the International Linguistics
Association and you want to stamp every book that even touches upon
linguistics as bad and good. Is that a solution? Well, the arguments
often made by linguists, (like a few already made here) are essentially
informal versions of this. And they stink as badly as the formal version
would stink.

>
> 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

--
M. Hubey
Email:          hubeyh at Montclair.edu    Backup:hubeyh at alpha.montclair.edu
WWW Page:       http://www.csam.montclair.edu/Faculty/Hubey.html