The good Dr. Tuna

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, H. M. Hubey wrote:
 
[on Tuna's knowledge of Sumerian]
 
> 1. You mean you would not believe me if I said 2+2=4 because I am
> not a mathematician?
 
Nope.  I mean only that I am unwilling to believe that something is true
of Sumerian merely because Tuna has asserted it -- especially if he is
not a specialist in Sumerian.
 
> 2. There's a thing called "Argument from Authority". It is one of
> the classic fallacies of logic.
 
But I am not arguing from authority.  I am merely pointing out that
facts are facts, independently of what anybody, authoritative or not,
thinks about them.  But an authority, by definition, is far more likely
to know what the facts are.
 
In Dr. Tuna's case, his cited Sumerian word for `two' is either right or
wrong.  If it is not in accord with the facts, then it is wrong, no
matter *who* he is quoting.
 
> 3. What exactly is there to not being a Sumerian except that you
> spent N years more on it than someone else?
 
`Sumerianist', I presume.  A Sumerianist is somebody with a detailed
knowledge of the Sumerian language.  Reading somebody else's book on
Sumerian does not make you a Sumerianist, just as reading a book on how
to play baseball does not make you a baseball player.
 
> 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,
 
Really?  You mean all of us have wasted our time in spending years
learning our trade, when all we needed to do was to sign up for Doctor
Hubey's Patented Ten-Minute Education in Linguistics?  Gosh.
 
OK.  Here's a problem from my field.  The four major regional variants
of the Basque word for `ear' are as follows:
 
        <beharri>
        <begarri>
        <belarri>
        <biarri>
 
So: what's the proto-form?  And what "simple rule" should be invoked to
discover it?
 
> So far I have found no book on historical linguistics in which there
> is a clear algorithm for reconstructing protoforms.
 
That's because there isn't one.  Reconstructing proto-forms is not the
sort of thing can be reduced to an algorithm.  Reconstruction requires a
profound knowledge of the languages involved and a good understanding of
language change -- at least.  The process is not determinate, and it
cannot be mechanized.
 
Historical linguists can no more use algorithms to reconstruct languages
than historians, archeologists and paleoanthropologists can invoke
algorithms to reconstruct the bits of the past they're interested in.
We all just have to dig out the available evidence, sweat over it, and
then try to figure out what happened.
 
> 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.
 
Nobody in the English-speaking world gets a PhD in linguistics by
memorizing things.  But it *is* a good idea to learn the facts, since
external examiners have a tiresome habit of expecting the candidate to
know the facts.
 
> 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.
 
So you can.  But you appear to be arguing as follows: *some* amateurs
have been successful, therefore *all* amateurs are successful.  But this
is precisely the deeply flawed inductive reasoning which you have
(wrongly) imputed to me.
 
In my experience, most amateur linguists are incompetent, and some of
them are downright crazy.
 
If you thing I'm being unreasonable, then answer this question: would
you be willing to fly on the maiden flight of an airliner designed by an
untrained amateur designer and piloted by an untrained amateur pilot?
Even if they've both spent "a few minutes" learning "a few simple
rules"?
 
[on the danger of relying on secondary sources]
 
> That is pretty useless. Nobody can learn every language.
 
True, of course, but this sad observation cannot change the fact that
working on languages you don't know is dangerous.
 
> 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.
 
Not guilty.
 
Look.  One of the non-existent "Basque" words cited as a comparandum by
Chirikba in that article I mentioned is the alleged *<beri> `this same'.
Why do I declare it to be non-existent?  Because some authority has said
so?  No, not at all.
 
I have never heard this word from any Basque-speaker.  I have never read
it in any Basque text.  I have never encountered it in any specialist
work on Basque.  I cannot find it in any of my numerous Basque
dictionaries, some scholarly, others popular.  My Basque-speaking
friends do not know it, and my specialist colleagues have never heard of
it.
 
I am therefore arguing, not from authority, but from evidence.
 
[on learning Sumerian]
 
> 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?
 
Mr. Hubey, are you suggesting that one need not spend years studying
Sumerian in order to know Sumerian?
 
Time for a reality check, I think.  ;-)
 
> 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?
 
It is beyond my power to fix it.  All I can do is to point out errors
when I encounter them -- which, in my case, is pretty damn often.
 
> 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.
 
Mr. Hubey, I fear that you do not know very much about linguistics.
Perhaps that ten minutes wasn't quite long enough after all.
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk