rhotacism from Ray Hickey

[H.M.Hubey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Ross Clark wrote:
>
> Could you cite an example or two? I don't mean of 1. or 2. in use
> separately, but of the two used together as a fallacious syllogism.
 
There are too many cases. I don't feel like embarrasing people
and making it worse.
 
 
 
> > But borrowings also create regular sound correspondences.
>
> Yes, just as things other than measles can produce spots on the face.
> We need to take such things into consideration if we want to raise
> our competence in historical linguistics (or medical diagnosis) from
> this very rudimentary level.
 
But that is not all.
 
Human family members resemble each other. That does not mean that
unrelated
people cannot resemble each other. And despite the fact that we know
both
we still consider two people who resemble each other to be related
unless
there's proof to the contrary. We arrive at this through experience. We
see
families (which we can confirm) resemble each other and therefore create
a general inductive rule.
 
For measles, doctors know very well what healty people look like.
 
How many language families has any human experienced? I do not mean the
purported/alleged language families. If a human could be created who
could
live 100,000 years or more and if we can send him to the past to learn
dozens of languages, then he would have 'experienced' language families
like human families and the way doctors (and others) have the experience
of
knowing what measles does.
 
No such thing can be done in linguistics so all of it is based on
analogy
to models from the rest of the world, such as Linnaean trees, etc. That
is
coupled with some intuitive calculation of whether the resemblence is
due
to chance.
 
 
> Well, we do in fact have records of various language families. What
> are you trying to say here?
 
There we go again. Do we know these families like we know human
families or is this based on some calculation that the occurences
cannot be due to chance?
 
>
> > 1. These languages have too many things in common. IOW, there are many
> > words in
> > these languages which can be made to look like each other with similar
> > meanings
> > and which could not be due to chance.
> >
> > 2. If that is not due to chance then either they got these words from
> > each other
> > or the words are all descended from a common language.
> >
> > 3. We have plenty of evidence (what?) that these languages did not get
> > these
> > words from each other.
> >
> > 4. Therefore these words in these languages must all come from an
> > earlier common
> > source.
 
> Yes, problems crop up and arguments occur, to be sure.
>
> I recognize 1-4 as a rough outline of the reasoning by which one
> arrives at a hypothesis of genetic relatedness among languages.
> Rather than argue about details, I'd like to know where you're going
> with it. Are we finished with the idea that it's logically circular?
 
But it is not finished. The key here is that we have to know what is
due to chance and what is not. Otherwise we can be creating an argument
like this:  Well, this mathematical method says that X and Y are related
but I know that they are not, so the mathematical method is wrong. There
are people (yes, real people, and linguists too) who do this. In fact
one
of the superstarts of sci.lang and linguistics actually argued exactly
like this in email to me.
 
 
> Ross Clark
 
--
Best Regards,
Mark
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