Arabic and IE

[Alexis Manaster-Ramer]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------


On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Clyde A. Winters wrote:

[snip]
> linguistics as it is practiced today does not always
> appear to rely on science. Science depends on hypothesis testing and
> experimentation. As pointed out in the Goddard example, the data can be
> interpreted in both a positive or negative way, but given the stature of
> Goddard his views were accepted.

I do plan to say in my reply to Campbell's critique of my
work on relating Comecrudan to the further languages Cotoname
and Coahuilteco (and even further to Karankawa) that he
accepts Goddard's Comecrudan on the basis of data which
he then turns out and rejects when I use them as a (tiny)
part of my case for my groupings (Pakawan and Pakawa-Karankawan
alias Coahuiltecan, as I call them), and I do not dispute that
personal factors may have had a role.  But things are not simple.
For example, I think it is not so much a matter of stature
as of familiarity.  Also, only very few linguists have actually
LOOKED at the question.  And most importantly it is a well known
fact that in every science this kind of thing goes on.  The
real question is whether linguistics is any worse than physics
or biology say at the kind of long-run self-correction that Carl Sagan
took to be the hallmark of science--to me, one of the few
useful ideas about what makes science science out of the
BIllions and BIllions that various scholars have proposed (sorry).

I think the answer is clearly yes.  In some ways, we may even
be better.  But it takes time, and it takes jobs and money for people
to do the relevant research.  The wholesale destruction of comparative
and esp. classificatory ling. programs in so many universities
in the US and some other countries makes that process
difficult, of course, but in principle I think linguistics does
OK on this score.

 [snip]


> Yet in many
> cases, views regarding the results obtained by some linguistists
> advocating the relationship between language A and B, are rejected due to
> the methods of intuition and authority, rather than a rigorous
> falsification of the hypothesis rejected by the "experts", for example
> the Nostratic Hypothesis.
>
For someone who has spent a lot of time and energy I really could not
afford to spend first arguing that Nostratic not be simply ignored
to death and then that it might actually be right, there is some
temptation to agree with this.  But it is a temptation one must
resist.  There are some very good reasons why few experts accept
Nostratic.  The best is that there are few people who are experts
in the relevant field(s).  The fact that many people who have no
right whatever to address the question have nevertheless made
all kinds of loud pronouncements, e.g., in textbooks, is a
pity, but that is something that happens in every science, I think.
And even real experts are often wrong, in every science.  Nor is
it either uncommon or unreasonable for people to trust other
people, who are thought to be good scientists.  Just recently, someone
has written a book arguing that modern theoretical physics is
totally based on the trust a small number of people have in
each other's claims, because it has become impractical to replicate
the crucial experiments on a wide scale.  The real question is
whether (a) it is possible to break the wall of silence surrounding
(real) Nostratic, and (b) in the long run arrive at a rational
decision based on fact.  The jury of necessity is still out.

The fact is too that Nostratic research has been slow and
halting, and that much of it has been of poor quality.  It
also has not helped that proponents of Nostratic have tended
to be too bombastic in their claims.  And lastly it helps not
at all that Nostratic is much more often talked about in
various forums, e.g., electronic lists, buy people who as far
as I know have done no research at all or at least not anything
the rest of us would regard as research on the subject.

AMR