Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE)

[Alexis Manaster-Ramer]

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


On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, WB (in Frankfurt today) wrote:

> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------

[snip]
> Let me just stress, however, since it is _very_ easy
> on a general discussion list like HISTLING, which deals 
> with so many different language families and genetic theories,
> to generate wrong, and possibly, longlived impressions to 
> the effect that the work of Sagart belongs into the cate-
> gory of "weird speculations", that he is somehow involun-
> tarily stuck with a "dead-wrong" idea which he fears to 
> withdraw, that he does not know the langugaes he is working
> on etc. etc., that nothing could be further from the truth
> (see Sagart's own posting on Sino-Austronesian).
> 
I emphatically said how much I admire him and his work,
and I suggested nothing of the sort. I dont think Scott
Delancey did either. It is merely that we do not agree that
he is right.  

> As far as the Old Chinese side of the comparison is con-
> cerned, it should be pointed out that Sagart has written 
> the _only_ serious comment on Baxter's _Handbook_ (_Dia-
> chronica_ X [1993] 2: 237-260; with the exception of EG
> Pulleyblank, who does not accept the six-vowel system
> at all and argues from a totally different perspective),
> that he is now certainly the most active scholar working
> on Old Chinese morphology and root-theory (watch out for
> his forthcoming book, J. Benjamins), and that he has pu-
> blished widely on a variety of crucial issues in Old Chinese
> reconstruction (for a list of his publications cf. http://
> www.ehess.fr/centres/crlao/crlao.html), which are extremely
> important, irrespective of what your favorite position on
> the external relationships of OC might be. I believe to 
> be entitled to say this, since I among the very few people
> who have ever tried to take Sagart's criticisms of some of
> the details of Baxter's reconstruction seriously by testing
> them against a corpus of uncorrupted bronze inscriptional
> sources, rather than edited texts (for an online-abstract
> of my dissertation see <http://linguistlist.org/diss/diss-
> html/17534.html>, for a more extended version cf. _Cahiers
> de Linguistique — Asie Orientale_ 26 [1997] 1), and since 
> Sagart's observations have been by and large corroborated
> by these data. My own views on ST and ST-AN notwithstanding
> (for which see my review of the volume by WSY Wang, quoted
> by Alexis, in one of the last issues of _Language_), I would
> appreciate it if those who think that Sagart's AN -- ST com-
> parisons are wrong, or who criticize his reassinging certain
> "classical" ST reconstructions to the layer of TB -- OC  
> borrowings, should present some evidence to substantiate 
> their criticisms. 
> 
I refer you to Baxter's and Starostin's responses to Sagart.
Heck, you know the relevant literature far better than I do.
I am NOT claiming to have any NEW arguments against Sagart.
If you think that there is need for such, I could try to think
about the issue.  

> This said, here are a few more impressionistic comments 
> (sorry if this is in a wrong chronological order --- HISTLING 
> messages have reached me in a totally chaotic succession
> recently):
> 
> 
> At 16:58 04.02.99 EST, Alexis wrote
> 
> AMR| [...] so too I think
> AMR| that the few critics of ST are really reaction to the
> AMR| unsatisfactory state of the actual work on ST (and
> AMR| again just as in Altaic to some extent I suspect that
> AMR| Miller is reacting to ST as it was some decades ago
> AMR| esp. to Benedict's work much as the anti-Altaicists
> AMR| are still really responding to the errors of Ramstedt
> AMR| in the 50s and Poppe in the 60s).
> 
> True up to a certain degree (Miller's reviews of Benedicts's 
> _Conspectus_, Shafer's _Introduction to Sino-Tibetan_, and 
> Sedlaachek's _Das Gemein-Sino-Tibetische_ etc. are certainly
> among the harshest specimens of that genre in the whole post-
> war sinological literature).

That is no more than I am claiming.

[snip]

> the climate 
> within O[ld] C[hinese]
> phonology, is, unfortunately, sometimes not quite
> as pleasant as Alexis would have it. 

[snip]

I meant only that it is far far better than
the way that the way in which Greenberg's
proposals or Illich-Svitych's or even mine
are treated.  I don't recall anyone saying the
kind of things that Delancey and I said about
Sagart, about Greenberg or I-S or me.  As I
recall, Dr. Thomason could not bring herself
to admit that Greenberg's work the classification
of American Indian languages is historical
linguistics, even.  The contrast is very stark.

> Alexis continues:

[No that was Scott Delancey, not me.]
> 
> AMR| More legitimately, I've heard the argument made (by Chris Beckwith,
> AMR| I think, among others, though he shouldn't be held hostage to my
> AMR| imperfect memory) that ST can't be considered *proven* because the
> AMR| lack of morphology in Chinese makes it impossible to find the kind
> AMR| of nice syntagmatic and paradigmatic morphological correspondences
> AMR| that make us so confident of Indo-European or Semitic or Algic.
> 
[snip]

> Finally a short historical note re: origins of the debate that
> shared morphology is crucial for the demonstration of genetical 
> relatedness, Meillet's position on East Asian languages etc. ---
> The discussion, as far as concerned with Old Chinese and its 
> presumably "isolating" root structure, goes back much further, 
> at least to the middle of the 19th century and Georg von der Gabe-
> lentz', "Sur la possibilité de prouver l’existence d’une affinité
> généalogique entre les langues dites indochinoises" (_Atti del IV 
> congresso internazionale degli Orientalisti_, vol. 2: 283-95, 
> Florence 1881).

I know a fair amount of Gabelentz's work but this is something
I didnot know.  Thanks a lot.  However, this appears to deal
with the question of typology vs. classification.   But that
is not Meillet's problem.  His problem was the idea that only
morphology can be used to demosntrate linguistic relationship.
As I pointed out in Anthro Lx in 1996, his own later work
shows that he did not any longer accept this as an absolute
rule.  THIS idea about the role of morphology also has
an earlier history, going back to Pott and his critique
of Bopp's comparisons of Austronesian and Kartvelian with IE.
So there are two separate issues here, each with its own
history, although there may have been some interpenetration
of ideas at some points.

AMR