The Significance of Comecrudan

[Alexis Manaster-Ramer]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Before we got sidetracked, I thought we had seen the beginning
of a really interesting and useful (and indeed potentially
revolutionary) debate about how languages really get classified.
And since it is impossible to talk about these things in a vacuum,
I had suggested that, contrary
to what some have said, it IS perfectly easy to find cases of (proposed)
language families where all the data and all the issues can be posted and
discussed electronically.  And in response to my posting the entire
Goddard (1979) argument for a Comecrudan language family, together with
all the known data from two of the three languages, several people did
seem interested in pursuing the substantive issues, incl. Larry Trask,
Stefan Georg, Sally Thomason, and Johanna Nichols.  But as I say we then
got sidetracked.

I don't know how many people are interested in this, so
I will not pursue this any further here if there is no interest, of
course.

But, for now, I think three issues have been raised in response
to my posting:

(a) Sally Thomason tried to minimize the contradiction between the views
on "Comecrudan" of Goddard, who proposed "Comecrudan", and Campbell, who
discusses it in his recent book as an established and uncontroversial
language family, and these same two authors' criticism of other
proposed language families, for which the evidence is much stronger than
for "Comecrudan".  So let me cite specifics. Campbell (1997:107) begins
his chapter 4 by saying that in this chapter "Only well-established and
generally uncontested families are treated...", and on pp. 144-145 in this
same chapter he lists Comecrudan and offers some discussion of why the
"Recognition of the Comecrudan family is important" and specifically cites
Goddard as well as a paper by another Campbell, T. Campbell, for the fact
that "the Comecrudan relationship ... is now recognized".  As for Goddard,
it is true that he does explicitly say that "Comecrudan" HAS to be
accepted merely that he has a "strong case", but his conclusion reads
(1979:380):

        "The available data from South Texas and the Lower Rio Grande
point to the existence of seven at present unrelatable languages or small
families: Tonkawa, Coahuilteco, Karankawa, Comecrudan, Cotoname, Solano,
and Aranama".

OF COURSE, Goddard is a cautious scholar and expresses himself cautiously,
BUT first of all in fact of the seven all are single languages EXCEPT
"Comecrudan", so he is putting "Comecrudan" in the same list with
individual languages, which to me is saying that he is taking as
established, and, second, supposing I, for example, used the same language
about "The available data from X point to the existence of Y ... families"
and then listed families which are NOT to Campbell's or Thomason's liking.
They would immediately denounce for proposing something methodologically
untenable, some of them would say that I am not a historical linguist,
etc..  In fact, this is what Campbell does with regard to my Pakawan (=
Comecrudan + Cotoname + Coahuilteco) proposal.  Or, they would take a
cautious formulation, such as Goddard's, but on my part as an indication
that, since I am asserting but merely proposing, they can simply ignore my
proposal (as Campbell does with my Coahuiltecan (= Pakawa-Karankawan)
proposal, again in the same book).

So it seems clear to me that the opinion-makers in our field are simply
applying a double standard, in addition to contradicting themselves about
what is and what is not acceptable methodology.

Larry and Stefan apparently concede that I am right about the
contradiction between the methodological stance of Goddard, Campbell, et
al., and their acceptance of "Comecrudan", but raise another issue.

(b) They say in effect that while I am right all this means is that
Goddard, Campbell, et al. are wrong about accepting "Comecrudan" (and
hence can still be right about methodology).  I don't want to dwell on
this, but to me the points here are two.  One, as I know Stefan agrees and
is clear to any historian of comparative (especially Indo- European)
linguistics, methodology has always come second in our field to the actual
linguistics.  The methods we use emerged and were tested in the course of
work on actual languages.  If there is to be a discussion of
methodologies, then we should look at language families that have proposed
on the basis of specific methodologies and see what we find, not start out
by a priori accepting some completely arbitrary methodological assertion
made up from whole cloth and then rejecting any language family whose
recognition would force us to abandon that assertion.  I am referring of
course to the two assertions:

(I) Language relatedness can only be shown by reference to morphology
(falsified by the history of how Tai, Comecrudan, and (an example I forgot
to cite earlier) how Uto-Aztecan was discovered),

(II) Language relatedness can only be shown by establishing a system of
sound laws (falsified by the history of how Niger-Kordofanian,
Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and indeed probably most of the currently
accepted language families were established).

But even more important is the fact that, as I maintain, it is NOT
reasonable to take a quick look at some proposed linguistic family and
immediately take either a negative or a positive stand and then hold on to
it for dear life.  Rather, a new theory, if correct, will over time
undergo considerable refinement and, crucially, find more and more
evidence to support it--and will explain more and more data.

My position on "Comecrudan" when I saw it was neither yes nor no, but
rather "Maybe, let's see what we can do with this", and I have since then
(in work published already as well as forthcoming work) assembled more and
more evidence for and found no evidence against.
It helps that more data have become available to me when I got a hold of
an unpublished ms. which Goddard had used but failed to exploit at all
fully.  And it helps even more that "Comecrudan" is, as I hold, a part of
a bigger family, Pakawan, about which much more is known simply because we
have more data.  So that the "Comecrudan" problem becomes more or less
like the problem of showing that some very poorly attested IE lg, like
Messapic, is indeed Indo-European.  Even though "Comecrudan" is smaller
than Pakawan, it is easier to argue for the latter than for the former, in
effect.

But to see if this is really so, people must be willing to examine the
data and the arguments without prejudging the case.

(c) I agree with Johanna Nichols, pace what Larry and Stefan seem to say,
that, when dealing with languages of which we know only a small number of
words, it matters not just that we can only, therefore, only find at best
a small number of cognates with other languages but also it matters how
percentage of the attested forms we can explain.  This is why I posted the
entire Garza and Mamulique corpus, to see whether she (and others) would
agree with me that the Comecrudan hypothesis (which links these two with
Comecrudo) is a reasonable one.  I say Freasonable' because as stated I
think the proof of "Comecrudan" lies in the broader Pakawan comparison.

AMR

Campbell, Lyle
1997            American Indian Languages.  Oxford Univ. Press.

Goddard, Ives
1979            The Languages of South Texas and the Lower Rio Grande.
_In_ The Languages of North America: Historical and Comparative
Assessment, edited by Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, 355-389.  Austin
and London: University of Texas Press.

Manaster Ramer, Alexis
1996            Sapir's classifications: Coahuiltecan. Anthropological
Linguistics 38:1-37.