Revised: Refining early Basque criteria

[Larry Trask]

Lloyd Anderson writes:

[snip stuff I might reply to later]

>  Trask believes the historical phonology of Basque is already *known*,
>  that there is only one viable such phonology, and he is comfortable using
>  it to exclude items.

Not quite.

I do believe that our current understanding of the phonological prehistory of
Basque is substantially correct, and very unlikely to undergo more than minor
clarifications in the future.  But I do *not* appeal to that phonological
prehistory to "exclude" anything at all.  My primary criteria are
non-phonological in nature -- remember?  So I can't possibly be appealing to
phonological criteria.

>  This is not stated overtly in his criteria, but it did
>  emerge explicitly in some discussions with others not long ago.

No.  The phonological prehistory of Basque is nowhere mentioned in my primary
criteria because I make no appeal to it.  If the known phonological prehistory
of Basque were utterly different, this would have no effect: my criteria would
still be the same, and the words picked out by them would still be the same, so
long as the facts of attestation, distribution and shared status were still the
same.

>  But then the procedure which he proposes,
>  to select the "best" candidates for early Basque vocabulary,
>  *is indeed at least to some small degree circularly based
>  on a prior hypothesis about the historical phonology of Basque*.

Lloyd, forgive me, but this is completely false.  Where on earth are you
getting such ideas from?  And why are you imputing them to me -- completely
wrongly?

Whatever hypotheses I may be entertaining about the historical phonology of
Basque, these hypotheses play *no part whatever* in my criteria for selection.
Surely that is obvious.

>  Nothing wrong with pursuing that route,
>  because in the long run we do evaluate the totality of hypotheses
>  and data, and Trask's hypotheses about historical phonology are quite
>  likely correct in most respects ...,

There are not my hypotheses.  The phonological prehistory of Basque was worked
out in great detail in the 1950s, when I was still a schoolboy who had hardly
even heard of linguistics.  The definitive publication came in 1961, when I was
still in high school.

>  but it DOES mean that the results almost *could not* lead to questioning
>  the hypothesis, since the data is selected by conformance to the hypothesis.

Nonsense.  Balderdash.  Lloyd, will you *please* stop making these absurd
declarations?

>  For those interested in the specifics, please go back to earlier
>  correspondence involving others,
>  it is beyond my competence as a non-specialist in Basque.

The earlier correspondence will merely confirm what I have just said (again).

>  However, for other exclusions which are not directly stated by
>  Trask's criteria but are indirect consequences, refer to the discussion
>  of expressives, and why a criterion of wide distribution improperly
>  excludes them (because of biases against recording).

We've discussed this to death elsewhere.  And, Lloyd, you have *still* not put
forward any explicit criteria for selection which you want to defend as better
than mine.

Given any particular Basque word, such as <makur> 'curved' or <tutur> 'crest',
by what explicit criteria will you decide whether it should, or should not, be
included in the list?  You have never answered this question, and I've asked it
about six times now.

>  In turn, their exclusion will lead to a misstatement of canonical forms
>  for the language as a whole. (Trask has stated that indeed canonical forms
>  for expressives are different from those for other vocabulary *in Basque*,
>  where I was myself able only to say that this situation is highly likely,
>  since it does occur in many languages.)

But who ever said I was interested in canonical forms "for the language as a
whole"?  Who has even claimed that there must have *existed* a single set of
canonical forms for Pre-Basque "as a whole" -- by which I take it you mean
"both ordinary words and expressive formations"?

>  Trask intends to use the result of his selection of "best" cases to
>  determine canonical forms, which result he will then use to select
>  further candidates for vocabulary of early Basque.
>  But he simply fails to respond to the point that his
>  canonical formulas may be biased by his starting point.
>  He only answers "not a problem for me"

And quite properly so, because this is not a problem.

Lloyd has raised only two points of possible substance, as follows:

(1) Expressive formations may be constructed according to different rules from
ordinary words.

Indeed they are, but how can I hope to establish this objectively unless I
*first* identify the rules for ordinary words?

(2) Words in particular semantic areas may be constructed according to
different rules from other words.

This I find unworthy of taking seriously.  I know of no language in which such
a thing happens, and I certainly know of no reason to suspect that it might be
true of Basque.  Of course, if it *is* true of Basque, then that fact should
emerge from my investigations.  But I'm not holding my breath.

>  This kind of result snowballs, has a domino effect on later stages
>  of investigation.  Sometimes good, sometimes bad (bad if some wrong
>  assumption slipped in anywhere in the process).

This is a bald assertion, unsupported so far by any evidence at all, and I see
no reason to take it seriously.

>  While his reply under this message title did mention my point
>  about the systematic bias in excluding sound-symbolic words,
>  he transited immediately to a discussion of attestation in only one
>  dialect in cases which were not sound-symbolic.  So he has still
>  not found any solution to this issue of systematic distortion of results.

So, Lloyd -- yet *again* you are telling me that expressive formations should
be picked out, somehow, *in advance* of any investigations, and deliberately
added to the list in defiance of the ordinary criteria, which must still be
applied to other words.  This is how I described your position earlier, and
your response was to claim that I was misrepresenting you.  Do you still think
I was misrepresenting you?

Lloyd, how will you pick out the expressive formations *in advance* of any
work?  What criteria will you use to identify them?  And how will you avoid
circularity?  Moreover, what criteria will you rely on to decide which of your
selected expressive formations will go into the list?  "Attestation in only one
dialect"?  That means you'll have to include *all* of them, now doesn't it?

>  So it is not a problem if his results about canonical forms are wrong,
>  and he then uses those wrong results to select his data (wrongly in
>  some cases because of the initial error) from which he will draw further
>  conclusions?

You know, Lloyd, I'm really getting a little tired of this.  For the last
bloody time, I am *not* appealing to canonical forms to select the data.
Instead, I am selecting the data by purely non-phonological criteria, and then
examining these data to *extract* canonical forms.

>  I simply don't follow this failure to appreciate the
>  snowballing consequence of certain kinds of errors,

And I don't follow this bewildering sequence of plainly false statements about
my criteria and my procedure.

>  or perhaps rather the certainty that he already knows the answers.

Not "certainty".  Remember, I've already done a good deal of work in this vein,
and I have a number of preliminary results which I am confident will stand up
pretty well.  But I haven't claimed any certainty: only confidence that I know
what I'm doing.

>  Because that seems to me to imply that he is only seeking the "best"
>  *examples* to *illustrate* *conclusions he has mostly already drawn*,

The response to this that pops into my head is one that I am sure the moderator
will decline to post. ;-)

So I will content myself with a more measured response: Lloyd, this is an utter
falsehood, and you should be ashamed of yourself.

>  not a reasonable selection of *very good* data from which to consider
>  drawing new conclusions.  He actually states the contrary,
>  but I believe he is not aware of the circularities.

What "circularities"?  I haven't seen any circularities, and you certainly
haven't advanced any.

[snip incomprehensible passage about <uko> and <ukondo> and darkly alleged, but
unidentified, "*non sequiturs*]

>  [LA, clarifying that including nursery words and expressives,
>  for the purposes of having a truly representative sample of
>  early Basque,

More balderdash.  Pre-Basque doubtless had some nursery words and expressive
words.  But how can we know what those were?

Lloyd, are you seriously proposing that I should take any arbitrary nursery or
expressive words from modern Basque (or even all of them?), and then declare by
fiat that they must have been present in Pre-Basque, even though there exists
no evidence that they were present?  If so, this is utterly irrational.  If
not, then what the hell *are* you proposing?

>  is NOT the same thing as handling the difficulties
>  of reasoning about external comparisons,

I am not interested in external comparisons.  I am doing internal
reconstruction.

>  precisely because
>  expressives may not undergo all of the sound changes which
>  apply to other words.

This suggestion has never been demonstrated to be true for Basque.

Anyway, even if it were true, this would have no consequences.  I am not
including or excluding words on the basis of their phonological forms.

>  Therefore, of course, arguments from the *difficulty*
>  of the latter task are not arguments to exclude such words.]

And I haven't argued from difficulty.  I exclude words which fail to satisfy my
criteria, and include words which do satisfy them.  Now where is the
"difficulty"?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk