Hindsight vs. First Steps

[ECOLING at aol.com]

[ Moderator's note:
  There was no quoted material included in the received posting.
  --rma ]

The message by Stefan George (quoted below) is highly reasonable,
and I agree with most of it.  The IE family was in an important sense
discovered not from vocabulary comparisons but from verbal morphology.

However, relationships in many other language families have
in fact been discovered (in the sense of proposed, and still considered
valid) from comparison of basic vocabulary.

Judgements in hindsight are often easy, forgetting in some cases
that our current judgements are merely past errors,
viewed from some probable future.

I do not think I would characterize as a rush to publication
the first investigators who thought that Quechua and Aymara
were related, biased as we *now* understand
by using those Quechua languages which
were most strongly influenced by Aymara.

The general opinion has since reversed on that claim,
once the borrowings and areal influences were factored out.

And then it may have opened up yet again, granting that
Quechua and Aymara *may* be related at a very deep level,
but that the evidence on which the earlier conclusion of their
relationship was first based is not of deep genetics but of later influence.

All of which shows that "final" conclusions are difficult to draw
within the lifetime of individual investigators, and that we must
therefore rely on publication of non-final conclusions,
and on exchange of views from different perspectives.

Of course we would like everything that is published to be careful,
to take into account all of the known ways in which
conclusions drawn are subject to error,
and to use as many techniques as are reasonably available
to the investigators.

Lloyd Anderson