Re: [tied] Re: Syncope

From: enlil@...
Message: 31844
Date: 2004-04-11

Jens:
> Perhaps not, but assuming it without good reason puts the whole
> thing on its head.

The "good reason" is logical efficiency.


> My main issue with Glen is that he is ostensibly dismissing many,
> many solutions because the reasons given for a few of them can
> be construed to be less than perfect,

You must forgive Jens. He has this odd obsession with "perfect"
and "imperfect", terms denoting absolutes. Like many afflicted
with Personality Type 1, Jens can't properly interpret my use
of Occam's Razor for what it is and will probably continue for
some time trying to shove circular pegs in square holes. God
bless him (or the deity of your choice).

My whole way of reasoning is based not on absolutes like this,
but rather extrapolation and probability. Theories require more
than just simple binary opposition and we can't always rely
on true-or-false, physical facts like a documentation of some
old form of a language to guide us into a murky journey into
pre-IE. A theory must adapt to new information, whether it
be facts accrued in IE itself or facing logical contradictions
within a theory.

Sometimes new information contradicts an existing solution and
solutions that one would not consider previously become necessary.
Since I've shown a number of times that I can adapt and change
my views in response to updated data, what Jens perceives as
a final, negative and absolute judgment of his ideas is a
psychologically projected illusion. None of my views are permanent
and they will change, even radically if I must to get at the
truth.


> Yes, PIE could be a strange language on many points where we
> have no serious information - but why just assume that it was?

I'm certainly not the one assuming this. I've created the most
"normal" looking Pre-IE ever devised to date. Conlangers would
yawn at the typical sound inventory and oft-seen-before
morphology. Sure there are a few oddities but the important
point is that strangeness isn't the overwhelming quality of it
and I never accept the first strange idea that pops in my head
and dismissingly say "but this is what the facts force us to
conclude".


> Conversely, PIE does seem to be a somewhat strange language on
> a number of points where we do have valid evidence,

Not really. The absence of /b/ for example may be because the
sound is just uncommon and we haven't properly reconstructed IE,
or because, as Bomhard points out, it derives from a labial
ejective in the past, articulatorily rare.

We have Szemerenyi Lengthening but that's not too odd. The
irregularity of *es-... well, no, that's normal actually.
It would be weird if *es- had a regular paradigm. What really
is terribly "strange" about IE?

I'd put these facts which are well studied and well proven
"oddities" of Reconstructed IE on a different table than the
strategy of actually breeding oddities and strangeness into
the language without considering alternatives that already
exist and are more common linguistically. Things known to be
exceedingly rare or non-existent like double long vowels or
monovocalism, *z's that don't immediately solve anything but
which add more questions. On and on. I haven't even gotten
to the strangeness of the O-fix theory that still lacks
linguistic-based motivation for its process as Jens continues
to formulate it.

Now _that_ is strange. These are all fantastical unicorns that
can't possibly all coexist in a single language. That language
is called Klingon. Mark Okrand created it a while back. NuQ
neQ?! So there's no need to extraterrestrialize pre-IE unless
you want to work for Paramount Pictures. We must ask whether
the language we're studying is strange, or whether the logic
of the theory behind it is. The probability most often is on
the side of the latter answer.


= gLeN