Re: Vandals

At 2:28:44 PM on Tuesday, September 9, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "bmscotttg" <BMScott@...>
> wrote:

>> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen"
>> <tgpedersen@> wrote:

>>> ...

>>>>>> [He] is only interested in finding evidence in
>>>>>> science which supports this prejudice.

>>>>> Of course.

>>>> If you were a real scientist, you'd also be interested
>>>> in subjecting your 'theories' to rigorous testing.

>>> That's why I offer them here.

>> You really just don't get it, do you?

> What is it you want me to 'get' (note the scare quotes)?

Schon gut, 'mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst
vergebens'. (Scare quotes are inappropriate here, unless
you're trying to suggest that 'get' in the sense of
'understand' is unacceptable, which simply isn't true.)

Very well, I'll try one last time.

I have yet to see any indication that you subject any of
your notions to any sort of critical examination before you
spew them forth. At best that spells incompetence,
laziness, or lack of interest; worse, it suggests a rather
uncritical willingness on your part to accept anything that
fits your prejudices and hasn't yet been refuted by someone
else, no matter how little real examination it's undergone.
In any case it's a poor excuse for scholarship.

>> *You* have a fundamental responsibility to do at least
>> some basic testing, preferably *before* you dump them
>> here.

> Nonsense. Of course I can ask the members of cybalist a
> question about the etymologies of sets of of words in
> which I have no special expertise. Everybody on the list
> does it all the time.

First, this is obviously not true. Some people occasionally
ask about the etymology of the odd word or two. Secondly,
my comment obviously covered a good deal more than requests
for etymologies, which in fact you rarely make. Thirdly,
this is another illustration of your bizarre notion of
scholarship.

>> Take that list of Breton-Slovenian look-alikes: what was
>> the point of inflicting it on us?

> Quote:
> 'It is of course interesting which of the words are only
> Breton and Slovenian and which are generally Celtic and
> Slavic, respectively. Comments are appreciated.'

> The point was to find out which of the words had
> respectable pedigrees from PIE to their respective
> languages, Breton and Slovenian, and which didn't, thus
> making them suspect of being substrate words in those
> languages.

So why not ask for what you now claim to want? Instead you
present the list as if it had prima facie value, and if you
get no substantive response, I fully expect to see you
pointing to it in the future as having some sort of
evidentiary value.

>> The authors obviously know nothing of linguistics, so
>> there's no reason to suppose that it means any more than
>> any other crank's list of surface similarities.

> The do seem to know very little of general PIE stuff, but
> have some knowledge of Slavic matters. The most
> bothersome, I finfd, is their lack of knowledge of the
> concept of substrate in languages.

The authors appear to have no knowledge of historical
linguistics, full stop. They apparently know Slovenian and
have some knowledge of its dialects, and they have access to
a Breton dictionary and an etymological dictionary of
French. That's it. They don't even know anything about
Breton morphology.

>> Might there be a valuable nugget amongst the obvious
>> crap? Of course there *might*, but there's absolutely no
>> evidence pointing in that direction, and hence no reason
>> to look.

> That's an example of what I call to myself a 'circular
> Brian'. It doesn't interest you because it is not
> interesting, and it is not interesting because it doesn't
> interest you.

This is so obviously a misinterpretation of what I wrote
that I find it hard to believe that it's not deliberate.

Besides, the list did interest me: I collect interesting
crackpottery, so I spent an enjoyable day or so doing
research to demonstrate just how bad it is.

>> [...]

>>> The view you, George and others represent insists that
>>> those sources concerning the history of
>>> Germanic-speaking peoples which refer to native
>>> traditions should be dismissed out of hand,

>> This is obviously false, since it's apparent from our
>> posts that neither George nor I dismisses them
>> _out_of_hand_.

> Oh, yes you do.

I am neither mistaken nor a liar. You simply don't know
enough about medieval sources to understand the basis for
the scholarly judgements that you dismiss out of hand
because they hobble your hobbyhorse.

>>> thus treated differently from other sources, a prejudice
>>> which is ideologically motivated as can be seen in
>>> George's past insistence that I am an 'Odinist'.

>> This is utter nonsense from start to finish. Your
>> interpretation of George's use of 'Odinist' is as far off
>> the mark as Kishore's insistence a while back that he'd
>> been threatened by Francesco.

> Could you be more specific?

No. What I wrote is clear enough, it already at least
verges on being off topic, and I've already wasted too much
time on a lost cause.

>> [...]

>>>> By the way, George left out at least one: routinely
>>>> appealing to invisible 'data', justified on the grounds
>>>> that it belonged to an unrecorded 'low' register.

>>> Please don't misrepresent me.

>> I'm not: that's exactly what you do.

>>> I sometimes posit words in low register; I never call
>>> that 'data',

>> I didn't say that you did; the quotation marks are scare
>> quotes.

> from
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
> 'Scare quotes is a general term for quotation marks used
> for purposes other than to identify a direct quotation.

Note that last line.

[...]

> '

> In other words, you are attributing that term to me.

No, I am not. I'm sorry if you don't understand the full
range of English usage of scare quotes, but your ignorance
doesn't change the intended meaning of what I wrote.

[...]

Brian