Re: Odp: A SinoTibetan-Vasconic Comparison: A very, very, very, ve

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1193
Date: 2000-01-27

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Glen Gordon
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 8:14 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: A SinoTibetan-Vasconic Comparison: A very, very, very, verylengthy letter.

>>Anyways, the *m-hutL saga goes on. I was in the library today and
>>glimpsed at a book "Atlas of Languages" (1996). [...]
>>
>>         Austronesian        MonKhmer          Kam-Thai
>>           *mata               *mat              *taa
>>
>>                    DeneCaucasian      Austric
>>eye    *m-hutL(a)   *m-hutL            *m-ata
>>we     *tLu         *tLu               *ta
>
>Aie aie aie. In fact, AN is matsa (cf paiwan), but
>proto-malayo-polynesian has mata, because -ts- -t- merged.

Beg my ignorance, but both this book I quote and Encyclopaedia Brittanica do 
display *mata and not *matsa for AN. How can we be sure that the ts/t thing 
isn't a later innovation on the part of Paiwan? Does the first person plural 
have "ts" or "t" in Paiwan?
Glen & Guillaume,
 
I find your long dispute very interesting (and I'm glad to see it improving in terms of civility and mutual respect). Excuse my interruption concerning a trivial point. You rely rather heavily on various reconstructive interpretations proposed by various experts. ALL reconstruction is speculative, but of course there is a scale of relative plausibility. Even the best books on IE (an exceptionally well-explored family) may contradict one another on some moot points -- they can't all be right about everything. This holds a fortiori of families like Austronesian, not to mention such looser and more hypothetical groupings as Dene-Caucasian. If your trusted authorities offer mutually exclusive solutions, please remember that the disagreement is usually about interpretations, not about facts (except in cases where attested forms are misquoted, etc.). That's OK as long as the opinions you invoke are well-considered proposals of serious experts, but ...
 
... I'm a bit surprised at your references to popular sources like the Encyclopaedia Britannica or The Atlas of Languages. The relevant articles in EB are rather old (read: partly outdated), one-sided (each being written by a single expert) and tailored to the needs of a lay reader (which may mean "simplistic"). The Atlas has B. Comrie as one of its consultant editors, but is nevertheless a typical popular publication (if a high-quality one) with all the obvious limitations of the genre. In particular it contains many factual errors -- down to stupid sloppy mistakes like confusing Russian letters, inventing hitherto unknown Mongolic languages, placing Letzeburgesch in southeastern Poland, or calling the East African waters of the Indian Ocean "Bay of Bengal" on a map. I know everything about those errors and inaccuracies, as the Polish edition of the Atlas is my own translation. Please make sure your bibliographical standards remain appropriately high.
 
Piotr