From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2762
Date: 2000-07-05
Anyone who reads Professor Gamkrelidze’s publications must often have a strange feeling of déjà vu. Having reread some of them recently I armed myself with a pencil and did some comparative textual analysis. Here is what I found.
[G92] Gamkrelidze, Thomas V. 1992. ‘Comparative reconstruction and typological verification: The case of Indo-European’. In Edgar C. Polomé & Werner Winter (eds.) Reconstructing Languages and Cultures, 63-72. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
[G97] Gamkrelidze, Thomas V. 1997. ‘Language typology and linguistic reconstruction’. In Jacek Fisiak (ed.) Linguistic Reconstruction and Typology, 25-48. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
In G92 we read:
As a matter of fact, in a series of phonemic correspondences d:d:d:d:t:t, etc., what sort of an entity shoud be posited for the protosystem, a *d, *t or a third sound, different from both the historically attested ones? Logically all three possibilities may be envisaged, since any of those entities is a priori not ruled out. The decision in such cases must rest wholly with typological considerations, with a view to obtain such a linguistic system which on the whole would be linguistically more probable and plausible, not constituting an exception to general typological evidence. That is why in this series of correspondences the preference must be given to positing, for the Proto-Indo-European system, such an entity which is phonemically unvoiced and characterized by an additional distinctive feature of glottalization.
And here is the G97 version:
As a matter of fact, in a series of phonemic correspondences d : d : d : d : t : t, etc., what entity shoud be posited for the Proto-system, a *d, a *t or a third unity [sic!], different from both the historically attested ones? Logically all three possibilities may be envisaged, since none of these entities is ruled out a priori. The decision in such cases must rest wholly upon typological considerations, with a view to obtaining a linguistic system which on the whole would be linguistically more probable and plausible, and not constitute an exception to general typological evidence. That is why, in this series of correspondences, the preference – for the Proto-Indo-European system – must be given to positing an entity which is phonemically unvoiced and characterized by an additional distinctive feature of glottalization.
Lest you should think I’m just nit-picking: the two articles share nineteen identical paragraphs – about six pages of printed text! This means that the author extracted more than two-thirds of G92, scrambled the pieces up (some of the paragraphs recur in the same order, others are permuted) and – hey presto! – almost one-third of G97 was ready. Just imagine how many new articles could be generated in this simple way. There is no warning anywhere in G97 that much of it has been copied from an earlier article. There is no mention of G92 in the G97 references either, as though the author were deliberately covering his tracks.
Both articles conclude with the same piece of linguistic propaganda:
I for my part firmly believe that the glottalic theory as a new paradigm in Indo-European comparative linguistics will gain with time an ever widening acceptance among Indo-European scholars of all generations, this being a strong impetus to further development of Indo-European studies, making them more theory-oriented and broadening considerably their scope of research.
I for my part firmly believe that I shall see this final paragraph yet again in some future article by Tamaz Gamkrelidze – for, as Horace said, Repetitio est mater studiorum.
Piotr
Those interested in Gamkrelidze & Ivanov but unable to access the book may find a summary of G&I ideas here: