Re: [tied] O lumpers lump, and splitters split, and never the twain

----- Original Message -----

From: Glen Gordon

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2000 8:37 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] O lumpers lump, and splitters split, and never the twain shall meet

Glen wrote: They [IE/U, IE/Tyrrh.] remain the likeliest relationships thus far. That's all we need concern ourselves with. Believing that they are unrelated would work against Occam's Razor, would it not?

Must be somebody else's razor. Occam doesn't say when you are obliged to posit a new entity; he only says when such an entity must not be posited. This is why I refrain from embracing Nostratic: what I have seen so far does not make Nostratic a necessity in my eyes.

... The evidence so far IS weak. This is because the ones that are competent enough to provide solid evidence have thrown the Nostratic Hypothesis out the window because it is too taboo and "weak" for their liking, rather than actually honestly examining the connections and putting aside irrelevant failures in the past by lunatic amateurs. We all know how political linguistics can be. <snip> ... </snip> Still, I maintain that the lack of success regarding the Nostratic Hypothesis stems mainly from apathy and politics more than anything. I hate to see this go on.

Attributing unspecified political motives to your opponents is a very political thing to do -- a mere rhetorical trick, and a very unfair one at that, just like insinuating that anyone who disagrees with you must be dumb, lazy or apathetic. Many serious linguists do consider it worth their time and effort to take a look at the Nostratic hypothesis. The connections you mention have been examined time and time again by competent specialists. Several serious international meetings have been organised solely in order to discuss the evidence for and against Nostratic -- such as the 1998 "Symposium on the Nostratic Macrofamily" at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University, where the finely balanced list of participants included *both* Nostratic veterans (A.R. Bomhard, V. Shevoroshkin, A. Dolgopolsky) plus other long-range comparatists (S.A. Starostin, C. Ehret), *and* dyed-in-the-wool splitters (L. Campbell, A. Kaye). R.L. Trask's conclusion more or less sums up my own feelings about the discussion:

 

"Consequently, I am not persuaded. In my view, the linguistic evidence in front of us does not add up to a substantial case for the reality of a Proto-Nostratic parent language which gave rise to a vast family of languages. Naturally, I am not flatly rejecting the Nostratic proposal. When further evidence becomes available for Professor Dolgopolsky's proposal, I will try to evaluate it as fairly as i can. For now, though, I must remain a sceptic."

... Nonetheless, the grammatical relationship IS there if we care to look and put two and two together. I've already made some connections such as the common use of interrogative stems *mi- and *kWi- (cf Uralic *mi- "who?", *ku- "what?"), which in themselves, along with demonstrative stems, show an early animate/inanimate gender contrast as we find in IE, the subjective/objective conjugation, etc. I've already outlined a common Steppe grammar to begin understanding where I'm coming from.

Unfortunately, in Uralic the K-set refers to humans (Hungarian ki, Finnish kuka 'who?') and the M-set to "things" (Hungarian mi, Finnish mikä 'what?'). I wonder how you explain this mismatch between Uralic and Proto-Steppe.

... I've so far outlined Steppe and Nostratic grammar and put up a phonological system for IndoTyrrhenian. Anything you want me to focus on right now? I'll take your order now.

Great. I am one of the faithful readers of your page, despite my professional apathy :). Would you please show me a fuller basis for your reconstruction of Proto-Steppe numerals? There are many dubious points and inconsistencies there. For example:

 

(1) Unless you want to propose a ternary system of counting at some point, why should the Japanese word for 'nine' have anything to do with the Proto-Steppe word for 'three'? Needless to point out, Classical Japanese mi 'three' doesn't match your protoform. For Altaic, you offer *kul/*gur. I don't know what your extra-Japanese evidence for *kul- is, but *gur- is definitely Mongolic rather than common Altaic. Likewise, you sell Finno-Ugric forms as Proto-Uralic. It's a well-known fact that common numeral protosystems (even in the 1-5 range) are only reconstructable for the subfamilies of Uralic and Altaic, and yet you boldly erect a Proto-Steppe reconstruction, complete with the decads.

 

(2) How did the original word for 'five' come to mean 'four' in Proto-Indo-Tyrrhenian and 'six' in Uralic? BTW, my Tyrrhenian is not very strong, but Etruscan huth is usually interpreted as 'six' rather than 'four' (pace McCallister's online glossary) on combinatorial evidence (for example, the arrangement of numerals on Etruscan dice implies that HUTH + THU = 7).

 

(3) Why are your sound correspondences so capricious? E.g., ITyrrh. *kWetWe > IE *kWetwores, but ITyrrh. *kWel > IE *tréjes (via *tWeréi-ec). Why doesn't your *t: in *kit:u/*kWut:u show up as (traditional) IE *d?

 

(4) What is the contrast (if any) between *kit:u and *kWut:u?

 

(5) What's your evidence for *ri, *ra, and *munri (the most mysterious of them all, for which I can't see a shred of support in the attested "Steppe" languages)?

 

(6) Using Japanese to represent Altaic when other Altaic evidence is not given is highly questionable practice (an extreme form of "reaching down" or limited-scope comparison); using Japanese to stand for the whole putative Steppe family is the same error to a higher power.

 

Piotr