I don't know what's eaten my
response to Glen's long posting on Steppe numerals. I'm sending it again just in
case -- sorry if you get it twice. The original posting is here (reasons of
space):
Dear Glen,
First, thanks for your long and
detailed reply. As I find it necessary to answer point for point, this posting
will be lengthy as well. My apologies to Cybalist if it develops into an
essay.
Your explanation of the relation
between '3' and '9' in Japanese in ingenious and I have no difficulty accepting
it. However, some problems remain: what you gain by solving this problem is
a rough match between Japanese, Mongolic and Finno-Ugric, with Samoyedic,
Turkic, Tungusic, Korean, Nivkh, Yukaghir, Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut
showing apparently unrelated forms and the alleged Indo-Tyrrhenian cognate
giving you headaches, as you yourself admit. As the Proto-Japanese numeral is
somewhat conjectural, everything really hangs on the agreement between Mongolic
gur- and Finno-Ugric kol(me) -- this is in
fact the REAL basis for your kWul(mu). You
seem to believe that this kind of double agreement (involving '3' and '4')
between two languages (Proto-Finno-Ugric and Proto-Mongolic in this case) is
unlikely to be mere coincidence. But if you compare, say, the numerals of PIE
and Proto-Quechua, you'll find even more spectacularly similar words for
'5' and '6'; and if you take Proto-Austronesian and PIE, you'll find the
correspondence between the words for '2' and '3' in both families quite
literally too good to be true. In other words, you fail to show that the degree
of similarity on which you build your reconstruction exceeds that which could
occur by chance.
By "reaching down", i.e. using
forms not from proto-languages but from their arbitrarily chosen daughters you
depart from the normal procedure of the comparative method and greatly increase
the probability of a chance match, as in Greenberg's mass comparison (especially
when you work with very short roots such as *ra or
*na). Frankly, I still can't see why Samoyedic should be less
likely than Finno-Ugric to have retained Proto-Uralic forms. After all,
Tungusic is also spoken way up north, and yet you don't hesitate to use
exclusively Tungusic evidence (ignoring Mongolic and Turkic, not to mention the
rest of Steppe) for some items. To give a concrete example, Tungusic is your
only witness for '6' (with some feeble support from Japanese).
Your admission that there is NO
ATTESTATION AT ALL for the reconstructed numeral '8' is staggering. What's the
point of reconstructing it at all, then? As a matter of fact, you abandon the
comparative method entirely in this case and simply project your Nostratic form
onto Proto-Steppe by "inverted reconstruction". Since that word does not exist
in the Steppe languages, a suspicious question arises: what is the Nostratic
reconstruction based on? A naive reader might hope that there is at least some
non-Steppe comparative justification for *munri (or the like),
but as far as I can see, the corresponding Sumerian, Dravidian and
Afroasiatic numerals (if reconstructable at all) can hardly be
cognates. From what evidence and by what esoteric method did you distil
your Nostratic reconstruction then? The answer is the same as before: you
project a still more ancient (Dene-Caucasian) form onto Nostratic -- ALL THE
TIME WITHOUT A SHADOW OF EVIDENCE. So here we have a Dene-Caucasian word passed
on to Nostratic and then to Steppe without leaving any tangible traces in any of
their daughter branches.
You promise there is a long story
behind it all. I'd be interested to hear it, but I'm not actually holding my
breath. Ironically, you seem to have overlooked the single Steppe '8' word
similar to *munri - I mean Nivkh minr (Nivkh
is the currently preferred term for what you call Gilyak). But I
wouldn't get too excited about this word. Your "Steppe" contains several hundred
languages. It would be a real miracle if never a one of them had something
similar to a prespecified "protoword".
If your aim is to demonstrate
distant relationship you should claim no data that violates the proposed sound
correspondences. Of course actual language change is often irregular, but the
requirement of admitting only regular sound change in TESTING a relationship
scheme is a sound methodological principle which reduces the danger of chance
resemblance. If you relax it ad hoc (as you do for the numerals '3' and '4' in
your response), you sabotage your own project. In the case at hand you make
things far worse by relaxing semantic constraints at the same time, as when you
allow the '5' word for to mean '4' or '6' (even with so much latitude you can't
get an unambiguos reconstruction for '5' and have to be content with two
different forms in free variation). Of course if you were more rigorous you'd
get no matches -- but that's the whole point. If you relax the requirement of
regularity you get SPURIOUS matches that can't be distinguished from genuine
ones. Again, it's a suicidal departure from the straight and narrow in
comparative analysis.
Your protoword for '5'
(*kit:u/*kWut:u) develops the meaning '4' in
one branch (Indo-Tyrrhenian) and '6' in another (Uralic). Oritur quaestio,
dominus Glen: is there a Steppe branch in which it means just what it's
supposed to mean? Your answer is "Altaic" -- but in actual fact you only mention
Old Japanese. Let's look at the words for '5' elsewhere in Altaic: Mongolic
*tabun, Tunguzic *tuNga, Korean
tasôt, Old Turkic beS. No good. How about
extending the search? If we look farther afield (and I've checked Nivkh,
Samoyed, Yukaghir, Eskimo-Aleutian and Chukchi-Kamchatkan, lest you should think
I'm lazy), *kit:u/*kWut:u just can't be seen
anywhere in the wide Steppe. Is it just another Nostratic (or
Dene-Caucasian) ghost?
It becomes clear that despite
paying lip-service to the comparative method you don't actually apply it in
reconstructing the Steppe numeral system. You POSTULATE a list of numerals
justified mostly by external considerations (namely, by what you believe the
Nostratic or Dene-Caucasian forms to have been like). There are isolated matches
or near-matches here and there (quite naturally, with so many language groups to
choose from) and you claim them as supportive evidence, but even if there are no
matches at all you aren't greatly worried. After all, you know in advance what
the protoforms should be -- as if Nostratic or Dene-Caucasian reconstructions
were more solid than Steppe ones.
I understand your private
methodology well enough to see that it's self-defeating. By saying that it's
better to reconstruct ANYTHING rather than nothing at all you ignore the
distinction between a serious proposal and unfounded speculation. A methodology
that ALWAYS allows you to reconstruct SOMETHING would yield a phantom
reconstruction of a non-existent protolanguage even for entirely unrelated
languages (such a thing would apparently be "better than nothing"). You present
a sketchy and highly speculative reconstruction and then challenge other people
either to accept it or to offer a superior hypothesis -- in other words, you
claim null hypothesis status for your reconstruction (as a reward for
pioneering work?) thus evading the burden of proof: "Got a better one? No? Then
I win."
This is a misunderstanding of
scientific methodology. The null hypothesis must always be as conservative as
possible in order to exclude unwarranted inferences. Thus, you can't start by
ASSUMING that the Steppe families are related and what remains to
discovered is just HOW they are related. Such a proposition could never be
falsified, for it cannot be proved that two languages are unrelated: the
evidence of their genetic relationship may have been obliterated by historical
change. The initial null hypothesis must assume their NON-relatedness -- only
then can we hope to make some progress by trying to falsify it. You can replace
it with a new null hypothesis only if you manage to demonstrate that all or some
of the languages being compared show systematic resemblances which exceed
non-genetic "background similarity" (due to borrowing, chance, etc.). The
QUALITY of proposed cognate words and morphological paradigms is much more
important that their number. Their DISTRIBUTION is important (in the initial
testing of a hypothesis one should exclude cognates that can't be found in
most of the daughter groups). If you postulate a model of relationships which is
not solid enough (and even professionals sometimes indulge in such games out of
impatience), you won't make it better by "extrapolation and evolution"; you'll
just move in circles instead of making progress.
We are all lumpers to some extent;
otherwise who would believe in Proto-Germanic or PIE? Lumping is a healthy
activity: you challenge the current null hypothesis (which assumes by default
that languages are NOT related unless demonstrated otherwise) and sometimes you
win. Do you think I've never spent evenings studying Etruscan or Uralic
word-lists and paradigms? I'm generally sympathetic to your efforts and I hope
you'll see my criticism as friendly and constructive even if you reject much of
it. At any rate stop seeing the ugly snout of politics everywhere.
Cheers,
Piotr