Glen:
> Glen: I don't recall scientists thinking of things in terms of >both
>waves and particles AT THE SAME TIME - that would _really_ make >for a
>tangled bush.
Piotr:
>It does. That's what the uncertainty principle is partly about. If you
> >want to treat an electron as if it were ONLY a particle -- to >pinpopint
>one of its parameters -- another parameter becomes less >pinpointable.
>[...] You CAN sketch a family tree, but it's inevitably >fuzzy if dialects
>and languages (also distantly related ones) are >allowed to interact.
True, it's fuzzy - so what? The point is to acquire greater and greater
accuracy. We all know that the tree model isn't a _perfect_ way of looking
at languages and language interaction but it gives us an immediate general
picture of relationship. Further investigation will show that any language
is both shaped by its inheirited past as well as later external contacts.
Another irony is that few people really delve into these external contacts
that IE, like any other language, MUST have had. IEists sometimes casually
mention some possible loanwords pertaining to agriculture, as Mallory does,
but then don't go deep enough in trying to explain the exact possible source
and time of these loans. They just let us hang at the vague suggestion that
the word somehow got into IE via some vague intermediary source somewhere at
some point in time...
...And so I suppose, this is where the diffusionist part of things works its
magic if only someone would wield it.
> Glen: In order to reconstruct languages (like IE!!!) we have to
> >impose some order, otherwise nothing can be accomplished. I find it
> >ironic that you talk about this complementary scenario as if this is >the
>foundation of IE yet if this idea were in place before the birth >of IE
>studies, nothing would have arisen as a result and we would find >ourselves
>in the linguistic dark ages. It's crossword puzzle time.
Piotr in response:
>The IE tree also has its problems, as any IEist knows, as does that of >any
>particular branch. Try to draw a family tree of Germanic, Slavic >or
>Romance.
Yes, it has partly to do with dialect continuums. Inuktitut is a good
example of a dialect continuum because one dialect just blends into the next
into the next into the next. However, if one were to compare the west end of
the area with the east end, we'd find major differences. Even so, a tree is
still possible to construct in order to give a _general_ picture of
relationship. More below...
>We can see the IE family as a something tree-like only because, first, >its
>late Neolithic expansion favoured split-and-divergence processes (and it
>was only more recently that convergence began to eat away at >the
>differences); [...] Don't pretend you don't realise how fuzzy the
> >reconstructable PIE node itself is.
Of course I wouldn't pretend that PIE isn't hazy. However, let's also not
pretend that PIE is completely hopeless and without informational value,
otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion. Like IE, it would appear
that Nostratic is also a "split/divergence" language since it would have
prospered in a warming climate, right after the Ice Age. Whether we use the
arboreal model or the diffusionist model, the results are the same. We just
can't use both at the same time, otherwise our heads will explode (<- there
have been many such cases of cranial explosion among nuclear physicists :)
So even if we think of "Proto-Indo-European" only as a fluid linguistic area
of closely related dialects, there would nonetheless be a tendency amidst
this area for *me "me", *egox "I", *nekWt "night", etc. to exist in some
slightly variant form.
Reconstructed PIE then can be thought of as the "average" of all these
extinct dialects. Instead of languages deriving from languages
(particle/arboreal model), we have dialect continuums deriving from dialect
continuums (wave/diffusionist model). Even in a wave model, however, there
is a source and so reconstruction, even long-range reconstruction, is still
valid and possible.
So, again I say, "So what?? What's your point, Piotr?".
>Since the time-depths in are modest in the case of IE and other
>well->visible families, the comparative method yield fairly good results
>and >gives us a fair approximation of the diachronic developments. It's
>much worse for Nostratic and other large-scale projects involving IE.
I haven't denied that it is less accurate. Instead, this is exactly what
I've been saying all along. However you seem to equate "worse" with
"hopeless" but the two just don't go hand in hand. The difference between
Nostratic and IE is only a matter of the level of accuracy but as accuracy
increases within IE studies, so to will the accuracy increase with Nostratic
studies and ultimately other studies like DeneCaucasian or Asiatic. On the
one hand, we can't expect Nostratic to ever be as accurate as IE is at any
given time, but on the other hand, it doesn't mean that Nostratic will never
be just as accurate as IE now is currently. Get it?
>Ringe finds that only in the case of IE and Finno-Ugric (he didn't use
> >Samoyedic data) do the observed correspondences MARGINALLY rise above
> >the background noise level. For Nostratic (and, incidentally,
>Finno->Ugric versus the three "core" subfamilies of Altaic) his simulations
> >show that the observed "regularities" are indistinguishable from >chance.
>His methodology has been furiously attacked by Nostraticists, >but what
>else would you expect them to do?
Hmm, I have a strange Ringeing in my ears... Piotr, what else would you
expect _logical_ people to do? The statistics Ringe uses is automatically
questionable by anyone's standards. The obvious, immediate question that any
rational person should ask when examining any statistical study offering
answers to life's little crossword puzzle is: "How are these results arrived
at? Is it a proper, scientific use of statistics?" Afterall, the improper
use of statistics abounds from what I personally observe and even makes it
on the evening news.
Some important questions to ask when testing Ringe's results are:
Whose cognate lists is he using?
How many cognate lists from different people is he using?
Is he testing all cognate lists in one lump sum
or is he testing individual Nostraticists claims seperately?
How does statistics weed regular sound correspondances from
bad ones when they can sometimes be variable depending on
the environment of the word? (cf. IE *k' vs *k/*kW)
This is one of many questions that one can validly ask concerning these
results. You do a wonderful job at deception, Piotr, since I fail to see how
Ringe could be anything less than contraversial especially when subjected to
your extreme skepticism. What a bundle of irony you are - keep up the good
work :)
- gLeN
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