Re: [tied] Re: House and City

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

From: tgpedersen@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, March 19, 2001 12:42 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: House and City

> <snip> ... Now I see 3 possibilities:
> 1. Bomhard's rules don't work properly.
> 2. Bomhard should introduce some d/l/n/r latitude in his inventory
(or getting rid of some of them?).
> 3. Loanwords from an d/r/l/n-vacillating language have messed up the
picture.

> Pick your poison.

 

Number one, please. I don't think much of Bomhard's reconstructions.

>> [Piotr:] I really think you put the cart before the horse. You begin by becoming strongly committed to a highly idiosyncratic version of history, taken from Oppenheimer, Saxo Grammaticus, or a compilation of miscellaneous sources. You feel that it must be true, but there are other people out there who might consider it goofy, so some persuasive support for it would be most welcome. That sends you on a desperate quest for linguistic evidence, which ends in the fringe.

> [Torsten:] A compilation of miscellaneous sources? Oh, horror!

 

OK, miscellaneous _unreliable_ sources. 

> I will admit that you caught me on the wrong foot when you asked me to document the claim that Danes came from Asgard na Donu, so I probably won't get 10 for style. But it was fun. I read on the net that Heyerdahl now subscribes to the same idea. So if you should happen to see from your windows a reed boat cruisin up the Odra, would you please post it here? If on the other hand he should try the Tanew route, would you help him get a visa? There seems to a lot of bureaucrats in Poland trying to keep other people off their waterways. I still haven't got one:)

 

I can only see the Warta from here, and the Tanew is approximately as distant from Poznan as Copenhagen is. But here's good news for you: as a Danish citizen, you don't need a visa to come to Poland for up to 90 days (same for Thor Heyerdahl and all other Scandinavians) -- enough time to do some rowing, I suppose. It's been like that since 1991, which just goes to show how little people know about the countries next door.

> Your fringe is my center. And vice versa. I'm sorry you guys won't drink tea with me, but that's what science is like. Sometimes you get ostracized. That doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong. I thought you knew that?

Gosh, this does sound dramatic. A nice cup of tea with you would be just fine, though a couple of beers would be still better. Can't we disagree and argue in an entirely friendly way? Or do you identify with your hypothesis so much that you feel personally persecuted if people attack it? As for science, you are demonstrably wrong on a number of vital counts, including the location of Proto-Austronesian and your completely confused dating of the submergence of the Sunda Shelf -- all that crackpot science you borrowed from Oppenheimer. As some wise person said, you're entitled to your own interpretations but not to your own facts. I understand that your centre is where you are, but I'm afraid it isn't just on "my" fringe. Of course there are a number of scholars (Greenberg and his followers, for example, or the cold fusion team) who have deliberately chosen to work on the fringe. They are evidently gambling, against all odds, on the possibility that their methods and theories will be vindicated by posterity ("When Wegener first proposed the theory of continental drift..."), and that's what encourages them put their academic reputation at stake. Personally, I prefer less romantic but better substantiated theories and conclusions that are not quite over the top.

 

Piotr