Re: [tied] Re: House and City

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

From: tgpedersen@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2001 12:31 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: House and City

> Erh, I forgot to put smileys. I know that, actually I drove through Poland and the Baltic countries in 1997. Now I can say "nierozumiem" almost without an accent. I was trying to be sarkastic and ... blabla never mind. The joke was supposed to be like this: I got the great idea that the Danes had been trading/travelling up the Tanew, and then I put that idea on this list and then some East European bureaucrats stopped me. Ha-ha. Funny;-) (It sounded better before).

 

Me a bureaucrat? Oh my. Well, I forgive you, and if any Danes want to go trading up the Tanew, I'll let them pass. But don't blame me for whatever befalls them in that remote and little known corner of Poland.

> So I meekly suggest that perhaps the word was related to the d-n-n- word that everyone was throwing around, and suddenly I realize I'm a heretic. Everyone had something to say, and I am trying to answer to the best of my ability. Should I have stopped before I ran out of arguments in order to improve the social coherence of this list? Say the word, and I'll do that.

 

It's OK, we all have out pet ideas.

>> As for science, you are demonstrably wrong on a number of vital counts, including the
location of Proto-Austronesian ...

> You mean, it shouldn't be in Eastern Indonesia? See the latest issue of Science.

 

When I say "Proto-Austronesian", I mean a language, not a population or its gene pool. I concentrate here on language rather than genes, since you claim to detect Austronesian vocabulary and phonotactic traits all over the place and use it to support an out-of-Sundaland scenario. For linguistic prehistory, popular magazines like Science, no matter how respectable, are hardly valid sources. Austronesian linguistics is a vast field with its own periodicals, post-conference paper collections and reference books. There is a good deal of consensus among the students of Austronesian about the broad genetic classification of the family and its linguistic homeland. Mind you, Eastern Indonesians may be largely autochthonous in the biological sense, but there is formal linguistic evidence that their languages, as well as all the other non-Formosan Austronesian languages, derive from just one of a few "basal" subfamilies still extant in Taiwan. Competent linguists have explained all that on this list before. You can say, "It's all rubbish, I know better", as stubbornly as you wish, but maybe you should prove first that you have the qualifications to know better.

>> ... 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.

> As I understand it, the existence or non-existence of the "third flood" is an interpretation, not a fact, or?

 

Interpretation of WHAT? What facts support the "third flood"? You refer us to Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer refers to geological publications that don't really bear out his story or confirm his timelines. Tangible geological evidence shows that there were indeed sea-level fluctuations during the sixth millennium BC, but their scale was nowhere near what is required by the "third flood" theory. Most importantly, the Sunda Shelf had sunk for good by ca. 10 ky BP and has not been emergent ever since. There was some (gradual rather than catastrophic) flooding and reemergence of the present-day coastlines, but the same was happening all over the globe, which means that there were no special disasters restricted to the region you're so interested in. In any event, former Sundaland was resting in peace many fathoms deep. In one of your postings you even suggested a meteoric impact as the cause of the flood. Any factual evidence for that? Here I consider it more prudent to believe sedimentologists and palaeohydrologists who meticulously do their jobs collecting cores and analysing them, than visionary paediatricians who can only collect and -- let's face it -- manipulate other people's data.

> If I find something interesting my tombstone will say he found something interesting. If not it will say I'm an idiot. Other people's will say that they meticulously carried out their jobs.

Your heroic attitude does you credit, but come on, Thorsten, you don't really risk that much. They never put anything unpleasant like "Here lies an idiot" on people's tombstones. And it is not necessarily eccentric theories that prove interesting in the end. Solid work often yields interesting results, while the vast majority of crazy ideas are -- well, just crazy.

 

Cheers,

 

Piotr