From: tgpedersen
Message: 27639
Date: 2003-11-26
> Dear Kalyan,I confess: I put those asterisks there.
>
> Some comments:
>
> Kalyan: Are you referring to this URL?
> http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/austric.html
>
> Don't laugh; there is no *word in my work, simply
> lexemes mostly
> from CDIAL, DEDR, Enc. Mundarica and
> Campbell's/Boding's Santali
> dictionaries. I suppose these are non-hilarious
> contributions to
> linguistics.
>
> JS: The asterisk words in Torsten´s rants are not the
> problem: non-attested forms must take the asterisk no
> matter what the reason for their being non-attested.
> No, Torsten deserved the Monty Python Prize for Silly
> Theories because of his quixotic "Sundaland is the
> Atlantis of the East"- obsession. It is this obsession
> that leads him and his comrades-in-arms & ignoramuses
> at the "Austronesian" board to defend ideas that
> violate all canons of sound research. Instead of
> making inferences to the best and most likely
> explanation, they infer to the least likely
> explanation; instead of using Occam´s Razor, they
> "explain" by reference to events and entities that are
> purely speculative; instead of showing a sense of
> source criticism and context, they pick up whatever
> cherries strike their fancy etc. Hence the hilarious
> tales about Austronesians being responsible for the
> Bronze Age Corded Ware culture in the Baltic Sea area
> and other uncontrolled flights of fancy.
>