Re: [tied] Re: trzymac'

On Sri, svibanj 31, 2006 8:18 am, pielewe reče:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Mate Kapović <mkapovic@...> wrote:

> I for one would need quite a bit of convincing that the points at
> issue necessarily imply a "crash".

Well, I think it's clear that Kortlandt's theory cannot explain all the
facts. I do admit that his theory *could* successfully explain most of the
other pretonic etc. stuff, but in the case of a. p. b verbs, it's just not
good enough. I for one find Kortlandt's theory very interesting, however,
it just doesn't do the trick. I can compare it with some other Kortlandt's
work - I read some of his articles (like the ones with the PIE glottal
stops having traces in Cockney, Danish etc.) like the most exciting
thrillers, but I don't think that it's really true. Needless to say, I do
believe in many things he says (like the depalatalization of palatovelars
in Balto-Slavic etc.).

>> > What FK writes on seNdzic' vs. saNdzisz in the
>> > article you quoted earlier today is not explicit enough for me to
>> > understand what he has in mind, let alone to criticize on other
>> > grounds than lack of explicitness.
>
> Then Mate said:
>
>> He should be explicit though if he wants people to accept his
> theories.
>
>
> It goes without saying that I agree with that.
>
> But we should never forget all the same that Slavic accentology (and
> Slavic historical phonology in general) has a long history of
> miscommunications and of valuable results falling by the wayside just
> because they happened not to be welcome or nice or to be expressed in
> the right way by the right person at the right time in the right
> language.

That is unfortunately very true. Still, it's up to the author in question
to make himself clear.

>After all what Stang did in his 1957 book was more than
> anything else a job of resurrecting old results that had been ignored
> or shouted out of existence by scholars who appear to have been more
> interested in scoring debating points and getting their way than in
> the truth. That is one reason why my criticism of the Moscow School
> (in the second edition of Werner Lehfeldt's Introduction) is written
> the way it is: I wanted to draw attention to a number of difficulties
> without my text serving as an excuse for readers just to reject the
> whole Moscow building.

Needless to say, I completely agree with practically everything in that
article (the same goes for Pepijn's article).
I just don't see why it is such a common trait in BSl accentology to be so
hazy. I include here both the MAS and Kortlandt.

> I am deeply convinced that it is often more
> profitable to keep flawed results in circulation than to have to
> reinvent them at a later stage. If I sound like an old codger here
> you have to realize that I *am* an old codger.
>
> (Actually to be honest I do think I understand full well what
> Kortlandt is doing here, but I also think that it is his
> responsibility and not mine to clarify his intentions.)

Of course. However, you did try to do exactly that sort of stuff before
(in Cybalist and elsewhere) :)

>> ... nobody's actually looked at all the material carefully. Stang
>> was on the right way but he has not payed much attention to the
> details.
>> Kortlandt's mistake was that he took modern standard language data
> for
>> granted.
>
> I can only say that this does not do justice either to Stang or to
> Kortlandt.

As for Stang, I think that his Slav. acc. was just not the right place to
clear everything concerning Slavic length. If not for anything else,
because of the space problem. My article alone (the one Kortlandt's
criticizing) is some 40 pages long (whether one accepts its conclusions or
not), and it does not deal with length in final syllables, later
developments etc.

> I vividly recall that when Kortlandt was working on his
> accentology back in the early seventies intricate dialectal data were
> very much on his (and everybody's) mind. A few years earlier the
> Amsterdam accentologists (Ebeling c.s.) had combed the entire
> literature searching for dialect descriptions that were solid and
> reliable enough to build on.

OK, I can accept that for Molise Croatian or Kajkavian, but what about
Slovincian and Old Polish? Lorentz's grammar dates from 1903, if I am not
mistaken. I don't actually think that Kortlandt didn't check all the data,
I am just implying that his theory does not account for the data that is
known to us now. Thus, it needs to be remaded or completely discarded.

>There are two big problems: that of
> deciding what is and what is not reliable and the problem posed by
> the presence of relatively recent phenomena that have not been
> inventoried, let alone sorted out. Croatian dialectology in
> particular was in a lamentable state at the time.

It's not much better now...

> Although internal
> facts sufficed to see that the well-known Susak description (of 1956)
> was profoundly flawed and although many people must have known about
> that, nobody in Croatia had the courage to say so publicly.

I wouldn't say it was up to courage. The main reasons were:
1) the "authority" of the three academics
2) the lack of knowledge of the majority of dialectologists
3) that those who did have enough knowledge to criticize it just did not
care enough to do it

But it's hardly a Croatian specialty. For instance, who would dare
confront Kortlandt in Leiden? Or the Netherlands? Isn't it not funny that
his theories on Slavic accentuation are recognized only in Leiden?
I heard that Peter Schrijver had to leave Leiden just because he did not
agree with Kortlandt and Beekes on some matter. Thus, one does not need to
look at Croatia to see this kind of things...

> At the
> same time publication of the Vrgada dictionary by Blaz^ Juris^ic^ was
> constantly being delayed with feeble excuses. (In both cases Mate
> Hraste was crucially implicated.)

Didn't know that. I see you have a lot of insider knowledge...

> The Susak study in addition to
> being of doubtful value in itself, gave rise to a tradition of
> neglecting contrastiveness in descriptive work, which culminated in
> the Z^irje description (1968, needless to say published in the Hraste
> issue of "Rasprave ..."), a piece of research that reads like a
> malevolent parody. Signs of what sometimes looked like deliberate
> incompetence were all over the place.

Have you seen Mogus^'s "Senjski rjec^nik" by the way? And he is the
president of HAZU... :-(

> To this, the workings of
> Murphy's Law should be added. Death prevented Petar Skok from
> continuing the description of his native dialect of Jurkovo Selo in
> Z^umberak beyond the phonology. Zvonimir Junkovic, who hailed from
> the most archaic section of the Kajkavian dialect area (at the time
> very poorly documented),

What part?

> chose not to write a grammar of that dialect
> but to dabble in Slavic accentology with results that have been
> universally regarded as embarrassing.

Oh yes, unfortunately, Junkovic''s work is still praised by many
dialectologists here. Needless to say, it's just a result of their
incompetence to see that most of his theories are flawed.

> Need I go on? Faced with this
> pretty picture, outsiders had no option but to excercize extreme care
> (which, needless to see, may impress one as exaggerated with the
> benefit of hindsight).

OK, but I still thinks it's no excuse :) Very interesting though...

Mate