At 2:05:36 PM on Tuesday, July 15, 2008, Patrick Ryan wrote:
> Brian,
> when I criticized Ringe before, you informed me his math
> was fine.
Criticized Ringe for *what*?! It's not as if the man only
ever did one thing in his professional life. I have some
familiarity with three things that he's done: his work with
Tandy Warnow on the IE phylogeny, his work on the likelihood
of matching CVC-roots, and his new book _From Proto-Indo-
European to Proto-Germanic_. I've now also read his review
of Greenberg. Which of these is it that I'm supposed to
support?
I'll help you out. I have some reservations about his work
on IE phylogeny, but I think that it's worth pursuing. His
1999 paper on CVC-roots has some mathematical errors in it,
but none of them qualitatively affects his conclusions.
There's no mathematics in his new book, but there is at
least one statement with which I'm inclined to disagree on
the basis of some discussions here.
> I responded that it was not the math but the formulation
> of the problem, and a misunderstanding of the significance
> of the results.
> Bancel seems to agree.
> Do you think Bancel is "smoking" something , too?
Bancel is manifestly incompetent to criticize: as I point
out in more detail in another post, he commits baby-level
errors and clearly fails to understand Ringe's argument in
the first place.
Brian