From: tgpedersen
Message: 59670
Date: 2008-07-28
>He uses them to posit a very early split of Celtic from the rest of
>
> > > Read Stephen Oppenheimer's recent 'Origins of the
> > > British'.
> >
> > <http://www.grsampson.net/QOppenheimer.html>
> > <http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004276.html>
> >
> > Oppenheimer has apparently been much influenced by Peter
> > Forster. Trask on Forster & Toth:
> >
> > <http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-1876.html>
> > <http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-2040.html>
>
> Yes, they are his big linguistic sources - too bad they are fringe
> nutballs!
> He also draws inspiration from the often-debunkedHe uses them only to establish a point you also advocated here, namely
> Celtosceptics Simon James and John Collis.
>It does look pretty bad.
> Note that Oppenheimer is actually a pediatrician who studies
> genetics and history as a hobby.
>
> See this blog, as well:
> http://mr-verb.blogspot.com/2007/03/english-as-fourth-branch-of-
> germanic.html
>
> Where Joe Eska and Don Ringe are quoted as saying:
> "We have shown that [Forster & Toth's] selection and analysis of
> data are full of errors, that their confusion about what kinds of
> evidence are valuable for research in linguistic phylogeny has
> compromised their project, and that their rejection of the
> principles of the comparative method is not only counterproductive,
> but also completely antithetical to historical linguistics as a
> science. Most importantly, they have not addressed the crucial
> computational problems involved in phylogenetic reconstruction from
> comparative data."
> [Eska, Joseph F., Don Ringe. 2004. Recent work in computational
> linguistic phylogeny. Language 80.569-582.]