Re: Vandals

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:

>
> At 2:28:44 PM on Tuesday, September 9, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "bmscotttg" <BMScott@>
> > wrote:
>
> >> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen"
> >> <tgpedersen@> wrote:
>
> >>> ...
>
> >>>>>> [He] is only interested in finding evidence in
> >>>>>> science which supports this prejudice.
>
> >>>>> Of course.
>
> >>>> If you were a real scientist, you'd also be interested
> >>>> in subjecting your 'theories' to rigorous testing.
>
> >>> That's why I offer them here.
>
> >> You really just don't get it, do you?
>
> > What is it you want me to 'get' (note the scare quotes)?
>
> Schon gut, 'mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst
> vergebens'. (Scare quotes are inappropriate here, unless
> you're trying to suggest that 'get' in the sense of
> 'understand' is unacceptable, which simply isn't true.)

I was saying that *I* found your use of 'get' wrong, which *you*
don't, small surprise.

>
> Very well, I'll try one last time.
>
> I have yet to see any indication that you subject any of
> your notions to any sort of critical examination before you
> spew them forth. At best that spells incompetence,
> laziness, or lack of interest; worse, it suggests a rather
> uncritical willingness on your part to accept anything that
> fits your prejudices and hasn't yet been refuted by someone
> else, no matter how little real examination it's undergone.
> In any case it's a poor excuse for scholarship.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion. ('Opinion' is something which
consists only of value judgments).

> >> *You* have a fundamental responsibility to do at least
> >> some basic testing, preferably *before* you dump them
> >> here.
>
> > Nonsense. Of course I can ask the members of cybalist a
> > question about the etymologies of sets of of words in
> > which I have no special expertise. Everybody on the list
> > does it all the time.
>
> First, this is obviously not true. Some people occasionally
> ask about the etymology of the odd word or two.

OK, so it *is* true.

> Secondly, my comment obviously covered a good deal more than
> requests for etymologies, which in fact you rarely make.

OK, so people occasionally make requests for etymologies, but I
usually don't, but now I ask for a whole list, and therefore I'm a bad
scientist? Could you please do some cleaning up on your lines of
reasoning before you spew them forth here?

> Thirdly,this is another illustration of your bizarre notion of
> scholarship.

Secondly, this is another example of your vapid contentless criticism
of my alleged method.

> >> Take that list of Breton-Slovenian look-alikes: what was
> >> the point of inflicting it on us?
>
> > Quote:
> > 'It is of course interesting which of the words are only
> > Breton and Slovenian and which are generally Celtic and
> > Slavic, respectively. Comments are appreciated.'
>
> > The point was to find out which of the words had
> > respectable pedigrees from PIE to their respective
> > languages, Breton and Slovenian, and which didn't, thus
> > making them suspect of being substrate words in those
> > languages.
>
> So why not ask for what you now claim to want?

I repeat: 'It is of course interesting which of the words are only
Breton and Slovenian and which are generally Celtic and Slavic,
respectively. Comments are appreciated.'
How is this unclear to you?

> Instead you present the list as if it had prima facie value,

'Prima facie value', as opposed to what kind of value? I don't get you.

> and if you get no substantive response, I fully expect to see you
> pointing to it in the future as having some sort of evidentiary
> value.

Evidence of what?

> >> The authors obviously know nothing of linguistics, so
> >> there's no reason to suppose that it means any more than
> >> any other crank's list of surface similarities.
>
> > The do seem to know very little of general PIE stuff, but
> > have some knowledge of Slavic matters. The most
> > bothersome, I find, is their lack of knowledge of the
> > concept of substrate in languages.
>
> The authors appear to have no knowledge of historical
> linguistics, full stop. They apparently know Slovenian and
> have some knowledge of its dialects, and they have access to
> a Breton dictionary and an etymological dictionary of
> French. That's it.

That's pretty much what I said. I agree.

> They don't even know anything about Breton morphology.

Please elaborate.

> >> Might there be a valuable nugget amongst the obvious
> >> crap? Of course there *might*, but there's absolutely no
> >> evidence pointing in that direction, and hence no reason
> >> to look.
>
> > That's an example of what I call to myself a 'circular
> > Brian'. It doesn't interest you because it is not
> > interesting, and it is not interesting because it doesn't
> > interest you.
>
> This is so obviously a misinterpretation of what I wrote
> that I find it hard to believe that it's not deliberate.

No, it's typical. Remember the Jysk data from Feilberg you dismissed
out of hand?

> Besides, the list did interest me: I collect interesting
> crackpottery, so I spent an enjoyable day or so doing
> research to demonstrate just how bad it is.

Please share your results with us. You usually do splendid jobs with
those.

> >> [...]
>
> >>> The view you, George and others represent insists that
> >>> those sources concerning the history of
> >>> Germanic-speaking peoples which refer to native
> >>> traditions should be dismissed out of hand,
>
> >> This is obviously false, since it's apparent from our
> >> posts that neither George nor I dismisses them
> >> _out_of_hand_.
>
> > Oh, yes you do.
>
> I am neither mistaken nor a liar. You simply don't know
> enough about medieval sources to understand the basis for
> the scholarly judgements that you dismiss out of hand
> because they hobble your hobbyhorse.

Well, please correct me, then.

> >>> thus treated differently from other sources, a prejudice
> >>> which is ideologically motivated as can be seen in
> >>> George's past insistence that I am an 'Odinist'.
>
> >> This is utter nonsense from start to finish. Your
> >> interpretation of George's use of 'Odinist' is as far off
> >> the mark as Kishore's insistence a while back that he'd
> >> been threatened by Francesco.
>
> > Could you be more specific?
>
> No. What I wrote is clear enough, it already at least
> verges on being off topic, and I've already wasted too much
> time on a lost cause.

Ok, so another uncorroborated value judgment.

> >> [...]
>
> >>>> By the way, George left out at least one: routinely
> >>>> appealing to invisible 'data', justified on the grounds
> >>>> that it belonged to an unrecorded 'low' register.
>
> >>> Please don't misrepresent me.
>
> >> I'm not: that's exactly what you do.
>
> >>> I sometimes posit words in low register; I never call
> >>> that 'data',
>
> >> I didn't say that you did; the quotation marks are scare
> >> quotes.
>
> > from
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
> > 'Scare quotes is a general term for quotation marks used
> > for purposes other than to identify a direct quotation.
>
> Note that last line.
>
> [...]
>
> > '
>
> > In other words, you are attributing that term to me.
>
> No, I am not. I'm sorry if you don't understand the full
> range of English usage of scare quotes, but your ignorance
> doesn't change the intended meaning of what I wrote.

Could I move your Excellency to deign to explain it to me, or will you
let it stand as yet another value judgment?
And yes, it's spelled 'judgment', not 'judgement'.

And a general remark: the posting I am commenting now contains 6
counts of 'obvious'/'obviously'. It shows that the self-criticism you
demand from me is severely underdeveloped in yourself. Perhaps you
should be having this conversation with yourself instead?


Torsten