Re: Query re: IE website

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "etherman23" <etherman23@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "darkstar100@" <darkstar100@> wrote:
> >
> > Too make things clear from the start, I will explain that I don't
> > care who anybody is, or how much money he earns, or who's his
> > brother, or even what he published offline in some journal that is
> > out of immediate reach online (it's the Internet Age, wake up! What's
> > not at your fingertips, no longer exists in nature!). To me, you're
> > are just letters on the screen, and I can only judge you by what you
> > write or have to say here and now or at least somewhere online. I
> > will also test whether you understand basic logic and scientific
> > method (many people don't), and attempt to extract some psychology
> > info on you based on the way you write. For instance, if you get much
> > too critical, and never say anything good, I may draw the conclusion
> > that you're not a creative or maybe not even a smart person and that
> > you're only able to criticize other people's work without doing
> > anything of your own, therefore good critciism is supposed to include
> > a consideration of both strong and weak points of a statement or text
> > in question. You're also supposed to back up your statements with
> > arguments; free-floating "opinions" are good for the kitchen talk,
> > not a scientifically-oriented forum...
>
> I agree to an extent. Just because someone claims to be an expert, or is an expert, doesn't mean they are infallible or even right on any particular issue. Unless they can provide evidence and well-reasoned arguments, their opinion is just an Appeal to Authority.
>
> As regards to Jens personally he's a frequent contributor here and you can Google his name to read some of his publications. I'd skip the pop psychology if I were you because then you're just Poisoning the Well.
>
> At the end of the day the person making the positive claim (e.g. Proto-Turkic is an Iranian language) has the burden of proof. Until a goodly amount of evidence for that proposition is presented the rest of us don't need to rebut it.
>

Okay, I see.

As to Proto-Turkic, there's plenty of evidence; it's the best-supported part of the website.

I'm not so sure for instance about the "Lexicostatistical Comparison of the IELs" done in the spirit of Dyen-Atkinson-Ringe's studies. This is because the 46-dataset is much too small for the manual comparison of cogantes. Neither I was able to build a sufficiently large dataset for a large number of the IE groups providing stastically stable outcomes, nor I was able to finish a program that was supposed to count them automatically. Consequently, the whole study is neither fish nor fowl. Still, it contains many points that would be useful in the future research.

BTW, it's not necessary to carry the burden of proof for saying something. It's just that an unsupported claim is of little value. Someone may make a hypothesis, and someone else provide the proof. There are many examples (Fermat's Last Theoreme, to name just one).