Re: *ka/unt- etc, new conquests

At 1:04:22 PM on Thursday, November 12, 2009, Torsten wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, johnvertical@... wrote:

[...]

>> - a claim that needs some actual evidence for it.

> No. 'Evidence for' doesn't exist.

You're confusing _evidence_for_ with _proof_of_. It's the
latter that doesn't exist, not the former. Or you're
misunderstanding 'evidence for' as 'evidence *exclusively*
for'.

[...]

>>>>>>> Forget predictive power in a historical science. Any
>>>>>>> prediction a theory makes we already know, unless we
>>>>>>> discover new material like Hittite, and that's very
>>>>>>> rare.

>>>>>> Maybe with Indo-European. There are still plenty of
>>>>>> understudied languages in the world which may or may
>>>>>> not provide us with data that fits our reconstruction
>>>>>> of, say, Proto-Uralic.

>>>>> True, but it's pseudo-prediction in principle.

No more than a physical prediction that can't (yet) be
tested.

>>>> We can predict the *discovery* of new lexeme sets that
>>>> fit our soundlaws, if you want to nitpick about
>>>> chronology.

>>> OK, sage, predict the appearance of the next Hittite.

>> Nice strawman.

> That was no strawman. I meant you.

If you really don't see that it's a straw man, John's
wasting his time.

>> Read again what I wrote, please.

> I just did, and it still doesn't make sense.

>> More rigorously:

> Yes, please.

>> a linguistic reconstruction (or just the relevant regular
>> correspondences, actually) predicts that, when scholars
>> further study a language of the same family that has not
>> been studied to full detail (but still to sufficient
>> detail that soundlaws for that particular language have
>> been estabilish'd), they will discover lexemes that can
>> be connected to lexemes in other languages of the family
>> in accordance with the soundlaws of the reconstruction.

> That's a definition. But exactly those lexemes may have
> been dropped from the languages in question, in which case
> your prediction fails when it shouldn't. So: fail.

And in the physical sciences the conditions that you need in
order to test a particular prediction may not be achievable.

[...]

>> Likewise, except close to 100% of the time. (I do have
>> one pretty good theory, but it requires assuming that
>> you're at least half of the time either immune to logic,
>> or trolling.)

He's deliberately provocative at times, but I don't think
that he's trolling even when he's just spewing snotty
comments instead of addressing content. He's sincere
enough, I think -- a lot like the OIT folks, actually, in
his refusal to recognize evidence against his core tenets
(e.g., by deliberately refusing to learn enough to evaluate
it, as in the case of medieval historiography and manuscript
studies, a technique with the added virtue of letting him
accuse everyone else of prejudice) and his lack of
understanding of scientific methodology.

Brian