Re: Stacking up on standard works

You are mistaken because Trask didn't say they were wrong. He just said that, as far as he was concerned, there wasn't enough evidence for him to decide positively, yet.

While I personally believe there are quite a few pre-Roman IE words in Basque.

1. I can't prove they are from IE without more evidence

2. I can't prove their provenance --are they from Celtic? From which branch? From pre-Lusitanian as it made its way over the Pyrenees? From Ligurian (which may or may not be Celtic)? etc. How do we prove one or another?

Take abarka "bast sandals", which looks as if it's related to English bark, but how? Is there a *bark- form in Gaulish or Lusitanian? Was it somehow transferred from Gothic or Frankish to Basque without leaving congeners in Romance languages?

Linguistics is not a game of narcissistic pronouncements. Guesses require solid evidence. Trask only made pronouncements when he believed the evidence was solid enough for him.

He was not stubborn. I managed to convince him that gavirai was a congener of Spanish gavilán, from some Romance source.

He wasn't perfect, only madmen are, and never claimed to be.

But he was a model for anyone who takes linguistics seriously.

From: stlatos <stlatos@...>
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 1:17 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Stacking up on standard works

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <bm.brian@...> wrote:
>
> At 6:38:16 PM on Monday, April 16, 2012, stlatos wrote:
>
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister
> > <gabaroo6958@> wrote:
>
> >> No one ever said Trask was infallible, least of all him.
>
> > Then why'd you say: He was a scholar who never made a
> > pronouncement that he couldn't back up 100%.
>
> > I guess there's a distinction between being infallible and
> > never saying anything w/o evidence,
>
> You guess? It's obvious.

In reply to my counter to "He was a scholar who never made a pronouncement that he couldn't back up 100%", I proved it wrong by showing pronouncements he made that had no ev. to back them up, including some in which the ev. shows the opp. (evident not only to me, but to Carrasquer in the message I quoted, and others afterward). After that, I was greeted w "No one ever said Trask was infallible", an attempt to redefine the skills or greatness of Trask under question, when its his competence at Basque, not complete infallibility (which I did not attempt to disprove in particular), under question in the first place.

I am not a fan of attempting to be so particular, as you apparently are, that no knowledge can ever be exchanged or discussed due to an opponent making distinctions so fine, and making new ones after his first failed, to prevent the proponent from saying anything. I did nothing wrong by replying as I did to the first statement, or mocking the attempt to seem correct after he was proven wrong.

>
> > but that's what I tried to show was wrong.
>
> And you failed. 'Without evidence acceptable to Sean
> Whalen' is most definitely not the same as 'without
> evidence'.
>

As I said, others agreed. In fact, Rick McCallister said he disagreed w him about that very thing I wrote about (borrowings << non-Celtic IE).

> [...]
>
> > No one has ever done really good work on Proto-Basque, or
> > almost any proto-language, but me.
>
> Right. Not even the three Napoleons and two Einsteins in
> the ward down the hall from you.
>

I'm simply the best. Others are often so foolish or work against the known laws of reconstruction it's not worth my time to consider.