CaesarVincens wrote:You say that proto-Altaic is shown to be in NW Europe by its loans, and the loans can be proto-Altaic because it exists in NW Europe.
No, it didn't said "proto-Altaic" but a branch of Altaic, which is a very different thing.
The argument that Proto-Altaic was supposedly to be thousand of kilometers away from NW Europe isn't a serious one.
If any of you are interested in this topic, please shift to the appropriate thread.
CaesarVincens wrote:You say that proto-Altaic is shown to be in NW Europe by its loans, and the loans can be proto-Altaic because it exists in NW Europe.
No, it didn't said "proto-Altaic" but a branch of Altaic, which is a very different thing.
The argument that Proto-Altaic was supposedly to be thousand of kilometers away from NW Europe isn't a serious one.
You are just mincing words. You know what I meant. I said proto-Altaic, yes, but I was referring to the Altaic substrate you propose to have existed in Europe. So, again, do you see how other people look at your argument and say, "This is a circular argument"?
Octaviano wrote:Don't be stupid. There're indeed regular sound correspondences but no in "dozens of words" as the corpus is small.
Errr... So you actually say that in case the evidence is poor, you are allowed to use the evidence as of it were not poor? So, e.g., that we have one indicident of your car's license plate being spotted in your local red-light district, and given that there's only scarce evidence, we can claim that you are a frequent prostitute visitor. If you try to refute that by claiming there's lack of evidence, and demand we show some more, we'll just say "Don't be stupid. You are indeed a prostitute visitor but there's no dozens of times documented, as our corpus is small." I would be tempted to think there's a certain flaw of logic here...
jal wrote:Errr... So you actually say that in case the evidence is poor, you are allowed to use the evidence as of it were not poor?
Cut the crap, man. I said exactly the opposite: the evidence is GOOD.
I think here he meant that the quantity of evidence for a given "correspondence" is poor, i.e low rather than making a statement about quality as was evident from the remainder of the post.
You can tell the same lie a thousand times,
But it never gets any more true,
So close your eyes once more and once more believe
That they all still believe in you.
Just one time.
sangi39 wrote:I think here he meant that the quantity of evidence for a given "correspondence" is poor, i.e low rather than making a statement about quality as was evident from the remainder of the post.
Yes, I understood his intention, but in my own language 'poor' isn't the same thing than 'small'. The evidence is GOOD for a SMALL data size.
Octaviano wrote:Yes, I understood his intention, but in my own language 'poor' isn't the same thing than 'small'. The evidence is GOOD for a SMALL data size.
I think you have your definition for "evidence" screwed up.
What Octaviano says is essentially that there are Altaic loanwords in Northwestern IE languages because there are Altaic loanwords in Northwestern IE languages. How convincing But that discussion peoperly belongs into Octaviano's Macro-Altaic thread.
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A
WeepingElf wrote:What Octaviano says is essentially that there are Altaic loanwords in Northwestern IE languages because there are Altaic loanwords in Northwestern IE languages. How convincing.
Not exactly. I said there are Altaic loanwords in Northwestern IE languages because these words have no PIE etymology but good correspondences with Proto-Altaic.
jal wrote:... keep your own dirt where it belongs please! ...
WeepingElf wrote:... that discussion peoperly belongs into Octaviano's Macro-Altaic thread.
@WeepingElf;
May I ask that you ask the moderators (e.g. Salmoneus) to "split" this thread, if possible, and move all the irrelevant posts to Octaviano's Macro-Altaic Thread?
And perhaps, also, to give Octaviano (and others of us if we need it) a "second warning" about keeping such things off "your" thread?
Perhaps Octaviano (and/or some others of us) doesn't understand why some of his/(or our) posts don't really belong here. A moderator could explain it so that we all understand it the same way.
Last edited by TomHChappell on Tue Mar 09, 2010 3:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
WeepingElf wrote:What Octaviano says is essentially that there are Altaic loanwords in Northwestern IE languages because there are Altaic loanwords in Northwestern IE languages. How convincing.
Not exactly. I said there are Altaic loanwords in Northwestern IE languages because these words have no PIE etymology but good correspondences with Proto-Altaic.
OK. Point taken. The question is whether those correspondences are really that good. So far, you have only shown that there are a few words in NW IE that look vaguely similar to some Altaic words, but haven't yet shown that chance resemblance is out of the question. The burden of proof remains on you.
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A
TomHChappell wrote:And perhaps, also, to give Octaviano (and others of us if we need it) a "second warning" about keeping such things off "your" thread?
And what about a "warning" to people who are spamming in my thread?
jal wrote:... keep your own dirt where it belongs please! ...
WeepingElf wrote:... that discussion peoperly belongs into Octaviano's Macro-Altaic thread.
@WeepingElf;
May I ask that you ask the moderators (e.g. Salmoneus) to "split" this thread, if possible, and move all the irrelevant posts to Octaviano's Macro-Altaic Thread?
And perhaps, also, to give Octaviano (and others of us if we need it) a "second warning" about keeping such things off "your" thread?
Perhaps Octaviano (and/or some others of us) doesn't understand why some of his/(or our) posts don't really belong here. A moderator could explain it so that we all understand it the same way.
Rightly spoken, Tom. It is perfectly legitimate when people point out what they think are problems with my hypothesis here. That's what this thread is for. But for discussing the "Macro-Altaic" hypothesis, Octaviano has set up his own thread, thus it is entirely unnecessary to discuss that matter here, especially as it has little to do with the Europic hypothesis.
Octaviano, this is a warning. Please take the discussion of Macro-Altaic to your own thread; otherwise I may call a moderator to take appropriate measures.
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A
WeepingElf wrote:Octaviano, this is a warning. Please take the discussion of Macro-Altaic to your own thread; otherwise I may call a moderator to take appropriate measures.
I've already done this, and I'd recommend you keep fair play ON.
Can we please just ban him already? Or start ignoring him? He thrives on the attention we're giving him- if he doesn't get it he'll probably just slink away.
Salmoneus wrote:(NB Dewrad is behaving like an adult - a petty, sarcastic and uncharitable adult, admittedly, but none the less note the infinitely higher quality of flame)
CaesarVincens wrote:I am very sorry about the OT posting, WeepingElf, I shall cease and desist immediately.
OK. End of the meta-debate, back to business.
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A
Disclaimer notice: I post this here because I think it's relevant to the discussion. My fellow Arnaud Fournet has just written an essay defending a Mesolithic PIE in Anatolia.
His main argument is the lexicon relative to domesticated animal such as sheep, goat, etc. in Western IE languages is different from the Eastern ones (he doesn't refer to the 'wheel' word).
I'm actually tempted to pass that essay onto one or two of my lecturers. First off, if this were written by any university student, at least at my university, the use of only two references by a single author/editor would pretty much lead to an instant drop in marks to around 40% or even a fail in the case of a third year essay where we're expected to use at least 8 references by at least 6-7 authors to gain at least 55-65%. The use of "insane crap invented by narcissically unhinged minds" would push it further down and the lack of data would just be worse.
The writer also states that one of the major flaws in the Pontic-Caspian Hypothesis (something I myself have a few doubts over), at least in its modern form, lacks an explanation for IE expansion yet then bases the idea of it being "insane crap" on the idea of IE unstoppable superheroes, an idea that he states is long dead, itself a logical fallacy. The paper, however, although providing a "cause" for the expansion, doesn't give a reason behind this assumption. The suggested "cause" isn't even a cause but a narrative. Why was it that the IE community repopulated Central and Eastern Europe after the glacial maximum and not some other speech community? Why did it survive long enough in those areas pretty much phonologically and morphologically unchanged despite modern ethnographic evidence which suggests the languages of pre-Neolithic, i.e. Mesolithic peoples who are generally separated by geographical boundaries, e.g. large rivers, mountains, etc. tend to have typically divergent languages due to lack of long-distance and long-term contact with other groups.
The evidence for domestication used also deals only with the initial evidence for domestication rather than the geographical distribution of domesticates plotted against time. For example, although the sheep may have been domesticated in around 9000BC, it doesn't occur in Central Europe until around 7000-6000BC (IIRC) or Britain until around 3000BC. Using the initial dates for domestication as a basis for debunking a Neolithic PIE in a different region of the world doesn't make logical sense. Instead, such a debunking should be based on the evidence for those domesticates in the supposed homeland.
The essay also does not provide a reason why the proposed "borrowings" did not occur in the other direction, but also, given the sparsity of data, how these can accurately be shown to in fact be loan words at all. The IE languages may have different vocabulary for various words but the essay hasn't tackled the issue of whether or not these could simply be the result of differences in Neolithic PIE dialectal vocabulary. I have a different word for what might generically be called a "trainer" to a friend of mine living over the Pennines while we both have the same word for the meal in the middle of the day, which differs from the word used by my fiancee who happens to use his word for "trainer". Even a "last common ancestor" in lingusitics is capable of dialectal variation through local innovation, something which the essay does not address at all. It also fails to look at processes such as analogy which levels out irregularities caused by sound change which may also lead to a shift of the word from one inflectional pattern to an unexpected one as further fails to look at interactions between the various IE branches after the separation of PIE.
Overall, the essay is under-referenced, it doesn't handle the claims of other homeland hypotheses as well as it could, has a lack of linguistic evidence to back claims of lexical borrowings as opposed to PIE dialectal forms or later intra-IE interactions and in general fails to provide reasoning behind the conclusions drawn and overall. All of this, plus the use of language early on in describing the Pontic-Caspian hypothesis, would indicate that this is not a serious essay by a serious linguist using a well thought out, logical methodology and structure but instead to an amateur "linguist" attempting to spuriously "prove" his hypothesis through an attempt to debunk another in order to support pretty general claims lacking a gret deal of supporting evidence.
You can tell the same lie a thousand times,
But it never gets any more true,
So close your eyes once more and once more believe
That they all still believe in you.
Just one time.
The Anatolian Theory was a passing fad that is pretty much dead as a doornail. Vocabulary and grammatical similarities with Uralic point to north of the Black Sea.
TaylorS wrote:The Anatolian Theory was a passing fad that is pretty much dead as a doornail. Vocabulary and grammatical similarities with Uralic point to north of the Black Sea.
Indeed. Colin Renfrew is not a linguist; he plainly did not know the relevant linguistic facts. The theory was somewhat fashionable among non-linguists (the linguists knew the problems all along the way), as everybody would like to be the descendant of peaceful farmers rather than aggressive conquerors these days; but the facts spoke against it, and it has rightly been discarded. The testimony of the facts is simply too strong. Last thing I heard about it that Renfrew himself has abandoned it.
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A
Although I'm not defending it, Arnaud's theory of a PIE homeland in Anatolia is quite different from Renfrew's in chronology and linguistic implications. Arnaud proposes a Pre-Mesolithic expansion from Anatolia to the Balkans, and then a Mesolithic one from there to West and East Europe.
Octaviano wrote:Although I'm not defending it, Arnaud's theory of a PIE homeland in Anatolia is quite different from Renfrew's in chronology and linguistic implications. Arnaud proposes a Pre-Mesolithic expansion from Anatolia to the Balkans, and then a Mesolithic one from there to West and East Europe.
That only makes it worse. There is too much Neolithic farming terminology in PIE to allow for a Mesolithic disintegration of PIE.
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A
But that discussion peoperly belongs into Octaviano's Macro-Altaic thread.
