Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[keenir]

Thanks for sharing!

I second that. very interesting material.

though...I didn't know Everett had died. (thats what a tribute is, right?)

[Raphael]

Thanks for sharing!

I second that. very interesting material.

though...I didn't know Everett had died. (thats what a tribute is, right?)

Nah, I think it's what in German would be called a Festschrift ("festival writing"), which is a kind of ritualized written ass-kissing, sorry, I mean, way to honor and show respect for a distinguished elder, in the world of academia.

[zompist]

though...I didn't know Everett had died. (thats what a tribute is, right?)

Nah, I think it's what in German would be called a Festschrift ("festival writing"), which is a kind of ritualized written ass-kissing, sorry, I mean, way to honor and show respect for a distinguished elder, in the world of academia.

We call it a festschrift too. They're commonly published when the honoree is still alive, as in fact Everett is.

[keenir]

Thanks for sharing!

I second that. very interesting material.

though...I didn't know Everett had died. (thats what a tribute is, right?)

Nah, I think it's what in German would be called a Festschrift ("festival writing"), which is a kind of ritualized written ass-kissing, sorry, I mean, way to honor and show respect for a distinguished elder,

if nothing else, one is easier to write.

in the world of academia.

ah, okay; many thanks to both of you for the explanation and clarification.

thus, congratulations, Mr. (Dr.?) Everett, on having gone from Rebel Outsider to Grand Notable Insider in the world of professional linguists.

[Raphael]

This reminds me, years ago, on the old, pre-Musk Twitter, at a time when a pioneer of early rock'n'roll in the 1950s (I don't remember which one) had just died, someone commented that those pioneers of early rock'n'roll in the 1950s who were still alive at the time would deserve to hear all the nice things people were planning to say about them when they died while they were, you know, still alive.

So I guess from that perspective, it's quite nice that the academic world has found a way to formalize that kind of thing.

[zompist]

thus, congratulations, Mr. (Dr.?) Everett, on having gone from Rebel Outsider to Grand Notable Insider in the world of professional linguists.

He has a PhD and a ScD, yes. But only medical degrees can be used socially. I think it would be silly if we all had to look up whether a linguist had a doctorate every time they're mentioned.

Plus he started as an Insider— his PhD dissertation was a Chomskyan analysis of Pirahã. His subsequent feud with the Chomskyans was purely intramural— he's no more eccentric than most linguists. The baseline is pretty high.

[keenir]

thus, congratulations, Mr. (Dr.?) Everett, on having gone from Rebel Outsider to Grand Notable Insider in the world of professional linguists.

He has a PhD and a ScD, yes. But only medical degrees can be used socially. I think it would be silly if we all had to look up whether a linguist had a doctorate every time they're mentioned.

along the same lines, I used to wonder if John Whorter was a Dr. or a Prof.....i kept meaning to ask, and I can never remember if i did or not.

Plus he started as an Insider— his PhD dissertation was a Chomskyan analysis of Pirahã. His subsequent feud with the Chomskyans was purely intramural—

In reading the 2nd half of Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, i wasn't sure where he sat on things (inside vs outside)

he's no more eccentric than most linguists. The baseline is pretty high.

like arguing Linear B was used to write Etruscan, like Hrozny?

[zompist]

he's no more eccentric than most linguists. The baseline is pretty high.

like arguing Linear B was used to write Etruscan, like Hrozny?

I hadn't heard of that one, but yeah. The average number of crank opinions per linguists probably reaches 1, though some folks are out there goosing the mean. Like (cough) Chomsky.

[Darren]

"average number of crank opinions per linguist probably reaches 1" factoid actualy just statistical error. average linguist has 0 crank opinions. Theories Bob, who believes he is world's foremost authority on logographic writing systems and has 10,000 crank opinions, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

[WeepingElf]

That someone has an academic degree in linguistics doesn't mean that their linguistic ideas aren't cranky. Peter Schrijver is an academic linguist, and he claims that as late as 1 AD, Goidelic was spoken in southeastern Britain and a non-IE language was spoken in Ireland; only when the Romans conquered Britain, the Goidelic speakers migrated to Ireland. Harald Haarmann is also an academic linguist; yet he has written a book on the history of the Indo-European family wherein he concurs with Gimbutas's reconstruction of Neolithic Southeast Europe as a feminist utopia (always controversial and today pretty much falsified) and comes up with truckloads of questionable etymologies; he is also quite sloppy, giving German Huhn:Hühner as an example of PIE ablaut and misspelling many PIE words. That are just two that come to my mind. Of course, linguistics is a wide field, and someone versed in, say, applied linguistics may be capable of writing good foreign langauge learning materials, but may be as clueless as a layman about historical linguistics.

And of course, there are many non-linguists who abuse their credentials in other fields to push unfounded ideas about languages, such as Colin Renfrew (an archaeologist) with his Neolithic Anatolian origin of IE (for fairness, he retracted it in 2017), or the geneticists who now claim to have found "Indo-Anatolian" in the Caucasus (not falsified yet, but unlikely for linguistic reasons; also, the genes say nothing about languages, and the data can be interpreted differently (as I have done here).

[hwhatting]

OTOH, cranky ideas can become mainstream - when I started reading about IE linguistics in the early 80s, most of the available introductory materials were from the 60s or earlier, and they either didn't mention the laryngeal theory at all or treated it as a cranky theory no serious IEanist believed in. Only when I formally started studying IE linguistics in 1986, I found out that the laryngeal theory had become mainstream. (And even then, we used as introductory book Oswald Szemerenyi's textbook, where he argued for only one laryngeal to have existed - a position noone serious nowadays shares.)

[WeepingElf]

Yes. Many ideas that are now mainstream once were highly controversial. Also, the fact that someone doesn't have a relevant academic degree doesn't mean that his ideas are worthless. Ferdinand de Saussure was a student when he came up with the laryngeal theory; he would later become an eminent linguist (though in a different branch), but back them he was just a student. Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B, was an architect by profession (though he exchanged ideas with scholars with more relevant degrees). In historical linguistics, common sense and adherence to the principles of all scholarly work such as Ockham's Razor, matter more than an academic degree.

[Raphael]

Yes. Many ideas that are now mainstream once were highly controversial. Also, the fact that someone doesn't have a relevant academic degree doesn't mean that his ideas are worthless. Ferdinand de Saussure was a student when he came up with the laryngeal theory; he would later become an eminent linguist (though in a different branch), but back them he was just a student. Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B, was an architect by profession (though he exchanged ideas with scholars with more relevant degrees). In historical linguistics, common sense and adherence to the principles of all scholarly work such as Ockham's Razor, matter more than an academic degree.

Every academic field except for a few of the oldest one was initially founded by people who didn't have degrees in it, because, of course, before they founded it, you couldn't get degrees in it.

[WeepingElf]

Yes. Many ideas that are now mainstream once were highly controversial. Also, the fact that someone doesn't have a relevant academic degree doesn't mean that his ideas are worthless. Ferdinand de Saussure was a student when he came up with the laryngeal theory; he would later become an eminent linguist (though in a different branch), but back them he was just a student. Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B, was an architect by profession (though he exchanged ideas with scholars with more relevant degrees). In historical linguistics, common sense and adherence to the principles of all scholarly work such as Ockham's Razor, matter more than an academic degree.

Every academic field except for a few of the oldest one was initially founded by people who didn't have degrees in it, because, of course, before they founded it, you couldn't get degrees in it.

Of course. When I started studying computer science in 1989, none of the professors had a degree in computer science - they had degrees in mathematics, physics or electrical engineering. (Though a few years later, two younger professors joined the staff who did have degrees in computer science.)

And what distinguishes Ventris from many of the amateur linguists whom you often run into on the Web is that he kept in touch with other scholars, and, more importantly, was ready to abandon an unproductive idea: he initially thought that the language of the Linear B inscriptions was related to Etruscan; only after he had failed to make progress, and had been told by Alice Kober that the language was most likely either Indo-European or typologically similar, he tried again with Greek - and succeeded. Still, he checked his results with John Chadwick who found them to be plausible before he published them.

[jal]

I think that's the biggest difference between cranks and non-cranks, the willingness to listen to those that are established in the field. Cranks often claim everyone and their mother is wrong about <insert field>, and only they have the One True Theory™. Also, they often ignore evidence from other fields. In palaeontology, a field I follow as a layman, there's various cranks that completely ignore evidence, both from within the field and outside it ("sauropods were to heavy to walk on land", "birds aren't dinosaurs", "there are all kinds of special structures visible in fossils if you look right"), following the exact same kind of reasoning and the exact same kind of rejecting actual science as what you see in linguistics. Just recently I learned that there are a lot of cranks in archaelogy as well, mostly fan of Graham Hancock, unsurprisingly. Exactly the same kind of reasoning, Big Archaeology is evil, and so on. (And let's not start about Corona sceptics, vaccine sceptics, flat-eathers, climate change deniers, ...)


JAL

[jal]

(as I have done here).

As a total layman, that seems sane. When I hear the "people = language" argument, I'm always thinking about Asia Minor, and how large swaths of the "Turks" there are genetically Greek, who started speaking Turkish after the Turkish conquest.


JAL

[Raphael]

I think that's the biggest difference between cranks and non-cranks, the willingness to listen to those that are established in the field. Cranks often claim everyone and their mother is wrong about <insert field>, and only they have the One True Theory™. Also, they often ignore evidence from other fields. In palaeontology, a field I follow as a layman, there's various cranks that completely ignore evidence, both from within the field and outside it ("sauropods were to heavy to walk on land", "birds aren't dinosaurs", "there are all kinds of special structures visible in fossils if you look right"), following the exact same kind of reasoning and the exact same kind of rejecting actual science as what you see in linguistics. Just recently I learned that there are a lot of cranks in archaelogy as well, mostly fan of Graham Hancock, unsurprisingly. Exactly the same kind of reasoning, Big Archaeology is evil, and so on. (And let's not start about Corona sceptics, vaccine sceptics, flat-eathers, climate change deniers, ...)


JAL

In those cases, do you mean cranks as in "people from outside the field who claim to know better than everyone else", or as in "People working in the field who claim to know better than everyone else"?

[jal]

In those cases, do you mean cranks as in "people from outside the field who claim to know better than everyone else", or as in "People working in the field who claim to know better than everyone else"?

The latter. I see relatively little people from inside those fields that hold deviating theories.


JAL

[WeepingElf]

(as I have done here).

As a total layman, that seems sane.

Thank you.

When I hear the "people = language" argument, I'm always thinking about Asia Minor, and how large swaths of the "Turks" there are genetically Greek, who started speaking Turkish after the Turkish conquest.

Asia Minor indeed seems to have a tradition of language shifts: both the advent and the downfall of the Anatolian languages (i.e., Hittite, Luwian and their ilk) are pretty invisible in the archaeogenetic record, so it probably was a matter of the people living there adopting a new language after a foreign elite moved in. Same goes for Armenian.

[Travis B.]

I had a rather weird experience at the airport in Kansas City today. I was ordering food and the person at the counter simply did not understand me. My daughter ultimately had to give the order for me, and they understood her.