🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct31.215441.15379@s1.gov>, lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich) writes:
|> 
|> 	OK, you guys, get ready to point your flamethrowers at
|> Scientific American, because SciAm just published (Nov. issue) an
|> article by Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen describing their
|> proposed Amerind family.
|> 
|> 	Much of their article is devoted to discussing some of the
|> correspondences they have found; they focus on Amerind, though they do
|> perform comparisons to Nostratic/Eurasiatic and Sino-Caucasian toward
|> the end. They are silent about Proto-World (fortunately!).
|> 
|> 	They do acknowledge their rejection by much of the linguistic
|> community, but they state that their critics have no better ideas.
|> 
|> 	They also criticize many mainstream linguists for doing
|> two-at-a-time comparisons, which they compare to working out
|> Indo-European by comparing English and Albanian. Given the way
|> Indo-European was actually worked out, with multiple comparisons, that
|> criticism would seem justified.
    ...
    Here are a few opionions from a complete amateur.

    One is that this article was extremely short on substance.  For
example, they talk about certain prefixes and give a few examples.
However, it was not at all clear to me whether their examples of
"my child", etc.  used prefixes which were functional in the
language cited.  I couldn't tell whether the sound changes that
they cited were systematic across the languages (for example, at
one point they refer to the correspondence between "r" and "l" as
being a common change -- how does this differ from our recent
discussion of Hebrew being the parent of English?).  It was almost
embarrassing to see a table in which not only Proto-Indo-European
as well as English and Latin were used, and it was not at all
clear to me what that table were supposed to be proving.  And
what really drove me up the wall was their calculation of the
"probabilities" of the correspondence occuring by accident!  It
reminded me of creationist literature.
 
    On the question of comparing the way that Indo-European was
worked out as opposed to two-at-a-time comparisons, I guess that
I'd think that standards have developed over time.  Perhaps the
method that they use is _suggestive_ of something, but by now,
the work of two-at-a-time should be starting, to see if the
suggestions are pointing at something real.  I cannot see that
there was anything new in the article (admittedly, I am an
amateur, and may have missed something -- but isn't that supposed
to be the audience of Scientific American?).

    I have to say that this article had the effect on me of
losing sympathy for Greenberg's and Ruhlen's case.

-- 
Tom Scharle                |cm65n6@irishmvs(Bitnet)
Room G003 Computing Center |scharle@lukasiewicz.cc.nd.edu(Internet)
University of Notre Dame  Notre Dame, IN 46556-0539 USA