🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov3.002144.16671@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:
>In article <1992Oct31.215441.15379@s1.gov>, lip@s1 (Loren I. Petrich) writes:

	[On the Greenberg-Ruhlen article...]

$ 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.

>You know, people on this group have on occasion thrown this charge at me when
>I've complained about the work of various large-scale comparatists.  However, I
>hadn't realized that the charge was being made *as raising a real issue*.

	Not only Greenberg and Ruhlen have raised this question of
this doing only binary comparisons, but also Shevoroshkin.

>I realize that I've not met every historical and comparative linguist in the
>world, but I would be surprised to learn that those I *have* met are in any way
>unusual.  *NO ONE* of my acquaintance does strictly binary comparisons, or
>suggests that that is the way to do comparative studies.

	I certainly agree there, but what G,R, and Sh are suggesting
is that that's the way it works out in practice -- that a lot of
comparisons of distant Native American languages have been done using
the two-at-a-time approach, for instance. Or else comparisons of
Indo-European with only Semitic or Afro-Asiatic or Uralic. Or at
least, so they charge.

	[On linguists comparing more than 2 at a time...]

>Do people actually think that the usual practice of comparative linguists is to
>do binary comparisons????  I thought I was being presented with an exaggeration
>to make some point that I couldn't see.

	I think that what G, R, and Sh are trying to state is that too
many long-distance comparisons have been done using only two at a
time, and that the inevitable failures have led to long-distance
comparison not being taken seriously.

>Admittedly, I don't have the time to keep up with the archaelogical journals
>and have to take my information from popular media, but isn't it the case that
>solid evidence for long-term human presence in the Americas is growing?  That
>is, is their timeline long enough at this point?  And what route(s) do they
>propose for the migrations?

	The migrations would all be through Alaska and going southward
from there, but the populations of origin may have been different.