Hallo!

On Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:23:57 -0500, Basilius wrote:

> On Tue, 8 Dec 2009 23:25:48 +0100, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> 
> >Indeed, the whole
> >thing is just an *idea* of which I know that it is not the definite
> >answer.  If it was, it would be a major breakthrough in Indo-European
> >historical linguistics, and my name mentioned in every handbook of this
> >field to be written in the future.  I frankly don't expect to attain
> >that fame anytime in my life.
> 
> Oh, no :)
> 
> You don't know the academic community of today. If your publication is ever
> noticed (which is not warranted at all), then you're in trouble. People will
> blame you for not using their favorite transcriptions; for quoting the forms
> in native orthographies - and for failing to do so; for calling a dialect
> what their former roommate says is a separate language; for quoting from
> wrong sources or wrong editions of right sources; for not using some voguish
> jargon and not referring to very important works on barely relatable
> subjects, etc. etc. Also, they'll write whole articles explaining how really
> dubious are examples which you, actually, did mark as dubious. It will be
> real success if a couple people condescend to admit that despite being so
> messy and inaccurate your paper includes one or two ideas that may turn out
> to be not completely insane and even perhaps worth consideration, although
> it's clear that everything must be restated to fit better some other
> hypothesis or a particular theoretical framework (and thus made really messy
> and insane). And all that even without knowing that in the past you've been
> caught... conlanging(!)
> 
> These days, one must have real courage to propose anything new about PIE :)

I have heard about such matters, though I haven't experienced them
myself, not being an academic linguist.  But I have felt for quite a
while that academic linguistics is not for me.  It only begins with
most linguists today not as much exploring *languages* as theroizing
about grammar theories which are actually little more than theories
of English that catastropically break down when applied to "exotic"
languages (heck, some of them cannot even deal with such common
features as noun cases!).

And of course, when you bring any kind of long-range relationship
hypothesis into play, you are immediately branded a crackpot, not only
by the majority who are (justifiably) sceptical about such matters, but
also by other long-range comparativists who will insist that you either
compare the wrong families, or use improper methodology, or whatever.

I also have seen a lot of academic inertia.  Once I found PIE voiceless
aspirates in a handbook of the history of German written in 2008(!),
need I tell you that that handbook did not even mention laryngeals in
passing?

Things like that were the reason why I quickly abandoned the idea of
trying to enter linguistics after my career in computer sceience had
collapsed in 1999.  Historical linguistics is interesting, but I was
repelled by the abuse that is common in that field.

> >> This is remarkably similar to Illich-Svitych's reconstruction, and the 
> >> more 
> >> elaborated version by Aaron Dolgopolsky.
> >
> >I don't know those reconstructions well, as most of the stuff they
> >wrote is in Russian and has never been translated, and I don't master
> >that language. 
> 
> A very concise version of Dolgopolsky's reconstruction can be found here:
> http://www.nostratic.ru/books/(94)foreword.pdf 
> (Sorry for referring to a PDF file of terrible quality: the fonts are made a
> mess of; however, more-less everything can be understood from the context.)

I have seen worse PDFs!

> Also, check out the rest of sources uploaded here: 
> http://www.nostratic.ru/index.php?page=books 
> (What isn't marked "[Russian]" is mostly in English.)

Yes, I know that site, and regularly visit it to look whether they have
some interesting new stuff.  I hope that that inaccessible paper by Uwe
Seefloth about Uralic and Eskimo personal endings will eventually end
up there.

> But the paper devoted specifically to PIE, including the origin of Ablaut,
> is indeed in Russian.

There is lots of potentially interesting linguistic literature that is
not available in English.  The standard reconstruction of Proto-Uralic
is written in Finnish - nobody translates it because "all Uralicists
know Finnish anyway" and there is thus no need for a translation.  Most
literature on Caucasian languages is written in Russian, and much of
what is not written in Russian is written in Georgian.  And so forth.

> >> Why not just assume that w and j were deleted before another sonorant? 
> >> That 
> >> is, that all the w's and j's in contact with other sonorants (mostly on
> >> morpheme boundaries) are produced by schwa-deletion?
> >
> >I tried, but it doesn't work.  One would expect *CeR~*CiR and *CeR~*CuR
> >ablaut pairs resulting from that, but they simply do not occur.
> 
> That's correct, some additional process is needed to eliminate narrow vowels
> before resonants - perhaps, a deeper reduction in this position? Also, it
> might turn out more interesting to look at the combinations -rw- and -lw-
> (perhaps also -nw-). It seems suspiciously common that they look like parts
> of further unanalizable stems in nouns; and in verbs they could be mangled
> by analogical processes leading to reinterpreting the roots as CReu-, or the
> -u- as part of the present-stem suffix -(n)eu-, or somesuch. 

I haven't yet looked deeper into that matter, but it seems that such
roots are especially susceptible to Schwebeablaut.

> >On Wed, 9 Dec 2009 17:43:54 +0000, David McCann wrote:
> >
> >> On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 23:25 +0100, J�rg Rhiemeier wrote:
> [...]
> >> I think I shall stop here. It's not really glossopeia, and neither of us
> >> stands a snowball's chance in hell of convincing the other.
> >
> >Yes.  Let's end this fruitless debate here.
> 
> It is indeed very encouraging to see how people here don't give flamewars
> any chance to start :)

I have better things to do than waste my creative energy on flamewars.
This discussion between David and me wasn't really getting anywhere; I
had presented what in my opinion was kryptonite for his theory, and I
decided that it is better to agree to disagree than to shell each other 
without moving.

> There seem to be, however, various aspects of this discussion that do have
> some relation to conlanging. For example, IMHO it is difficult to discuss
> diachronic conlanging without some analysis of natlang precedents, i. e.
> real comparative studies with all their problems and unsettled issues. 

Indeed.  Real world historical linguistics is a treasure trove to
explore by diachronic conlangers; you can get lots of inspiration for
conlang families from the study of the evolution of natlang families.

Also, my interest in the prehistory of Indo-European and in other
languages of prehistoric Europe is connected with my conlanging
interests.  I do the research I do on these matters in part in order
to find stuff I could work into Albic and perhaps also other projects
for the League of Lost Languages.  It was my conlanging which made me
sensitive for those matters; before I started ten years ago with what
eventually would become Albic, I wasn't very interested in prehistoric
languages.

> Also, this thread started from discussing Edgard's project which seems to be
> both a conlang and a serious experiment in modelling a real-life diachronic
> scenario. And I believe that conlangs modelling the emergence of
> particularly tricky systems found in natlangs, like PIE Ablaut or Semitic
> apophony, might in fact turn out a very useful thing. Indeed, arriving at a
> plausible imitation of diachronic scenarios leading to such sophisticated
> systems as e. g. Vedic would require a lot of experimantation, and that's
> exactly what professional comparativists cannot do in public (as it seems).

Sure.  How does one know what goes in a naturalistic conlang other
than knowing what goes in a natlang?  However, few historical linguists
would consider conlangs useful, though a common method to point out
that a particular reconstruction was wrong is to trace what would have
resulted from the criticized form and to show that it does not yield
the observed reault - which could be called "diachronic micro-
conlanging".  And one textbook (_Indo-European Language and Culture_
by Benjamin W. Fortson IV, a very recommendable volume anyway)
indeed contains an exercise in which the student is asked to make a
conlang and describe it as if it was a new discovery!

But unfortunately, "conlang" a cuss-word for many linguists, as much
as "horoscope" is to astronomers ;)  If a linguistics encyclopedia
mentions the term "artificial language" or "constructed language"
at all, it usually has the phrase "for international communication"
or something equivalent in the first sentence of the article.

> A conlanger is perhaps in a better position, and if the product is not
> presented as precisely a reconstruction, it might be still an illuminating
> reading, and can expect a much more constructive feedback from fellow
> conlangers.

Exactly!  While my Old Albic with its prehistory is meant to represent
an ancient European language, I would not call it a "reconstruction";
it is way to speculative and fanciful for that.  I rather call it a
"re-creation" - not something that *was*, but something that *could
have been*.

> That is, it is one thing when somebody tries to teach people what the
> reflexes of laryngeals in Sanskrit are according to their favorite version
> of laryngeal theory, and something completely different when someone comes
> and says "Hey guys I've come across a crazy idea about how I can get all the
> alternations and accent shifts found in Sanskrit in just five steps only it
> requires doing some weird things to laryngeals tell me if you think it's
> crazy indeed" (etc.).
> 
> Maybe, we could even announce some sort of diachronic conlanging award for
> such projects...

Diachronic linguistics in my view should be more open to experiments.
I think the best way to find out what has happened in the prehistory
of a language is to invent various sets of sound changes and try out
whether they give the attested results or not.  It is not only that
diachronic conlangers can learn from historical linguists, but also
the other way!

... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html