Arden Chatfield
Posts: 6657 Joined: Jan. 2006
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Quote (Reluctant Cannibal @ April 24 2007,01:57) | Quote (Arden Chatfield @ April 23 2007,22:47) | Quote | What's your take on Merritt Ruhlen and the Proto-world hypothesis? |
Do you want my polite answer or my tactless answer? ;) |
Let's have the tactless answer -- it's bound to be more entertaining. I think I know what it's going to be ... |
short tactless answer: Ruhlen is a bonehead and a disgrace as a linguist.
short more polite answer: the bottomline problem with Ruhlen's extremely lax methodology is that it's unfalsifiable. His methodology can 'prove' relatedness between ANY two languages or language families. Therefore's it's vacuous.
This was vividly demonstrated in print in a review of Joseph Greenberg's (Ruhlen's mentor and big influence) Language in the Americas, where reviewer Lyle Campbell demonstrated that using JG's methodology, he (LC) could just as easily 'prove' that Nahuatl and Finnish are related (something JG did NOT claim). In a textbook example of Missing The Point, JG replied "of course Nahuatl and Finnish aren't related, if they were I would have noticed it". Erm, okay...
Another little problem with Ruhlen's work is that he lacks expertise in any of the language families he discusses, and seems not to consult with people who *are* experts, so he ends up with countless misinterpretations of the basic data. At that point, the garbage-in, garbage-out principle takes over.
My personal hunch is that at around 8,000-10,000 years (2,000 years before FTK thinks the world was created), it becomes impossible to demonstrate language relatedness as opposed to diffusion or simple coincidence. It's possible that someday someone will prove language relatedness at a deeper level than that, but I haven't seen it yet. Of course a fundamental problem is that it's extremely difficult to assign ages for the world's older language families with any great confidence.
-------------- "Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus
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