Yes, but you did cite Forster, P., Polzin,T. and Röhl, A. (2006), as the
'only one peer-reviewed article arguing, with qualifications, for an earlier
arrival of Germanic to England' - but it is published in a volume co-edited
by the principal author, and published by his own institute!
John Briggs
Stephen Oppenheimer wrote:
> What puzzles me about this indignant secondary thread on "P Forster &
> A Thot," (should be Toth), is its relevance. I am familiar with that
> paper and the storm of linguistic protest it engendered, but it's not the
> one I cited and is not relevant to the issue of early English. The Forster
> paper I cited was:
> Forster, P., Polzin,T. and Röhl, A. (2006),‘Evolution of English basic
> vocabulary within the network of Germanic languages’, in Peter Forster
> and Colin Renfrew (eds), Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of
> Languages, McDonald Institute Monograph Series (Cambridge: McDonald
> Institute for Archaeological Research), pp. 131–7.).
>
> Is this thread a confusion or just "critique by repute"? I recall that
> Darwin's bulldog Huxley had some choice words to say on Sam
> Wilberforce's unconventional use of ridicule in scientific discourse.
> Incidentally, Keith Briggs at least makes his own critique (of
> Forster &
> Toth) here rather than reporting other people's.
>
> If the real problem is that the above paper is not as available as the
> Forster & Toth PNAS one, I can easily remedy that by sending a pdf of
> Forster, P., Polzin,T. and Röhl, A. (2006) to anyone who is
> interested -
> which may be unlikely. Then it would be possible to do the more
> appropriate thing and critique that.
>
> Stephen Oppenheimer
>
> Keith Briggs wrote:
>
>> Stephen Oppenheimer wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> The recently published estimates of time-depth in I-E come not from
>>> linguists, but primarily from mathematicians. The raw data were
>>> respectively obtained with permission from Don Ringe's and Isidore
>>> Dyen's I-E cognate sets, but neither of these linguists had their
>>> names as co-authors on the papers (Gray, Russell and Atkinson,
>>> Quentin (2003), ‘Language-tree divergence times support the
>>> Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin’, Nature, 426: 435–9. and
>>> Atkinson, Q., Nicholls, G.,Welch, D. and Gray, R. (2005), ‘From
>>> words to dates:Water into wine, mathemagic or phylogenetic
>>> inference?’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 103(2):
>>> 193–219.).
>>> I happen to find their methods and results rather convincing;
>>>
>>>
>>
>> As a mathematician with experience in the area of phylogenetic tree
>> reconstruction, I happen to find their methods and results
>> completely unconvincing. The tree reconstruction methods even in
>> the more quantifiable area of DNA analysis are full of uncertainties
>> as to what the correct model should be, and all practical methods
>> are heuristic.
>>
>> Having said that, I very much support research in this area and
>> would like to see better methods developed. But we have a long way
>> to go yet.
>>
>> Here are some specific objections to P Forster & A Thot, Toward a
>> phylogenetic chronology of ancient Gaulish, Celtic, and
>> Indo-European. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 100:9079-9084 (2003),
>> available at
>> http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=166441&rendertype=abstract.
>>
>> 0. What is the definition of "cognate" being used? It seems to be
>> done by visual similarity of the written forms of words - obviously
>> a bad procedure.
>>
>> 1. The Latin and Greek "god" words should not be equated
>>
>> 2. Most of the Gaulish forms occur once (or very few times) only,
>> and mostly on pottery graffiti, where the interpretation is unclear.
>> The method gives too much weight to this sparse and noisy data.
>>
>> 3. There is an arbitrariness in the translations. For example,
>> under ALLOS one could have put Latin alias, and then we would
>> suddenly have a match. The concepts "second"="following" and
>> "other" overlap.
>>
>> 4. Why should primus and protos be counted as a match, but not
>> cyntaf? Although the latter Welsh word has a different root, it
>> shares a common superlative ending (the clue being the -m- in Latin
>> and the -f in Welsh). The method hides the really interesting
>> information, just because it is not obvious at first. Similarly
>> filia:hija is a hidden relationship, not a mismatch.
>>
>> 5. Welsh "mae e wedi gwneud" is a modern colloquial periphrasis for
>> "he has done", of not much interest for understanding historical
>> relationships (it means literally something like "there is he after
>> doing"). Welsh also has simple past forms (aorist and imperfect)
>> which it would have been better to use here.
>>
>> 6. In the case of "has made", the translations don't match exactly:
>> fecit can mean he/she/it made, but the Welsh form only "he made".
>>
>> 7. There are many case of borrowing, such as Welsh ffwrn from Latin.
>> These will obscure the true relationship.
>>
>> Keith
John Briggs
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