From: "H.M.Hubey" Subject: Re: Caucasoid Turks/Bulgars Date: 04 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT Message-ID: <36B960DA.F14BC06F@montclair.edu> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <369E3BE1.5C45@sbu.ac.uk> <77li2j$qi0$1@whisper.globalserve.net> <369F52FE.2B6@sbu.ac.uk> <77rc86$auj$1@brokaw.wa.com> <36A444B3.F3B70F1C@alum.mit.edu.-> <7827sb$269$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36A52D70.9E372DD2@alum.mit.edu.-> <36A556AB.9927BD29@montclair.edu> <36a63533.58309714@news.yale.edu> <7866ud$i9m$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36cdb21e.883120019@news.wxs.nl> <36A7FCC8.79790A6B@earthlink.net> <36d77e23.1000882888@news.wxs.nl> <36a8d455.81661202@news.yale.edu> <78pl3c$84o@cpca3.uea.ac.uk> <36b0dc2f.3434839@news.yale.edu> <78v30o$vl6@cpca3.uea.ac.uk> <36b34d7c.60430113@news.yale.edu> <794e84$4iq@cpca3.uea.ac.uk> <36b61035.22226830@news.yale.edu> <797ik4$jo4@cpca3.uea.ac.uk> <36B7C8ED.F19FB4AC@earthlink.net> <36B7D5D1.283A0970@montclair.edu> <36B7DFE3.3F38CE52@earthlink.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: abuse@rcn.com X-Trace: 8/EHN3sztdF6t2q4ecvl758xmUcaXj7GDgdMCczCIZs= Organization: Montclair State University Mime-Version: 1.0 Reply-To: hubeyh@montclair.edu NNTP-Posting-Date: 4 Feb 1999 08:52:07 GMT Newsgroups: sci.archaeology,sci.anthropology,sci.lang Robert wrote: > > H.M.Hubey wrote: > > > I was referring to the material culture of said component. The area > from which this group is thought to have been derived, its earliest > manifestations around the 2nd century B.C.E., was populated by > Indo-Europeans. This stuff is all there by assertion. Nobody can know what they spoke. Historical linguistics is 5% science, 70% politics, and 15% bullshit. That is why the Great Aryan racism that buried the world in blood only 50 years ago was led by linguists like Childe. There are historical linguists with integrity obviously, but there does not seem to be too many of them. And they are squashed by the great masses who like things all confused because it allows them to gang up and cover their ignorance by synchronized hollering. Most of the historical linguists don't even have the slightest idea how science is done. They try to give the impression that something no mere mortal can understand is being done by them, but the reason why they never try to quantify, or use statistical, or probabilistic techniques used in all the social sciences like psychology, sociology, economics is because they don't know how and they don't want to put to test their pet assertions. Even linguists know that what they do is "heuristics". See J. Nichols' article "The comparative method as a heuristic." IT's mostly fighting over prestige of whose ancestors created civilization. It is just not so openly racist as in the past. > Significant, considering Dobrev does stress the Europoidity of the > proto-Bulgars as a counter-argument to the "mongoloid" Turkic > hypothesis. However, I confess your information is complete news to me. There is book on Greeks and Scythians in Southern Russia, and even that book does not forget to mention that long before Turks are supposed to be there, there are pictures and carvings of people which are strongly Mongoloid. IT was and has been known for a long time. That is why the Scythians were generally thought to be Mongols by the common folk. Right about here all the linguists who want to put Turks in Asia because of race, will holler loudly that race does not equal language. The fact is that none of those digs by archaeologists can ever pin any language on any of what they find. The simple rule they follow is that they take whoever has been near there but they will deny all this and claim that what they are doing is as scientific as Nobel class physics. That is why almost every linguistics list is moderated (read that as 'censored'). For one thing that keeps nonlinguists at bay. For another, they can stop nationalistic and chauvinistic fights when they start. Since there are no objective criteria, they can fight for the next 500 years. Almost all of them prefer to have things hazily defined and kept in dense fog. That is like businessmen who enter into a business without signing contracts; they intend to defraud each other. The reason why most of them object to any kind of quantification is because if no such objective measures exist they can use the standard modus operandi of politicians "plausible denial". As long as they keep going without being caught telling nontruths they prefer to have some flexibility in the fights. But like my students (the poor students) who ask me to drop the test with lowest grade because they think their averages will go up, the fact that there is so much flexibility means that everyone avails themselves of the same fogginess. My students don't realize that their grades go up slightly if I drop their lowest grades, but the grades of the better students go up even more, so the poor students get even poorer relative grades. > I thought a Siberian/Altaic genesis for Turkic peoples was taken for > granted. Apparently even this isn't universally embraced. Then again, > aren't you the one who finds the theory offered by a Turkish scholar > that Sumerian and Turkic are related credible? Perhaps I'm confusing you You must be a linguist to reason like this :-) The guy has a set of words with meanings from published data in scholarly journals by linguists. And no, he does not say that Turkic is related to Sumerian. > with someone else. Unless I'm really behind the curve on this one (after > all, I'm no scholar), this is a fringe theory, isn't it? Sort of like Aha. Another linguist. There's a logical fallacy called "argument from authority". This is one of the favorite reasoning methods of historical linguists. The reason they do this is because they have no objective measure of whatever they do. That is because they don't know how to do it and they will not take the time out to learn basic statistics or probability theory. Furthermore, because there is no objective criteria, they find it necessary to make grand claims for their little field, and then accuse each other of cheating and incompetence. This way, they can try to keep everyone else off their field, and like the medieval craftsmen, they try to keep it sort of like "black magic". As Arthur Clarke said "Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic". So since they think that physics, math, engineering, biology, genetics is all magic, they can do the same thing by turning what they do into black magic and keep everyone either out, or cowed. The thing they hate most, like all ignorant and superstitious peoples, all over the world, is the person who they cannot bluff. They love undergradutes who are meek and mild, that they can browbeat and threaten into submission. > L.A. Waddell's ideas once that Sumerian was the original Indo-European > language in a more primitive agglutinative stage. > > Robert -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh@montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=