In response to #125:
About Philology - I agree Bodhi that it could potentially be useful. I say 'could potentially' because of this:
Philology in general appears to identify similarities in languages and use some common sense in tracing out the shortest and most sensible route in which language transformations happened. Which is all good and well, but the problem is that in history things don't always happen either in the shortest or most sensible manner. So we don't know that the languages categorised as IE today evolved to reach their present forms in the manner that indological philologers have supposed (that is, that they underwent linguistic transformations in the order they propose nor even covered all intermediate transformations they suggest. As an analogy, imagine a documentary showing an ancient mammal morphing into another living in the present: not all intermediary forms need necessarily have existed nor even have been viable. A few could have, whereas others might have been unnecessary to the process of evolution. But even this analogy does not apply, because at least we have evidence of some mammalian ancestors, whereas there is none of PIE). More often than not, history is rather surprising, and there could have been roundabout events that we have no idea of - either because it was from a time before the written record or no records of such events have survived or been found - which resulted in the linguistic similarities that we see today. History, like the people who make it, bespeaks of many inexplicable events and motivations that we can't begin to guess at if we don't have any tangible communications preserved from those times to go by.
Where there are significant historical records remaining, we can use common sense and deduction to fill in the missing gaps - and so too, when we have a starting point, some middle points and an end point. Linguists can then approximate what linguistic transformations occurred and how they effected the changes we see. In such cases, there'd be the possibility that the theories and interpolations may be correct.
But with IE, the apparent gap representing the unknown makes up nearly the whole of the problem: we have neither the origins nor the progression - we only have the final result. That is, (1) we do not know what the initial situation(s) were that led to today's similarities between certain languages grouped as IE, (2) nor do we factually know what transformations from that point onwards actually took place and how they were applied to produce those similarities. Linguists have explained both with theoretical models - in fact, they've only come up with one major widely-accepted theoretical model which, most curiously of all, has the least external evidence to show in support of it. They are not willing to contemplate other ones, because PIE and IE have become 'gawd's-own truth'.
Such as it is, their theory explains only the linguistic observations (and there are even exceptions in the extent of the coverage thereof) and nothing else. Next to that, they keep changing their linguistic rules to fit with the trends in IE thought/fantasy of the times:
http://docs.google.com/View?docID=ajhwbk..._620hs8zfc
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I challenge anyone, any IEL expert or believer in PIEL to read aloud and create audio versions of the sample IEL text (many versions) of Schleicher's fable. It is about a goat, yes, goat referred to on an indology research list in excited terms. So much for IEL as evidence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher%27s_fable<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
And here's what's at that wackypedia link mentioned above. Note how the original PIE reconstruction is quite close to Samskritam and how PIE has progressively changed to become rather like the non-existent, unrealistic intermediary-entities in a morphing simulation.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Schleicher's fable</b> is a reconstructed text in Proto-Indo-European (PIE), published by August Schleicher in 1868. Schleicher was <b>the first scholar to compose a text in PIE</b>. The fable is entitled Avis akvasas ka ("The Sheep and the Horses"). Schleicher's reconstruction assumed that the o/e vocalism was secondary, and his PIE is much more closely based on Sanskrit than modern reconstructions.
Original text:
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Avis, jasmin varnÄ na Ä ast, dadarka akvams, tam, vÄgham garum vaghantam, tam, bhÄram magham, tam manum Äku bharantam. Avis akvabhjams Ä vavakat; kard aghnutai mai vidanti manum akvams agantam. AkvÄsas Ä vavakant: krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvant-svas: manus patis varnÄm avisÄms karnauti svabhjam gharmam vastram avibhjams ka varnÄ na asti. Tat kukruvants avis agram Ä bhugat.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
A second version of the same tale was composed by Hermann Hirt in 1939.<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Owis ekâwÅses-kÊ·e owis, jesmin wÑlÉnÄ ne Äst, dedorkâe ekâwons, tom, woghom gÊ·Ñrum weghontmÌ¥, tom, bhorom megam, tom, ghâÑmonmÌ¥ Åkâu bherontmÌ¥. owis ekâwomos ewÑwekÊ·et: kâÄrd aghnutai moi widontei ghâÑmonmÌ¥. ekâwons agâontmo . ekâwÅses ewÑwekÊ·ont: klâudhi, owei!, kâÄrd aghnutai vidontmos: ghâÑmo, potis, wÑlÉnÄm owjôm kÊ·rÌ¥neuti sebhoi ghÊ·ermom westrom; owimos-kÊ·e wÑlÉnÄ ne esti. Tod kâekâruwos owis agârom ebhuget.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
A third version was published by Winfred Lehmann and Ladislav Zgusta in 1979[1]:<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->[Gwrei] owis, kwesyo wlhna ne est, ekwons espeket, oinom ghe gwrum woghom weghontm, oinomkwe megam bhorom, oinomkwe ghmenm oku bherontm. Owis nu ekwobh(y)os ewewkwet: Ker aghnutoi moi ekwons agontm nerm widntei. Ekwos tu ewewkwont: Kludhi, owei, ker aghnutoi nsmei widntbh(y)os: ner, potis, owiom r wlhnam sebhi gwhermom westrom kwrneuti. Neghi owiom wlhna esti. Tod kekluwos owis agrom ebhuget.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
A fourth version appears in the EIEC (1997:501).
English translation:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->[On a hill,] a sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses". The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool". Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Note that in the modernized version of "The Sheep and the Horses", a spelling convention is used which is different from the one introduced in the Proto-Indo-European language article: h and w are not superscripted to indicate aspiration and labialization. Also most laryngeals are omitted, and where given, the different laryngeals are not distinguished. <b>The original version of "The Sheep and the Horses" uses Schleicher's spelling, which is influenced by Sanskrit</b>, but uses j for y.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->Note how PIE - the language which IE studies and indologicals swear by - has changed radically. And it can keep changing forever: no one will ever find a fragment of parchment or a stone slab written in PIE, so they are free to change it as they wish without anyone being the wiser for it.
The last versions are like a ridiculous weighted average that makes no sense - and IMO another proof of why PIE is a figment of their evolving imagination and is unlikely to have ever existed (imagine taking a straightforward weighted average of all mammals to derive the appearance of the earliest mammalian ancestor - and in doing so, ignoring complex evolutionary events like possible bottlenecks and interspecies-competition along the way merely because we haven't yet discovered they happened).
The first one is manageable, at least. But can you imagine how any allegedly sensible (or even looney) people could have invented, let alone spoken, such languages as the subsequent reconstructions/guesses are? Such reconstructed PIEs are as likely to have existed as the original IE supermen who are imagined to have spoken them. Oh wait, the IE supermen population does exist today: the indologists. They ought to learn to converse in this language they have constructed, instead of inflicting the nonsense on others.
But based on the PIE reconstructions above, I suspect that IE linguists are just joking around and trying to see how gullible people are: how much nonsense people would be willing to put up with when it's called 'science'.
Linguistics could potentially be useful in filling in missing pieces of a historical record we largely know the main flow of. But it shouldn't be used as it is at present: creating a towering story based on a flimsy foundation. That is, for inventing an entire history using silent/non-indicative bits of data that can actually be construed in a myriad of ways (though it will necessarily only have one real explanation - which we may never discover). See the excerpts Rajesh_g posted in #125 of the Unmasking AIT thread and this excerpt from Lincoln (post 87):
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->All of these exercises in scholarship (=myth+footnotes) suffer from the same problem. They attempt to reach far back into prehistory that <b>no textual sources are available to control the inquiry</b>, but where archaeology offers a plethora of data. IN practice, all the remains found throughout Eurasia for a period of several millennia can be constituted as evidence from which to craft the final narrative, but it is often the researchers' desires that determine their principles of selection. When neither the data nor the criticism of one's colleagues inhibits desire-driven invention, the situation is ripe for scholarship as myth.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->And that is exactly what philology is today - in IE Studies certainly, but possibly in other areas of linguistics too.
I think the field of linguistics is itself a political tool that certain people will (and do) find useful to rewrite history with. But we don't want politics, we want facts.
Not even sure that linguistics can ever be used for unmotivated scholarship, I think it is such a loose methodology - when there's no large body of historic data to keep speculations bounded - that one can use it to find/create support for many points of view. That's not what we're looking for: not just any means to an end.
Until we get more information, people should be willing to say that they simply don't know either what happened or how things happened. And also admit we may never know (which is more difficult and certainly more annoying). IE linguists and indologicals won't admit these things of course, because it concerns the very field they're in.
About Philology - I agree Bodhi that it could potentially be useful. I say 'could potentially' because of this:
Philology in general appears to identify similarities in languages and use some common sense in tracing out the shortest and most sensible route in which language transformations happened. Which is all good and well, but the problem is that in history things don't always happen either in the shortest or most sensible manner. So we don't know that the languages categorised as IE today evolved to reach their present forms in the manner that indological philologers have supposed (that is, that they underwent linguistic transformations in the order they propose nor even covered all intermediate transformations they suggest. As an analogy, imagine a documentary showing an ancient mammal morphing into another living in the present: not all intermediary forms need necessarily have existed nor even have been viable. A few could have, whereas others might have been unnecessary to the process of evolution. But even this analogy does not apply, because at least we have evidence of some mammalian ancestors, whereas there is none of PIE). More often than not, history is rather surprising, and there could have been roundabout events that we have no idea of - either because it was from a time before the written record or no records of such events have survived or been found - which resulted in the linguistic similarities that we see today. History, like the people who make it, bespeaks of many inexplicable events and motivations that we can't begin to guess at if we don't have any tangible communications preserved from those times to go by.
Where there are significant historical records remaining, we can use common sense and deduction to fill in the missing gaps - and so too, when we have a starting point, some middle points and an end point. Linguists can then approximate what linguistic transformations occurred and how they effected the changes we see. In such cases, there'd be the possibility that the theories and interpolations may be correct.
But with IE, the apparent gap representing the unknown makes up nearly the whole of the problem: we have neither the origins nor the progression - we only have the final result. That is, (1) we do not know what the initial situation(s) were that led to today's similarities between certain languages grouped as IE, (2) nor do we factually know what transformations from that point onwards actually took place and how they were applied to produce those similarities. Linguists have explained both with theoretical models - in fact, they've only come up with one major widely-accepted theoretical model which, most curiously of all, has the least external evidence to show in support of it. They are not willing to contemplate other ones, because PIE and IE have become 'gawd's-own truth'.
Such as it is, their theory explains only the linguistic observations (and there are even exceptions in the extent of the coverage thereof) and nothing else. Next to that, they keep changing their linguistic rules to fit with the trends in IE thought/fantasy of the times:
http://docs.google.com/View?docID=ajhwbk..._620hs8zfc
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I challenge anyone, any IEL expert or believer in PIEL to read aloud and create audio versions of the sample IEL text (many versions) of Schleicher's fable. It is about a goat, yes, goat referred to on an indology research list in excited terms. So much for IEL as evidence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher%27s_fable<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
And here's what's at that wackypedia link mentioned above. Note how the original PIE reconstruction is quite close to Samskritam and how PIE has progressively changed to become rather like the non-existent, unrealistic intermediary-entities in a morphing simulation.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Schleicher's fable</b> is a reconstructed text in Proto-Indo-European (PIE), published by August Schleicher in 1868. Schleicher was <b>the first scholar to compose a text in PIE</b>. The fable is entitled Avis akvasas ka ("The Sheep and the Horses"). Schleicher's reconstruction assumed that the o/e vocalism was secondary, and his PIE is much more closely based on Sanskrit than modern reconstructions.
Original text:
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Avis, jasmin varnÄ na Ä ast, dadarka akvams, tam, vÄgham garum vaghantam, tam, bhÄram magham, tam manum Äku bharantam. Avis akvabhjams Ä vavakat; kard aghnutai mai vidanti manum akvams agantam. AkvÄsas Ä vavakant: krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvant-svas: manus patis varnÄm avisÄms karnauti svabhjam gharmam vastram avibhjams ka varnÄ na asti. Tat kukruvants avis agram Ä bhugat.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
A second version of the same tale was composed by Hermann Hirt in 1939.<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Owis ekâwÅses-kÊ·e owis, jesmin wÑlÉnÄ ne Äst, dedorkâe ekâwons, tom, woghom gÊ·Ñrum weghontmÌ¥, tom, bhorom megam, tom, ghâÑmonmÌ¥ Åkâu bherontmÌ¥. owis ekâwomos ewÑwekÊ·et: kâÄrd aghnutai moi widontei ghâÑmonmÌ¥. ekâwons agâontmo . ekâwÅses ewÑwekÊ·ont: klâudhi, owei!, kâÄrd aghnutai vidontmos: ghâÑmo, potis, wÑlÉnÄm owjôm kÊ·rÌ¥neuti sebhoi ghÊ·ermom westrom; owimos-kÊ·e wÑlÉnÄ ne esti. Tod kâekâruwos owis agârom ebhuget.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
A third version was published by Winfred Lehmann and Ladislav Zgusta in 1979[1]:<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->[Gwrei] owis, kwesyo wlhna ne est, ekwons espeket, oinom ghe gwrum woghom weghontm, oinomkwe megam bhorom, oinomkwe ghmenm oku bherontm. Owis nu ekwobh(y)os ewewkwet: Ker aghnutoi moi ekwons agontm nerm widntei. Ekwos tu ewewkwont: Kludhi, owei, ker aghnutoi nsmei widntbh(y)os: ner, potis, owiom r wlhnam sebhi gwhermom westrom kwrneuti. Neghi owiom wlhna esti. Tod kekluwos owis agrom ebhuget.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
A fourth version appears in the EIEC (1997:501).
English translation:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->[On a hill,] a sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses". The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool". Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Note that in the modernized version of "The Sheep and the Horses", a spelling convention is used which is different from the one introduced in the Proto-Indo-European language article: h and w are not superscripted to indicate aspiration and labialization. Also most laryngeals are omitted, and where given, the different laryngeals are not distinguished. <b>The original version of "The Sheep and the Horses" uses Schleicher's spelling, which is influenced by Sanskrit</b>, but uses j for y.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->Note how PIE - the language which IE studies and indologicals swear by - has changed radically. And it can keep changing forever: no one will ever find a fragment of parchment or a stone slab written in PIE, so they are free to change it as they wish without anyone being the wiser for it.
The last versions are like a ridiculous weighted average that makes no sense - and IMO another proof of why PIE is a figment of their evolving imagination and is unlikely to have ever existed (imagine taking a straightforward weighted average of all mammals to derive the appearance of the earliest mammalian ancestor - and in doing so, ignoring complex evolutionary events like possible bottlenecks and interspecies-competition along the way merely because we haven't yet discovered they happened).
The first one is manageable, at least. But can you imagine how any allegedly sensible (or even looney) people could have invented, let alone spoken, such languages as the subsequent reconstructions/guesses are? Such reconstructed PIEs are as likely to have existed as the original IE supermen who are imagined to have spoken them. Oh wait, the IE supermen population does exist today: the indologists. They ought to learn to converse in this language they have constructed, instead of inflicting the nonsense on others.
But based on the PIE reconstructions above, I suspect that IE linguists are just joking around and trying to see how gullible people are: how much nonsense people would be willing to put up with when it's called 'science'.
Linguistics could potentially be useful in filling in missing pieces of a historical record we largely know the main flow of. But it shouldn't be used as it is at present: creating a towering story based on a flimsy foundation. That is, for inventing an entire history using silent/non-indicative bits of data that can actually be construed in a myriad of ways (though it will necessarily only have one real explanation - which we may never discover). See the excerpts Rajesh_g posted in #125 of the Unmasking AIT thread and this excerpt from Lincoln (post 87):
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->All of these exercises in scholarship (=myth+footnotes) suffer from the same problem. They attempt to reach far back into prehistory that <b>no textual sources are available to control the inquiry</b>, but where archaeology offers a plethora of data. IN practice, all the remains found throughout Eurasia for a period of several millennia can be constituted as evidence from which to craft the final narrative, but it is often the researchers' desires that determine their principles of selection. When neither the data nor the criticism of one's colleagues inhibits desire-driven invention, the situation is ripe for scholarship as myth.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->And that is exactly what philology is today - in IE Studies certainly, but possibly in other areas of linguistics too.
I think the field of linguistics is itself a political tool that certain people will (and do) find useful to rewrite history with. But we don't want politics, we want facts.
Not even sure that linguistics can ever be used for unmotivated scholarship, I think it is such a loose methodology - when there's no large body of historic data to keep speculations bounded - that one can use it to find/create support for many points of view. That's not what we're looking for: not just any means to an end.
Until we get more information, people should be willing to say that they simply don't know either what happened or how things happened. And also admit we may never know (which is more difficult and certainly more annoying). IE linguists and indologicals won't admit these things of course, because it concerns the very field they're in.