Discerning Reasonableness -- Part 2

Language began 70,000 or more years ago. We can reconstruct languages with moderate assurance only about one-tenth that far, and most languages much less than that. To the mainstream linguist, Ruhlen’s claim of showing that current languages are all related back through that first one requires that he speculate about 90% of the possible data, nearly all of which is irrecoverable.

To take a geographic analogy, Ruhlen is claiming
All roads lead to Rome, or something like Rome.

The other linguists counter
We can only with great effort trace these roads into the next town, and very occasionally, the next country. Roads do tricky things. Sometimes a freeway dwindles down to a cowpath. Sometimes the cowpaths disappear altogether. Roads take unexpected turns and switchbacks. It is fantasy to assert that all roads lead to Rome.

There is not much way around the fact that the mainstream linguists have a very powerful argument here. A lot of intelligence and effort has gone into tracing languages even short distances in time. Ruhlen’s counterclaim that he is using different techniques, that he is flying over the area in a balloon rather than examining the ground, is somewhat effectively countered with the rejoinder “there’s a lot you can only see from the ground.”

Nonetheless, I think Ruhlen’s theory will eventually prove out. The nature of the arguments used by his opponents fall short of objective scientific inquiry in many cases. There are a few good arguments, two of which are noted above. But the bulk of the arguments actually used are not so rational. When smart people resort often to poor arguments, something is up.

Ruhlen’s mentor, Greenberg, proposed a larger grouping of African languages which was similarly rejected when it first came out. That ridiculed theory is now generally accepted. Greenberg proposed a larger grouping of Native American languages that was rejected when it first came out. There is now some grudging acceptance of it as at least possible. The strongest parts of that argument, the recurrent na, ma, for I, you, and tina, tuna, tana for son, daughter, child, have not been adequately refuted. The argument that such coincidences could be accidental, given so many hundreds of languages, is struck down by the inconvenient fact that it has in fact, not happened elsewhere. Third, Greenberg’s grouping of Eurasiatic, tying together Indo-European, Uralic, Semitic, and other families, is frequently countered by a patently stupid argument. Because the Nostraticists clump several families together as a European-Asian group and Greenberg proposes a slightly different grouping, the theory is dismissed because these linguists with highly similar theories cannot exactly agree what the categories should be though the overlap is great. Next, Greenberg and the Nostraticists made mistakes -- precisely the mistakes that a generalist, overview type of scholar would make.

There is one huge new fact, and it is being ignored. True, it was first published in an obscurer journal – Ruhlen is not published in the better ones – but there is not even any curiosity about the claim. I have myself pointed it out to linguists who have dismissed it with no more than “Oh. Ruhlen. I wouldn’t recommend you pay much attention to that.” The new fact is that Kusunda, a Nepalese language previously categorized with the languages near it, is claimed to actually be an Indo-Pacific language. To those of us far away from the area and controversy, this would seem a small claim. But for Kusunda to be related to the languages on Papua New Guinea is not possible given our current understanding of the movements of people. To be related, those peoples would have had to have been in contact at least 50,000 years ago. That is more than 8 times the current greatest time-depth acknowledged for language connections. It is nearly all the way back to the beginning of languages.

Is Kusunda indeed related to the languages in New Guinea? I have not remotely the training in linguistics to tell. Either side could convince me in fifteen minutes. But I find it damning that there is now curiosity.

Next, I will speculate why Ruhlen attracts such hatred.

Merritt Ruhlen's List

Linguist Merritt Ruhlen declares there are worldwide cognates for a small set of words. This drives most other linguists crazy. Even if it could be granted, they argue, that there were one original language from which all others descend, the time-depth is too great to have any confidence in word similarity. Language changes too quickly, they say, especially languages which are not written down. As writing only goes back 5-6,000 years, and an original language would have to be at least ten times as old, all similarities must be regarded as mere coincidence.

Ruhlen's counterargument is that a small set of words change much more slowly, slowly enough that we can still hear echoes. Other linguists would agree that some basic words change more slowly, but nothing like slowly enough to be useful.

With that as introduction, this is Ruhlen's list of words that he believes have been stable enough that we can find cognates in every language superfamily in the world (though not in every human language). Words in italics are cognates from supposedly unrelated languages. I took liberties with the orthography.

Who? !ku, k(w), kwi, kwi, okoe, kune
What? ma, ma, ma, mi, ma, manu, mina, minha, mana
Two ball, bala, bwar, pala, boula, bula, p'al
Water k"a, nki, engi, akwa, rtsq'a, akwa, oKwa, namaw, okho, akwa
One/finger tok, dike, tak, tik, tok, dik, diki
Arm kani, kono, gana, kang, kone, kan, Xeen, akan, kano
Bend/knee bonggo, bunqe, buka, buku, buku, bungku, buka
Hair sum, somm, toma, tsham, syam, summe
Vagina/vulva buti, butu, put, put, poccu, p'ut'e, put'i, betik, puda, butie
Smell/nose c'u, cona, suna, sun, cuntu, sna, sung, ijung, sunna, cuna
Seize/squeeze kangkam, kama, km, kama, kamu, kem, nggam
Fly (v.) par, pere, pyarr, p'er, para, para, p'hur, apir, paru

Ruhlen would also add Mama and Dada, the words for mom and dad in many languages. Traditionally, this commonality is attributed to the fact that these sounds are the easiest for an infant to say. Kaka, however, is a common word worldwide for uncle, grandfather, older male relative, and the k- sound does not come early for children.

Looking at the list, it's hard not to see it as a slam-dunk case for Dr. Ruhlen. Perhaps so. But with 6,000 languages it could just be that you could find something similar from at least one language in every family for whatever word you wanted.

Discerning Reasonableness -- An introduction

A clever amateur looks at a controversy among professional linguists, and attempts to determine which side is more reasonable, not from knowledge of linguistics, but knowledge of reasoning.

The proto-World controversy in a nutshell: Merritt Ruhlen, following Joseph Greenberg and some Russian linguists called Nostraticists, believes that the extant languages of the world all derive from an original language, and that we can demonstrate enough connections to observe this. Most other linguists believe that the languages may have derived from an original language, but we are unable to know this because the time-depth is too great to observe reliable connections.

The amount of anger generated over this would be surprising unless one had observed such controversies in one’s own field. Ruhlen’s The Origin of Language is scathing and even rude in his complaints against the linguistic mainstream, which he contends will not give him a fair hearing. The linguistic mainstream, for its part, is seldom dispassionate and judicious in its criticism of Greenberg and especially Ruhlen, preferring to scoff dismissively and knock down straw men rather than answer the challenges.

I am completely unequipped to argue with either group on linguistic grounds. However, it is possible to come to tentative conclusions and take sides on the basis of something I do understand: the nature of reasoning and argument. As with discussions of global warming, alternative medicine, pre-war intelligence, and a dozen other subjects we might encounter, how people argue, what they choose for evidence, and how they respond to challenges to their reasoning reveals a great deal that an intelligent layman can use to decide whose theories are more likely to prove true.

Few of us are world-ranked experts in any subject, and none of us are expert in more than a very few. Plate tectonics was rejected and even sneered at early in the 20^th C. Even though Wegener, the originator of the theory, has proved right, I could still not successfully argue with those who thought him wrong. I don’t know their subject in depth. But I can observe the type of argument they made, and estimate whether it was founded on reason and data, or on self-interest and closed-mindedness.

So google up some basic information on the topic, and see if you and I agree which side is making the better arguments.

Top Posts #51-55

Letters From Tom. A college friend who rose in international business discusses what skills go into leadership in high-tech business.  Quite interesting. Someone must have linked this to push the readership this high, and there are unfamiliar commenters. Jan 2010.  We still correspond occasionally.

Merritt Ruhlen's List. Ruhlen is a linguist who believes all languages descend from an original, and faint traces of it can still be discerned. It is controversial and often rejected. Since this was written, there is evidence in both directions: more deep connections between at least some families have been proposed; however, evidence for a less linear family tree for homo sapiens sapiens is also showing up.  Nothing conclusive. I still think his evidence is good. July 2006

Ofen and Often. The "t" dropped out, but is coming back.  The same thing happened to the pronounced "c" in Arctic. Readers seem to want to put these things back in, believing it is more precise. August 2006

The Richmond 12. There is a cult in Richmond, NH which calls itself "traditional Catholic" but is actually Feenyite and not authorised by the Vatican. I go hard after a couple of the commenters who did not read carefully and made assumptions about why I was writing.  I read further on the subject after posting, including reviewing the book Deliver Us:Concerning Victimhood. There is a style common to many cults, at least the Christian ones I am familiar with. August 2009

Today's Sermon. What question is God asking you? August 2015

Obscure Linguistics Vindication

Merritt Ruhlen was my guy.  He not only claimed that all languages sprang eventually from a single initial source, he provided evidence that he said made that the mostly likely reality. He was almost universally reviled a generation ago, and is still disdained, though younger historical linguists are giving him some grudging acknowledgement.  A PhD linguist who was a student of Joseph Greenberg of Stanford, likewise dismissed as terrible. Ruhlen recently died, and I think missed the new tidbit of DNA evidence that speaks in his favor. It is not the first.  Research from other field, increasingly including archaeology and genetics, have vindicated them. Plus other linguists had always sulkily agreed that both were excellent at classification.

I have written about the controversy many times before, if you are interested.  About half of these don't pertain, though.  You will have to skim.

For the moment, the interesting piece is his claim that the Kusunda language was related to Juwoi in the Andaman Islands. They are a thousand miles apart, with lots of mountains and oceans creating barriers. Worse, there are no languages in between them that would suggest a connection, and at the time of the claim, it was believed that these peoples had not been in any contact for 80,000 years. Linguists believe that language relationships cannot be detected beyond 10,000 years, so this was hooted at. (When I was in school anything more than 5000 was considered suspect.  So things change.) Things got a bit better over the years and the time distance dropped to 60,000 years, but still excessive. But new DNA evidence suggests that because one population pushed out another on the way to the islands, the real number is now only 25,000 years. Even that would be a lot, but because one of the main similarities is a pronoun ("He, she, or it" gita versus kiteh), it is looking like less of a stretch, as pronouns are some of the most stable words in families of languages.  Ich in German and ego in Greek are separated by a few thousand years, for example.

Genetics and language relationship are not proofs of each other.  One only needs look at America to see that a lot of genetically diverse people are all speaking English. But it happens often enough that it is the first line of inquiry when there is any question.

More Onomastics

Steve Sailer points out that the young golfers leading at the US Open aften 3 rounds are all "Generation Ǝn," that is, their names all end in that schwa-n sound: Jordan, Jason, Dustin, Brandon. Add in the rhyming Braydon, Jaydon, Graydon, Hayden, Peyton, and even Creighton; plus Justin, Ethan...it goes on forever among guys born in the 80's and beyond. There are girls' names that have that ending, but I think all are ones stolen from the boys, such at Jordan, Jaydon.  Madison is a tweener - the "o" is pronounced ins some versions, not in others. But recently the -a names have dominated among the girls: Sophia, Emma, Isabella, Olivia, Alexa, Michaela, Sarah, Hannah.  In the previous two generations the "-ee" sound was far more popular at the end: Kelly, Tracy, Dorothy, Shelly, Amy, Brittany, and even the -a names would become -ee names in nickname, such as Theresa/Terri, Barbara/Barbie, Rebecca/Becky.

The -Ǝn sound is not a common universal for boys' names, as far as I can tell. In fact, the -ee sound that girls used was a common ending for boys' names until recently: Kelly, Shirley, Leslie, Tracy, Terry, Jackie, Bobby. The -a sound, not so much for boys.  But the -a ending is a feminine ending in many languages in the world, common enough that Merritt Ruhlen and the other linguists who believe we can detect echoes from the original language of humans suggest that -a is one of the language universals that has been there for 50,000 years. Those of you who know foreign languages might reflect on whether that sound is feminine in the ones you know.

So mothers are reverting to so some deep association of -a with girl children that is old-fashioned in about as complete a sense as one can imagine. Why the schwa-n sound for boys comes from I don't know.

1491

I am rereading Charles C. Mann's 1491, liking it even better the second time.  After following the vitriol of the Greenberg/Ruhlen historical linguistics arguments over the last decades; remembering the sneers from my Mesoamerican professor when the first whispers came out of Cactus Hill* in the 1970's; the very nasty things said in the Mead/Freeman controversy; and the heaped calumny on the HBD folks, I am not surprised to read again about refusals to consider pre-Clovis, the condescension toward the High-Counters (and likewise in return), and half a dozen other discussions (Solutrean, Indo-European Urheimat, Yanomami) that seem to be carried on via eye-rolling and insult as primary intellectual offerings, I just have to ask:

Are Anthropologists just bigger jerks than other people? Do they just have an especially hard time considering other points of view?  Did they all go to those kindergartens where they were encouraged to express their unique personalities rather than take turns and share?

Stories:  I took half-a-dozen anthro courses at college.  I liked the professors better than average.  But I now recall only in retrospect how much of course time was devoted to attitude-training and political training.  There are no races, only clines, plus an extended discussion of how white people were actually more like apes** than black people were. Just so you knew. Same professor - a bit ironic, that. The Caribbean Cultures course was very much a colonial exploiters vs. peaceful, complex dark people exercise.  At the time, as a northern boy at college in the suspect South, I rather approved of their taking the time to make darn sure than none of those rural hillbillies left W&M with any ignorant political ideas.

Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of very cool stuff, and the Mesoamerican and linguistics courses carried no hint that I recall of any modern political or social implications - though when I provided one in a discussion of pottery decoration it was warmly received.  But one of the central values of the discipline, I believe, is to understand different-looking people and cultures and try to see them in context.  Other anthropologists seem to not be included.

Perhaps this is only because these are the academic debates I know about.

*I don't remember the actual site sneered at.  I am guessing it was Cactus Hill
**More hair, similar skin color

Proto-World (and small rodents)

I have not been convinced that evidence of a Proto-World language is recoverable, but I have been sympathetic to the idea that it is possible, and extremely critical of the way more traditional linguists have gone about criticising Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Greenberg. When you have to go all Mean Girls* right off the bat, as my linguistics podcast did today, I am immediately suspicious. When I was in school we were assured that it was impossible to detect relationships between languages at a depth of more than 5000 years, and now it's grudgingly up to 10,000. There are also small bits of evidence for demonstrable relationships up to 20,000, such as the purported connection between Ket in the Yenisien Valley of Eastern Russia and some Native American languages, and some  odd things that go even deeper. Also the evidence from other fields, such as genetics, has been supporting said "impossible" connections in biological fact, making linguistic connections at least more possible.

The Aspie quality that makes some historical linguists good at their job is not without its downside. If you can't make them believe it incontrovertibly, they smugly believe it must therefore not be true at all. Sigh.

It is a signal-to-noise problem, in that one side says they believe they can hear someone broadcasting on the wireless, while others say they are imagining things. Yet as equipment and technology get better, we might hope to accurately discern signal better. Also, there are a bunch of Russian linguists working with disparate families we have been unfamiliar with who have been claiming associations at deep time-depths for years, and I don't have any reason to believe they were less competent than our linguists.

Yet in defense of the critics, we have to ask that even if we can detect the signal, based on focusing on Swadesh words and particular sounds (see my first back-link for some of that), what have we got, really? In the Americas, Greenberg and those who follow him believe that there is one big Amerind family that includes most of the continent and all the Proto-Algonkian, Proto-Iroquoian, and Proto-Everything, plus some minority Na-Dene languages (Navajo, Hopi, and many Canadian) and the Inuit languages. Most linguists would break that into many more families. They say there's not enough signal to make solid assertions. And at this point we have to ask even if Greenberg, et. al are right, what's it mean? These are similarities so faint as to be unnoticeable. If there are connections between tribes and movements to be traced, perhaps we had better leave that to the archaeologists and geneticists at this point.

****

Fun fact: many Germanic and Slavic languages have a word for hoarding things that is based on the word "hamster." Yet it is not so in English, which is a Germanic language. Why not? Well, hamsters are not native to the British Isles, and only go as far as the Continent. Which is why instead of hamstering things, we squirrel them away.

*I saw a clip from "Mean Girls" for the first time in the review of The Dawn of Everything at ACX that I posted on a couple of weeks ago. While the characters were exaggerated for art's sake, I was impressed that they seemed like a great many of the girls I went to high school (and college) with - and more of the boys, once I thought about it.  We are all Mean Girls. In the case above though, the podcasters were both female, adult academics, so maybe I just haven't the faintest idea what the real percentages are.

Top Ten List

I finally discovered one.  Looking through my stats every month or two, I notice that "Wayfinding And Stonehenge" and "Goethe's Three Questions" are always among my most-viewed posts, even though neither is recent.  I imagine both of them are coming off google hits, as Stonehenge must be a biggie, and the 3 Questions part of Goethe is in that no-man's land between common and obscure that a lot of people have heard of it, and are looking for it, but not many people have written about it.  A guess.

Tonight on a whim I clicked through to see what my most-read posts of all time are.  It's an odd grouping.

1. By far - is Wayfinding And Stonehenge, from six months ago.
2. And way ahead of #3, Things You Shouldn't Tell Young Parents.  I think it got stumbled-upon, or digged, or something, because it was 800 hits in one day, not much otherwise.
3. O'Sullivan's Law Hits Habitat For Humanity, from six years ago.  Both O'Sullivan's Law and HFH likely have good search numbers.
4. Goethe's Three Questions.  Also from 2006. As above.
5. Not Their Tribe. Late 2006.  A mix.  A big burst when it first came out, but a few readers every month since then as well.  This would also go into my "most comments received" top ten as well.
6. Clyde Joy, Willie Mae, and Goodnight Homes.  I am stunned this is on the list.  Enough NH people must be searching for Clyde every month, and I must be on the first page somewhere.  The 1950's nudist camp photo has been deleted, presumably by its originator or owner.
7. Chagall Windows - Zurich. Common search, I suspect.  They are stunning.
8. Merritt Ruhlen's List.  (Of words that echo the original, unified language of mankind, 50,000 or so years ago.) 2006 again.  Perhaps I peaked as a blogger in my first year.
9. Flamingos, Real and Plastic.  Rather a disappointment, as the Don Featherstone's have been deleted. akafred, aka Sponge-headed Scienceman, has a recommendation for a museum in Leominster.  You heard me.  No sniggering there in the last row.
10. California Rocket Fuel.  Likely search-engine related.

Idear Will Be The Last To Fall

I have mentioned that much of the Eastern New England accent, which sounds its O and other low vowels a little differently while dropping some r’s and adding others, still persists in NH, though much weakened. The dropped-r (officially called non-rhoticity) in cards, or marked is more subtle now, but I don't believe the added-r at the end of words has diminished at all.  Many feminine names end in –a,* which in NH can still be pronounced –er, as in Christiner, Aniter, Wander, Rebeccer. The –a sound is more likely to be retained after a soft consonant, so it is rarer to hear Carler or Sarer (though they do occur). Lots of medical words end with the –a sound as well, created out of Greek and Latin roots, so here at the hospital one hears nurses saying nausear (sounds like NAW-zhur, not NAH-zee-ur), dystonier, dyslexier.

Yet strongest of all is idear.  People who add the R onto no other words might retain it there.  I don’t believe accents are actually going away, as is commonly claimed.  (It sounds plausible, but there’s actually not much evidence for it.  Most accents show up in vowels - which already have a lot of variety no matter long you put Hooked On Phonics on continuous loop in your kid’s ipod - and in dropped consonants, which already occur so often in English that they hardly raise a red flag when a particular region has variants.) But even if it is true, and Americans are homogenizing to the speech of Medina, Ohio, idear will still be around in 50 years.

*-a is a frequent feminine ending worldwide, which is part of Ruhlen’s argument for common origin of all languages.

The World's Oldest Words (?)

A number of British sources have reported on Mark Pagel's research into the half-life of words. If there is a new paper by Pagel, I haven't seen it. This seems to be a rehash of the University of Reading prof's 2007 paper.

There are just so many things wrong with this reporting. To call words 9,000 years old (the article hints they could be 20,000 or even 40,000 y/o - yikes) "English" is just senseless. English began about a thousand years ago, according to convention. Of course that Old English came from an earlier language, which in turn came from an even earlier one, but we have to drop the idea of "English" pretty quickly. Even "Indo-European" would be a stretch, but there are at least some folks who would call that barely within the PIE fence. To talk about time traveling and playing Scrabble with Stone-Agers is meant to be amusing but is still too mixed for coherent thought. They have to sell newspapers, I know, but this is well beneath the standard of any reputable science section.

The research is essentially this: some words change more slowly than others, and we can recognise resemblances across time and geography. This has long been known. The Swadesh list consists of common words that have been shown to be more stable over time. Pagel has tried to quantify this by estimating the half-life of words and projecting backward what words used in 7000BCE have direct descendants of similar meaning today. He also notes some words which are so divergent in meaning between languages as to be considered unstable, and on their way out in the next thousand years or so. The words Pagel believes are most stable are similar to Merritt Ruhlen's list - well, there's a surprise - the smaller numbers, personal pronouns, and parts of the body predominating.

Well fine, so far. Even historical linguists who believe we can't trace back with any confidence more than 6000 years would likely agree that the principle of stability is as likely in the Swadesh words in the 6000 years before 4000 BCE as the 6000 years after. "I," "we," "two," "five" likely changed as slowly in the old days as in the new. If we could make a tracing back 9000 years, those would be our first suspects. The problem is, those words are already just barely recognisable to us over 6000 years.

For example, German Wasser, French eau, Latin aqua. Does the connection jump right out at you? No. You can trace all those back to PIE *akwa- but it's rather painstaking to get there. That whatever word they used for water in 7000 BCE, if we could know it, might be intelligibly connected to *akwa- I grant. But the point is we don't know it. Other language families suggest that something like kwa, akwa, okwa, okho might have been that word, but we are a long way between stepping-stones here.

Simplest answer. You could quickly learn to understand and be understood 400 years ago, if you like that time-travel idea. 800 years ago, maybe. 1200 years ago, you are learning a foreign language, noting occasional curiosities that make you suspect it's related to English. 9000 years, 20K, 40K? No chance.

If you're planning on time travel, work on your gestures instead.

Hey, Toro, Toro!

It bugs me when I miss something as obvious as the relationship between Greek tauros, (Latin taurus) and Spanish toro for "bull." Benjamin reassures me that I keep noticing these things all the time, unlike normal people, and keep kicking myself at each new one for not having noticed it before. I suppose.

It's a great opportunity to go trace it back into Indo-European, to see if there's anything interesting about it. There usually is. In this case there is the mildly interesting aspect that the reconstructed Indo-European *tauro is derived from an earlier root *sta-. The dropping of an initial s is only moderately common.

More interesting is the earlier *sta-, meaning "to stand," and giving rise to stay, stand, stable, steed, stud, stage, constant, and dozens of others. The idea is of a permanent place where something - originially stockbreeding - was done. In Pashtun it leads to -stan meaning "place," as in Afghanistan, "place of the Afghan people," Pakistan "place of the Pakis people."

Okay, so that's not frightfully interesting just yet. But wait, there's more. The roots *stak (stand, place), *stel, (put, stand), *steg (pole, stake, stick), and perhaps even *stai (stone) and *stebh (post, place firmly on) suggest an even earlier root around this "sta" sound. There seems some connection of place, solidity, standing in place, stability, doesn't there?

But there aren't supposed to be any observable earlier reconstructions beyond the Indo-European, according to most linguists. The linguistic distance is supposed to be too great, and all such connections unreliable.

Except that it's pretty clear, isn't it? One more small point that Greenberg and Ruhlen are right.

High School Teacher Rant

Michelle Malkin posts the transcript of the geography teacher's rant.

My uncle asks "Is he a menace?"

Menace? No. That would be reserved for someone who was causing some direct danger. He is an idiot, however. This class was a long rant of his, specifically teaching opinion instead of fact and inquiry. I think such things can be done legitimately, if it is understood that the teacher is intentionally taking one side of an argument and challenging the students to "give me your best shot." My guess is most HS students could not care much less and the teacher wouldn't get much action.

I don't get the impression that this is what's happening here. Context might give a different picture, but it sure seems that this teacher is putting this forward, not as a point of view, but of what is true. That's hardly legitimate. The teacher knows the subject to be discussed in advance, and can line up his data and arguments to make it look like all the facts are on one side. That's hardly teaching. If the teacher got put on a Sunday morning talk show, without being told in advance what the subject was going to be, and was then asked to go toe-to-toe with the other participants he'd get creamed -- even if he was right. There's something abusive about a teacher who wants to pummel students like this.

Reimagine this style and stacking the deck from a teacher in South Carolina in 1850 defending slavery. Y'see, it doesn't look dangerous and abusive when you sort of agree with the speaker's points, and think that getting kids to "wake up" is a good thing.

I imagine that equally stupid things, from a variety of teacher's soapboxes, are said every day in American HS classrooms. People rant, and most students pick up pretty quickly what it's about. Usually people rant within their own field, railing on about how Shakespeare isn't taught properly anymore, or the school board doesn't understand the value of band instruments. Linguists can sound like this if you bring up Ruhlen or Greenberg. Non-keynesians can pop a blood vessel over Keynesians. You expect a geography teacher to hew pretty close to geography, just as you expect the dentist to clean the kid's teeth, not teach him about local zoning laws. But teachers wander off topic a lot. There's not a lot of accountability for some things they do (and ridiculous accountability for others -- typical bureaucracy).

Jonathan's point is well taken, that the describing one student as brainwashed is engaging in the same poisoning-the-well that they complain about in Bennish.

Is this an amazingly ill-informed person, wandering off topic onto favorite soapboxes, unclear of the line between opinion and fact? Sure. So? That's what highschool pretty much is, isn't it? If we looked hard enough, we might find a conservative nutcase who runs his class the same way.

Best of October 2006

Horton Hatches A Creed

Why the chicken crossed the road, according to JRR Tolkien.

One of my few comments about gun control.

“There are other factors which overwhelm the gun-law effects no matter what legislation is or isn’t passed. Sports analogy alert: it would be like examining park effects to determine why Barry Bonds hits more home runs than Roger Clemens. There may actually be something there to measure, but specialization, at-bats, and steroids dwarf all other considerations.”

How one's heritage is a rough predictor of violence.

Some Gitmo hypocrisy in The Hearings Officer and The Grapes

Senator Claire McAskill, an auditor, can’t do arithmetic

An example of a Douglas Adams world

Republicans work for you, Democrats fight for you. Sums it all up.

A plug for Life For Sudan. Including the single greatest comment ever on my site.

Only if you are interested in the neurological underpinnings of insight. Brodmann Areas 9/10 and 40 /41 and all that.

No Bark.…which was his 7th-grade science project. I no longer care. The one thing I do still carry around resentfully from that whole event is that his project finished fourth, mostly because the judges - including the school secretary - didn't understand his project. The girl who did a really nice vinegar and baking soda volcano finished ahead of him. It's one of my prime examples of how schools favor girls shamelessly. (Fun comments on this one)

Linguistics discussion Hey, Toro, Toro, including that immediate turn-off to my oldest son, the dreaded phrase "Indo-European."

The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) contructions *penkwe (five – think “pente,” or “quinque” in Latin and Greek), *pnkwstis (fist), and *penkweros (finger) sure look related, and few would doubt that there is an earlier root which gave rise to all of them. In the equally ancient language families which bordered PIE (Uralic and Altaic, the ancestor languages to Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish), the roots for fist or palm of hand are suspiciously similar: *peyngo and *p’aynga. Penkwe-peyngo-paynga. Looks awfully related to me.

and a followup.

But there aren't supposed to be any observable earlier reconstructions beyond the Indo-European, according to most linguists. The linguistic distance is supposed to be too great, and all such connections unreliable.

Except that it's pretty clear, isn't it? One more small point that Greenberg and Ruhlen are right.

Post 2100 - Best of July 2006

It's been over a month since I did one of these. Do the math. At that rate I would never catch up.

The month was very big for book reviews and commentaries, apparently. I complained about Freakonomics. I had some praise for the language book The Way We Talk Now. I liked Theodore Dalrymple's Our Culture, What's Left Of It and had some further comments on Virginia Woolf.

I even discovered a similarity in the relationship between JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis and between Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell while reading The Narnian and The Rivals.

It's hard to believe that few people believed there was a Religious Left just three years ago, but the conventional wisdom was exactly that. I had a lengthy, rather irritated post arguing that there is indeed a powerful Religious Left. Don't read the whole thing, just browse it.

I wrote of yet another example of how Monty Python provides absurd situations which actually turn out to be true in politics, comparing Middle-East negotiations to The Cheese Shop.

Why cultural values are more worth preserving than ecosystems.

And the obligatory linguistics post summarising Merritt Ruhlen's list of words still identifiable from mankind's original language.