There's an excellent (critical) commentary on the linguistic aspects of this by Larry Trask, on the ev-psych list for those who subscribe. The Web copy of Trask's comments is
here.It seemed to me to be another journalistic just-so story.
Scott
One of the co-authors of the Current Biology paper is Merritt Ruhlen, author of "The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue" (1994). Here's Larry Trask's "glowing" review of the book at Amazon.com. Enjoy!
Ruhlen’s fantasies, September 18, 2001
Reviewer: Robert L. Trask from Brighton United Kingdom
This is not a book about comparative linguistics. Instead, it is a book devoted to Ruhlen’s personal fantasies.
Comparative linguistics, like all linguistics, and indeed like all serious scholarly work, is done by applying rigorous and scrupulous methods to carefully obtained data. The right way of doing comparative linguistics was worked out only at the end of the 18th century, and it has been developed and refined ever since.
Before that time, people had no idea how to compare languages, and they worked wholly in the dark. Their favored “method” was nothing more than the assembly of miscellaneous resemblances among miscellaneous languages, in the hope that this might shed light on language origins. But it didn’t, and it doesn’t: miscellaneous resemblances are meaningless and worthless, as has been amply demonstrated countless times. See any decent textbook of historical linguistics.
But this Dark Age procedure is exactly what Ruhlen wants his readers to accept, believe in, and follow. Ruhlen shows no understanding of the numerous and serious obstacles to the comparison of languages, and no understanding of the formidable pitfalls that must be avoided if useful work is to be done.
In place of rigor, Ruhlen offers us only lists of miscellaneous resemblances, which, like the forlorn scholars of the past, he wants us to take seriously, and to use as the sole basis for spectacular conclusions.
Worse, Ruhlen wants his eager readers to believe that they too can do serious work in linguistics:
“Don’t believe the blinkered professionals when they tell you that good work requires years of training and experience, or that it requires a comprehensive knowledge of the languages you want to compare. Just trust me when I tell you that any idiot with a bilingual dictionary can do real linguistics, better even than the professionals.”
There is more, much more. The very first duty of a scholar is to get the data right, but Ruhlen can’t even do that. For example, of the 13 Basque items presented on page 65 (as “language B”), four are wrong, and two more are not even native Basque words, but are words borrowed from Latin or Spanish. And there are also some profound problems concerning the origins and earlier forms of several of the others, problems which Ruhlen ignores because he doesn’t even know about them: he’s just extracted his forms incomprehendingly from a bilingual dictionary. But Ruhlen doesn’t care about such humdrum tasks as getting the facts right: he merely wants to persuade readers of the spectacular success of his primitive and wrongheaded approach. So what if the data are wrong: it’s the Big Picture that’s important, right? Professional linguists, who are all too aware of the enormous difficulty of establishing links between any languages at all, have no time for this sort of nonsense.
This shabby book is made even shabbier by Ruhlen’s practice of making nasty remarks about those linguists who have quite properly criticized his work—which means just about every linguist who has ever commented on it at all. He even goes so far as to say nasty things about long-dead linguists of the past, like Meillet (on page 79), apparently on the ground that they too would have condemned his work if they had lived to see it.
You will learn nothing about doing comparative linguistics by reading this dreadful book. You will learn only how to join the massed ranks of the linguistic cranks. And we already have more than enough of those. There are thousands and thousands of cranks churning out useless and pathetic “comparisons” like Ruhlen’s every year. Ruhlen is more prominent than most, but he is no better.
R. L. Trask
Professor of Linguistics
JG
