Those who clutch on to the past have no future

"You can't rehabilitate shoehorn freaks like GG," blurts Douglas Kilday about me on Cybalist, a Yahoogroups forum originally devoted to Indo-European linguistics before devolving into a depraved gathering of angry lunatics hurling invectives to malign intelligent debate. And to emphasize just how depraved many of these sorts are online, this remark apparently arose simply because of a perfectly valid reference I cited a whole ten years ago and which, to boot, I no longer even believe. I've moved on and evolved considerably since 2001, unlike some apparently. However I've discovered that this is part of Kilday's larger campaign of trolling to slander any online contributors that threaten his little basement-dwelling life.^[1]

Kilday incites further: "Anyone familiar with the Etr. corpus will reject Gordon's /n/-genitive nonsense." Funny enough, the nonsense was published by Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante in 1983. It can't be "my" nonsense because I was all of 7 years old at the time! Indeed he may as well beat up a child to justify his drama-addiction because on page 70 of The Etruscan language: An introduction, it was verily alleged the following:

"There is also an archaic genitive in -n (-an, -un): so lautn: gen. lautun or lautn; puia: gen. puian."

Of course now I know that it's fabricated poppycock but that's a part of the learning process that some insecure people want to pretend they're beyond - that is, the process of trying something, getting it wrong, admitting it to oneself, and adapting accordingly. Some people get stuck at the first stage and never do a thing out of a crushing fear of failure. I suspect this is Kilday's more genuine issue.

There is no word *puian in Etruscan as we can now confirm online in Helmut Rix's Etruskische Texte. The closest form listed is puiam but this is composed of nomino-accusative puia plus phrasal conjunctive -m. It's one of several booboos they've published which give me the impression that the Bonfantes hadn't boned up on the linguistics side of their field before rushing to publish on it. I trust that in later versions of that book the claim of a genitive **-n in Etruscan was omitted, however little else had been updated after almost 20 years between the first and second editions. Their mistake is exacerbated by the fact that a published book is expected to be thoroughly thought-through before being printed and it can remain on library shelves for a very long time to misinform future readers, even several decades later.

I bring up this quote from the Bonfantes though because in a strange way it's comforting to know that even respected specialists can be fallible. It's comforting not through petty spite but because it reminds us that there's still so much knowledge for every one of us to discover and share with others openly. Once we get past our egos, that is.


NOTES
^[1] On Nostratic-L, Kilday concocted the claim, "it is quite clear that thesane cannot be a case-form of thesan," tripping over himself to provoke others with pompous pet theories and twisted strawman arguments despite Steinbauer and Pallottino maintaining exactly what he rejects. He forcibly mangles so much here that I really doubt his views are honest. Tellingly he cites no relevant references regarding his theory on thesan as a verb nor proffers a decent rationale in his favour. If it quacks like a duck...

What if the problem is traditional academia?

Memiyawanzi raises an issue in Imposter syndrome about perfectionism run amok among linguistics students (and students by and large). I noticed that the focus is on the individual's internal psychology but I have an even broader perspective on this.


Individual quirks and psychoses

My life experience has led me to believe that many students who seem to naturally gravitate to scholarly pursuits have a common personality type. They tend to be detail-oriented for one and this can lead to this beautiful skill being turned inward on themselves for less constructive purposes (ie. perfectionism, self-doubt, anxiety, depression, etc.). Detail-oriented people, I believe, are precisely the kinds of people that will direct their psychic energy inward rather than outward, unlike the stereotypical jock who will instead gravitate towards physical pursuits to work off those same internal energies. If this inward reflection is used in a healthy way, one can properly evaluate one's weaknesses and adapt. If not, a student can be swamped by her own thought processes. All introspective, detail-oriented people need to learn to manage this hidden battle within themselves to stay on top.

However, we should also consider how environment must also play a part in a student's mental health. If an environment is unreasonable, we all know that it can contribute to an unhealthy mental state in an otherwise healthy individual. Family abuse, gang intimidation, drug abuse, etc. are the typical things we hear about as toxic environments for many children, teens and even adults. Yet what if traditional academia itself is adding to deleterious feelings of inadequacy in hopeful students?


University as a "place of learning"? Are you sure?

We're all led to believe that the university is a "place of learning" but we should question that notion. The university is in reality a "place of gambling" where students bet with their hard-earned money for a mere shot at the workforce and a future career. The wonky global economy only makes the game more exciting for career thrill-seekers. It goes without saying that rich and incompetent people can afford to gamble multiple times until a pay-off while competent poor people have little room for error. University is a business, pure and simple. Intellectuality comes second to money.

If university were really a place of learning rather than the heavily corporatized institution it is, it would be more in line with a rationalist Socratic ideal where strict roles such as "student" and "teacher" are regarded as illegitimate. The reasoning for this is simple. If knowledge as a whole is infinite and all humans are finite beings, then all of us must be ignorant one way or another. If we're all ignorant, we all can stand to learn something and then that means we're all students. Yet since we all know *something*, we're also all teachers automatically.

So when we say "teacher", we're really saying that society arbitrarily recognizes someone as "more knowledgeable" than "students". The meaning of "teacher" has been perverted into a kind of paid career while the student is an indentured servant beholden by peonage to the system. When we say "specialist", we're really saying that society arbitrarily recognizes someone as "more knowledgeable" than non-specialists and this effectively stops "non-specialists" from questioning them out of threat of shame or ridicule. There's no empirical way to measure how much one is a "teacher" or "specialist" because even the boundaries of any particular "subject" or "branch of study" are arbitrarily defined. Simply put, universities avoid this socratic ideal of equality, critical thinking and individuality because they are in bed with CEOs who would much prefer in its stead inequality, yes-man thinking and conformism.

To be clear, a real student questions others with reason, thinks for herself, investigates the truth no matter how inconvenient, stands up to stupidity and holds her own but none of this is conducive to corporate "team-playing". Learning is and must be a solitary pursuit.

From that angle then, is it any wonder that even a well-meaning, normally adjusted student might feel mentally unhealthy? The university has turned into a kind of ideological war zone meant to separate the true scholars from the status-hungry. The status-hungry win in this system.


On a side note...

Take in UCLA's Campus casts wider safety net for depressed students. This quote is a mixed grab bag of good and grim:

"'Fortunately, at UCLA we have a lower suicide rate than other campuses, and overall we have a higher rate of students who are already being counseled at CAPS,' said Susan Quillan, chief of clinical services at Ashe, who oversaw UCLA’s participation in the partnership."

Oh good, they have a lower suicide rate. We can sleep well at night then. Keep in mind that corporations have made depression into a disturbingly profitable industry (ie. pharmaceuticals) while simultaneously causing much of the woe by creating a head-trip system that runs counter to sense. Irony much?

Is problem solving dependent on money?

Sometimes I google for much more than informative websites or blogs. There are a wealth of interesting journal articles available too, sprinkled all over cyberspace like tasty candy for the mind. But beware of greedy corporations and old-school institutions who try their best to interfere with the inevitable future of the internet: free information exchange.

For example, there was this interesting article called Is problem solving dependent on language? that I wanted to get my dirty hands on. If you follow the link, you can see that ScienceDirect.com basically says "Cough up my $31.50 if you wanna see the article alive!" So I was like, "Omg, how rude. No thanks, creep." Realistically, the average person just doesn't have 30 bucks to throw away for every article that they need to read. If there was ever a time when that was true, it's certainly not now.

So being a rebel to the core, I went back to google and searched directly with the query: "Is problem solving dependent on language?". My defiance paid off and I recovered the abstract plus article which is accessable in pdf format here for the low low price of *ZERO* dollars. I celebrated afterwards for my victory against the machine with a soothing cup of tea. (Yeah, I'm a geek. What's it to ya? Lol.)

Now what have we learned for today, class?

Outdated goals for outdated people

Insecure people online or off will sometimes try to intimidate me with comments to the effect that I'd be more 'believable', 'likeable', 'respected' or some other condescending adjective if only I could get my views on the Etruscan language or those of Proto-Indo-European published in journals or books instead of wasting my time with this silly blogging thing. Usually they're just unaccomplished themselves and are projecting their life-failures onto me but the intended implication is that my lack of published journal articles is an unforgivable mark against me. It's also implied that online publishing is secondhand publishing while the worthy people are publishing physical books with paper pages and ink, just as they did in the Middle Ages. If only I could learn to be more retro and quill my way to fame like the elite pulp polluters of society.

Yet if traditional publishing had higher standards of quality, tonnes of printed gobbledeegook, everything from Zecharia Sitchin's painfully serious The 12th Planet to the intoxicated self-contradictions of the King James Bible, would never reach print. (Oops, did I just go there? Lol.) The obvious lesson here is that traditional publishing has no higher standards than online publishing. To pit one communication medium against another like this is a specious excuse for certain readers to be dismissive and mentally lazy.

A related credentialist belief is that if you don't get peer-reviewed by certain academic cabals, you have no right to express an educated opinion regardless of its logical validity. These people sadly believe that only those with a boastful curriculum vitae have the authority to think and question things. Well, I've been blog-writing long enough to recognize where the future is headed, who I'm writing for and what misplaced hostility sounds like. These online predators must not have gotten the memo.

So here's the memo: Are we near the end of the journal? by Nat Lang.

By whom, for whom

According to Bakkum, The Latin dialect of the Ager Faliscus: 150 years of scholarship, vol 2 (2009), p.305 (see link):

"The Etruscan forms in -si and -(a)le can be used to designate both by whom and for whom the object was made (Steinbauer 1999:174-6)."

In case the absurdity isn't noticeable, "by whom" and "for whom" are opposite roles in these inscriptions. How did this nonsensical statement make its way to modernday print? What happened to the concept of structured, coherent grammar? In his solitary example of ET Fa 3.4, a vessel from Vignanello, the solitary name Vultasi doesn't help much to decide the matter. I can't help but appreciate too how, by using an unclear inscription, the author can quickly pass a shaky statement over the reader without being too obvious.


Luckily for us, TLE 651 does decide the matter. As pictured above, this is a statue of a standing nobleman nicknamed The Haranguer. The only names present in the entire inscription at the base of his toga are in the first line and they're declined in this same case: Auleśi Meteliś Ve. Vesial clenśi. Who would think that the image of this mystery man can be anything other than Aule Meteli himself? The inscription must read "For Aule Meteli, for the son of Vel and Vesi." If we interpret this case ending as by whom the statue is made, the inscription fails to explain who this man is while giving us useless information about the statue's creator. This data is hardly as important to an average, literate Etruscan as the man for whom all this metalworking effort was devoted!

Then too, we also find tinśi tiurim avilś χiś repeated several times in the Liber Linteus and since tin, tiur and avil are certain to mean 'day', 'month' and 'year' in these passages, forcing an agentive sense on an inanimate noun like tinśi is absurd. It must therefore mean 'for the day' in the context of the rituals to be performed on specified dates. An Etruscan agentive case has been concocted from nothing.

Bakkum goes on to write something that I'd gauge to be naive wording for a linguist:

"[...] in most other cases, the use of the -si or -(a)le form is due to a verb, usually mulu-."

To observe that this case ending occurs often with the verb mulu- is justified, but to say that the use of this case marker is "due to" a verb, combined with his odd reference to Steinbauer above, seems to disqualify his expertise on structured grammar itself, let alone on Etruscan grammar. Need it be said, the use of this case ending or any case ending isn't incumbent on the verb itself per se but demanded by the overall semantics of what one is expressing. If one doesn't comprehend why -si/-le is used with some verbs like mulu- while not for other verbs, one fails to comprehend the very meaning of these individual grammatical units. The verbs haven't "caused" these endings to occur any more than the Oracle of Delphi.

The correct answer is simple: -si/-le must be consistently translated as 'for', as in 'for the purpose of' or 'on behalf of', never ever 'by' (whether in a locative or agentive sense). This value is evidenced not just in several Etruscan inscriptions but in Lemnian ones too.

Etruscology moving at a snail's pace

Have a look-see at the glossary supplied by Decke/Pauli/Bugge, Etruskische Forschungen und Studien, vol 1-3 (1881), pp.89-96. Yes, I know. It was published back in 1881. Now fast forward 121 years to the meager glossary in Bonfante/Bonfante, The Etruscan language: An introduction, 2nd ed. (2002) starting at page 214. If the two glossaries seem effectively identical, it's because they are.

So at this rate of breathtaking progress, I shall predict that a published translation of the Liber Linteus will finally be available during a particularly hot spring in 2346.

A revisal of the PIE sound system

As Jésus Sanchis in his blog Language Continuity takes up a noble battle against academic insanity and laryngeal overindulgence, I decided to finally upload a small pdf to my Lingua Files section regarding my summarized views on PIE phonology which have remained somewhat static for the past couple of years. Just as I've blogged before, I still advocate uvular and creaky-voiced phonemes to help rebalance the system and bring it in line with what we currently understand about phonology and its tendencies. I've included a paragraph or two about the ill-named laryngeals as well.

Of course, the staunchest traditionalists will be outraged by my vision as they are with most change but the rest of is, most notably qualified phonologists as well as rational Indoeuropeanists, should at least be intrigued if not in agreement.

Bureaucracy stifling academic innovation

Hardly a newsflash, is it? I just came across a recent article by Donald W. Miller Jr. entitled The Government Grant System: Inhibitor of Truth and Innovation? [pdf]. Essentially it details some core problems existent in the current American grant system that disfavours support for research that contradicts scientific orthodoxy.

This is nothing new, of course, and is a predictable outcome of many bureaucratic systems that take over the role of cultural accountant, dividing funds up to only those that it may deem "academically worthy". It's always hopeful that a bureaucracy is wise enough to make informed choices and to take appropriate actions towards the welfare of meritorious scholars and towards the benefit of society as a whole. However, this is too often not the case and, when bloated and mismanaged, bureaucracies can quickly turn into oppressive buddy systems.

An interesting thought I take out of this article is the concepts of "Apollonian" (pro-orthodox) and "Dionysian" (anti-orthodox) research. Miller proposes that a balanced system should be remodeled to explicitly allocate funds for both types. This is a commonsense solution to me but, being pessimistic, I somehow doubt this superior model will be implemented as long as human politics are involved.