Eurasiatic: A Wild Pursuit (2)

The only content word cited by the Pagel et al. (2013) with a putative cognate class size of more than four is ‘give’. The proposed Eurasiatic reconstruction is *dwV[H]V, with an optional “laryngeal” and two wildcard vowels. The reconstruction of a labial-velar glide is not justified explicitly (one can only guess that without it the Altaic initial would be different). PIE *deh₃- ‘give’ (phonetically *doh₃-, with laryngeal colouring) is a widely attested root aorist. Proto-Uralic *toɣe ‘bring’ is a very nice match and indeed is frequently quoted as possible evidence of “Indo-Uralic” kinship (alternatively, it could be an old loan from IE). Ironically, if Pagel et al. had really observed their “identical meaning” requirement as strictly as declared, they would have been forced to disqualify this match as not quite exact: the Uralic meaning is primarily ‘bring’, not ‘give’. The other cognates cannot be taken seriously: the Altaic ones (apart from formal problems) have to do more with feasting than with giving, the Eskimo one means ‘sell’ rather than ‘give’, and the Dravidian one means ‘bring’ in most languages of that family. In both Eskimo and Dravidian, unlike Uralic, the only potential sound corresponcence involves the initial (a dental stop, one of the most common classes of sound cross-linguistically). To claim that we are dealing with an item represented in five families out of seven is a massive overstatement. It’s really more like two families (and even there some semantic leeway must be excused).

All the remaining content words in the list are said to have cognate class sizes of four (whetever their estimated universal frequency of use). Even they, however, present various problems. For example, the ‘mother’ word (presumably *ʔVmV ‘mother, woman’ in the database, with a glottal stop that is nowhere attested, and vowels that may be present or absent at will) is a fancy cover reconstruction for a collection of obvious nursery noises coopted as kinship terms. ‘Mother’ words like /mama/, /ma/, /eme/, /ana/, /aɲa/, /aja/ etc. are likely to be re-created independently in different languages. They are common on all inhabited continents for reasons discussed already by Roman Jakobson in 1959 and by innumerable linguists since. Though babbling sequences involving /m/ preferentially refer to ‘mother’ (note the almost self-explanatory fact that Latin mamma means ‘nipple’), they may also occasionally be applied to other members of the family, like Manchu ama or Georgian mama, both meaning ‘father’. Linguists routinely disqualify nursery words as comparative evidence (unless a root that might be of such an origin is extended with non-iconic suffixes elevating it to the status of a “regular” word).

Thor’s goin’ wormin’
[source] 

The meaning ‘worm’ is too imprecise to be useful in inter-family comparison. English worm (like bug) may be applied to innumerable invertebrates. It was still vaguer in the early Germanic languages, where it could describe anything that crept or crawled, including legendary dragons and serpents (such as the mighty Midgarðsormr of the outer Ocean, shown on the left). The comparative material under Eurasiatic *ḲorV- ‘worm’ in the database is aswarm with miscellaneous vermin: houseflies, gadflies, maggots and other larvae, fleas, crickets, wasps, spiders, leeches, and even eels – words referring mostly to particular taxa rather than “worms” in general. Despite this semantic latitude the formal correspondences are far from impressive. One is reminded of the apocryphal definition of etymology as une science où les voyelles ne font rien et les consonnes fort peu de chose.

There would be little point in analysing the remaining items one by one. If anyone is interested in discussing them (or any other sins against linguistics committed in the article), it can easily be done in the Comments section. The examples above were chosen more or less at random, and are not necessarily the most problematic ones; they merely illustrate some of the obvious problems. What is quite evident is that the database does not allow one to define well-bounded cognate sets, and that the size of those sets is very easy to inflate by relaxing formal or semantic criteria even minimally in a way not controlled in the study. The “data” so concocted are simply unusable. If a statistical method applied to them seems to confirm the researchers’ expectations, it’s probably because the expectations are already encoded in the reconstructions used as data (which is part of the reason why reconstructions are not supposed to be so used!). The authors of the article consider such a possibility but do not really take any precautions against it. With such input, the only signal a statistical analysis will detect comes from confirmation bias.

[Stay tuned in, there will be a little more.]

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