Re: Old Japanese

First to remind you, I didn't say I don't believe it at all. I said that I
have doubts.

Basilius wrote:

>And the database represents in fact an unpublished material. Do you know
>any critique of it already made public? I mean that the generalisation
>about what Starostin & Co are willing to accept must have been pronounced
>by somebody knowing the material, whom I guess you were citing?
Lyle Campbell gave a lecture at UCLA on proposed language families. He
discussed various families including Na-Dene, Hokan, Altaic, Amerind,
Nostratic, and a small bit of the general African classification. I can't
find my notes from the lecture, but I remember two things that he said
about Altaic. The first was that it was originally proposed based on purely
typological grounds rather than lexical similarities. The other was
something along the lines of "Starostin is a really intelligent person and
has a good command of the data, but..." and he went on to criticize the
semantics of some of the proposals.

Of course, Lyle Campbell is well known in Americanist circles for tearing
down accepted classifications, and requiring more evidence than most do
before he accepts a family.

Perhaps Starostin's material is good. I've not seen more than a couple
examples. But the published stuff that I've seen on Altaic is not
completely convincing.


===============================
Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
===============================