Re: CHAT: Conlang-friendly linguists

On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, John Cowan wrote:

> dirk elzinga wrote:
>
> > Alexis e-mailed me a month or so ago about some
> > collaborative work on Uto-Aztecan he was interested in doing
>
> Wow.  Did he pick you out of a catalog, or did you know him before?
More the former. He knew that I was a student of the late Wick
Miller, and that my dissertation was on Gosiute phonology.
Apparently he's not doing well right now, and would like to get
some pending projects finished up before he's unable to do any
further work.

> AFAIK his reputation, backed up by the few exchanges I had
> with him, is for being eminently fair and reasonable, even
> if he is a connoisseur of odd theories (at the time, at least,
> the only non-Nostraticist who would say publicly that N.
> hadn't gotten a fair shake on bogus a priori grounds --
> "we just can't reconstruct past 6 KYBP, no how, no way ...").
Yes. And was roundly castigated for it; it has marginalized him
somewhat. His Uto-Aztecan work has always been of the highest
quality, and Wick spoke favorably of it on more than one
occasion.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga                          dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu

"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists."               - Edward Sapir

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