Re: CHAT: Conlang-friendly linguists

dirk elzinga wrote:

> 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.
This last sentence is both oblique and confusing.  Is "unable" a typo?
In what sense is he not doing well?


> > 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.
Manaster-Ramer has also done a bit of work on Malagasy, which is how I
know his name.  He had an article and a squib (= short article, for the
uninitiated) on Malagasy published in "Oceanic Linguistics" a few years
back.  His analysis wasn't nearly formal enough for my tastes, but he
made a few good points.  I cite him in my dissertation in a couple
places.

Matt.

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