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Alexander Militarev

Once more about glottochronology and etymology: theOmotic-Afrasian case, or my disagreements with H.Fleming

"The large Data Base (76 pages)...can be used to check on my analyses or conclusions or to make some ofyour own. The cognate decisions are based on my best knowledge of Afroasiatic...I believe that most of theproposed cognations are accurate. Like Joe Greenberg I think you can look at an assemblage of data like thisfor 36 languages for an hour or so and reach rough and ready conclusions about classification.""What I am opposing is the sweeping over-simplification of our work called proof by reconstruction. It isbasically an Indo-Europeanist invention...and a dogma held by Russian historical linguists long after itsusefulness had expired.""Having gotten 1% or 0% or 0.9% or 1.8% and such like between the extremes of Afrasian, I bore thegeneral conclusion of 'zero to one percent'...As I said several times in Santa Fe_, proto-Afrasian is at least20,000 years old and by one reckoning 30,000 years old.""...one misjudged cognate scoring can distort results".

(Harold Fleming. Excerpts from Letters to Murray Gell-Mann, Sergei Starostin, MerrittRuhlen, Christopher Ehret. 2002)

Why myself? The letters were formally addressed to other people. However, Starostin with hisglottochronology ("Sergeichronology" as Fleming put it) and myself with my dating proto-Afrasianto the 9th millennium and placing the proto-Afrasian home in the Levant, are the objects ofFlemming's criticism. Since "the data, reality, facts -- the empirical aspects of things", are withinAfrasian, my professional domain, it is naturally myself whom Starostin entrusted to reply.

I am a firm believer that a good piece of work in comparative linguistics or etymology can be doneonly if one observes certain principles. In my case, they stem not from some theory or Indo-Europeanist tradition (of which, frankly speaking, I know very little), but from common sense andthirty years of practical work. They are:

(1) all data compared must be well documented, i.e., provided with accurate references to thesources used (sorry to say, 20 years ago I followed that principle rather loosely), the rule often notobserved even in Semitic, to say nothing of Afrasian studies;

(2) playing with isolated etymologies is fun, but it does not allow the player to climb fromthe level of guesses to that of sound proof (unlike Fleming, I believe in proof and valid tests inmy science -- otherwise I would have chosen another profession) reached only by means of regularsound correspondences, non-controversial reconstructions of proto-forms, and eventually aprofessional, comprehensive (representing a bulk of the compared languages' lexicons) and carefulcomparative/etymological dictionary;

(3) sound correspondences are reliable only if confirmed by sufficient lexical data; if deviantcases are explained by special rules; and if all phonemes -- in case of Afrasian, consonantphonemes first of all -- attested in each individual language are compared and presented in the tablesof sound correspondences;

(4) separation of loanwords from the inherited lexicon is not only indispensable, but must besustained, whenever possible, by precise references to the source words, and explicit argumentation,

both linguistic and cultural-historical;(5) semantic comparison should be based at least on a common sense; the less alike arecompared meanings the more they need confirmation by other examples of similar meaning shifts;

(6) without observing the above principles no final conclusions can be made either aboutgenetic classifications or about dating of proto-languages, contours of human societies whospoke them, location of their homelands -- all those correlations with archaeology and genetics weare so anxious to establish.

We all know to err is human, and, if I were Fleming, I would not risk going so far in my self-confident criticism. Instead, I'd try to be more objective about my own competence and more waryof taking on so many languages lest I should commit such mistakes as:

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- Eg m_z-t and myz-t 'liver' quoted as m_st (ignoring the well-known fact that W_rterbuch deraegyptischen Sprache conventionally uses s to render the voiced sibilant [z] while the voiceless [s] isrendered by graphic s_) is scored differently from Male mayzi 'liver',its undoubted cognate; that it isnot a slip follows from another example: Eg z(y) 'person' quoted by Fleming asz/s is scored, as if itwere s, together with Mao eesa^ and similar Omotic forms (

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controversy.