[Indo-Eurasia] **The Farmer-Sproat-Witzel Model
George Thompson
gthomgt at COMCAST.NET
Wed Feb 7 00:56:10 UTC 2007
Steve,
I think that Mahadevan would be a fool to accept your offer. This is
not an open list. It is YOUR list, and you set all of the ground rules.
What will happen is that a post from Mahadevan would appear on the list
-- at your leisure -- immediately prefaced by a moderator's note, and
then a closing refutation from you. This is no way to carry on an open
debate. You get the first word and the last word -- every time.
Instead, this debate should be conducted on an unbiased list with a
moderator who is not so invested in the issue.
I agree with you that we are not dealing with a script here, but I do
not agree at all with this policy of always having to have both the
first word and the last.
I can think of two other lists that might serve as an unbiased place
where a genuine debate could occur.
Sincerely,
George Thompson
Steve Farmer wrote:
>Here is a letter that I just wrote to Iravatham Mahadevan, which I am
>copying as well to the Indo-Eurasian Research List (750 Members and
>hundreds of other daily readers).
>
>It contains an invitation to Mahadevan to discuss evidential issues on
>the List involving the Indus symbol system, so we can resolve this
>issue quickly. The invitation is open to anyone else working seriously
>in the field as well.
>
>Iravatham says in the newspapers that he wants open scientific
>discussion. Well, here is his chance: let's settle this issue once and
>for all, on strictly evidential grounds.
>
>************
>
>Dear Iravatham,
>
>Yesterday I read your recent article in The Hindu. The article carries
>the title "Towards a Scientific Study of the Indus Script":
>
>http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/02/04/stories/2007020400260500.htm
>
>My initial criticisms of it are found in a post that I made last night.
>There is no need for me to repeat the arguments I made then, which
>undercut the old assumption -- and it was simply an unexamined
>assumption -- that the short symbol chains found in Indus inscriptions
>were part of a "writing system." The evidence as a lot of people
>see it today, including many Indus researchers, suggests otherwise.
>
>You'll find my criticisms from last night here:
>
>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/6030
>
>One part of any genuine "scientific study" is that it acknowledges all
>claimed counter-evidence against any proposed theories. This is
>especially important when the data you cite for your views come from
>studies 30-40 years old, which is true in your case. There is no
>substantial claim in your article that you hadn't already made way back
>in the 1960s and 1970s. That was a long time ago.
>
>Moreover, all of those claims have already been discussed, sometimes in
>great detail, in the paper that Michael Witzel, Richard Sproat, and I
>published in December 2004 -- which was, of course, widely publicized
>at the time via a feature news story in _Science_ magazine.
>
>Here is a link to our article again, which I know you've read:
>http://www.safarmer.com/fsw2.pdf
>
>I would like to invite you to come on our List, where you can discuss
>these issues publicly and at leisure with me, Michael Witzel, and a
>large and diverse group of historical researchers, including script
>experts, Indus archaeologists, linguists, etc. We can make sure that it
>takes place in an orderly way, point by point.
>
>Open discussion of this sort is what science is all about: Science
>isn't conducted in newspapers, where critics don't get an opportunity
>to question dubious claims that have been repeated whatever the
>evidence for decades.
>
>These issues will also be taken up at the public Workshop at Stanford
>University that we are holding on July 11th, in conjunction with the
>Linguistic Society of America (LSA), where these issues will be
>discussed before another body of linguists attending the LSA's summer
>school. Michael and I will be participants, as will Asko Parpola,
>Richard Sproat, and a large cast of linguists and script experts. You
>are welcome to attend as well, if you want: we do everything we can to
>facilitate open discussion.
>
>Here is a link to our preliminary announcement of that Workshop, which
>is being funded in part by the National Science Foundation:
>
>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research/message/6010
>
>*************
>
>There is certainly a lot to discuss in relation to your studies. You'll
>see in our 2004 paper, for example, that the core views you have been
>proposing for some 40 years, and that you simply repeat in your new
>article, are criticized at length:
>
>http://www.safarmer.com/fsw2.pdf
>
>-- For example, on page 21, note 5 (see also below), you'll find us
>using your own evidence to falsify your claims that sign positions
>supposedly link the inscriptions to the Dravidian language family;
>Michael also underlined this fatal criticism of your work on the List
>earlier today;
>
>-- On page 22, note 6, we deal with your anachronistic association of
>Indus signs with Tamil traditions from thousands of years after the
>demise of Indus civilization, which reflects your well-known Dravidian
>ideological views;
>
>-- On page 28, n. 14, we discuss your misapplication of Mackay's
>formula as a supposed indicator of linguisticity (Sproat, incidentally,
>has recently shown that Mackay's formula doesn't even work for the
>languages to which Mackay claimed it was applicable; more on that on
>July 11th);
>
>-- On page p. 36, and again in Figure 7, we discuss the unorthodox
>methods you have used to understate the anomalous numbers of
>"singleton" signs in Indus inscriptions, which aren't easily compatible
>with any linguistic model;
>
>-- In Figure 12, striking examples are given of the way that you
>overstandardize inscriptions, which help makes mythological symbols
>look more like "writing";
>
>-- And so on.
>
>***************
>
>There are so many problems in your recent article, deriving above all
>from the very old studies on which you depend, that it is impossible to
>deal with all of them.
>
>Let me just emphasize four points:
>
>1. Most importantly, perhaps, no linguist who has followed the field
>could possibly endorse your central view, based on very old studies,
>that the fact that Indus symbols have some positional order to them --
>i.e., with some signs showing up more often than others at the front,
>back, or middle of symbol chains -- is evidence that Indus
>inscriptions contain "writing."
>
>That argument may have convinced people many decades ago, but today it
>is well-known that positional regularities in the distribution of
>symbols show up in virtually EVERY class of symbol systems known --
>linguistic and nonlinguistic alike. You find such regularity in the
>order of symbols in mathematical equations, boy-scout badges, army
>medals, highway signs (see the amusing examples in the PDF below!),
>alchemical signs, god signs in Near Eastern kudurrus and seals, Mauryan
>symbols, Mongolian tamgas, horoscopal signs, heraldic symbols -- and
>everyplace else that symbols show up.
>
>In this two-page PDF you'll find a reductio ad absurdum of old
>claims that order in Indus inscriptions implies either that they were
>linguistic or that they encoded some Dravidian language:
>
>"What do highway signs have in common with the 'Dravidian' model?":
>
>http://www.safarmer.com/indus/signs.pdf
>(note there are two pages here; the punchline is on the second page).
>
>How do you deal with this problem? You can't just pretend that the
>problem doesn't exist, which is all you've done since we published our
>paper. I showed you these data way back in 2003.
>
>2. As noted in my post last night, and as I mention again above, your
>key claim about the inscriptions supposedly encoding some early
>Dravidian language is easily falsified -- ironically even on your own
>data. You write in your article, based again on studies made way back
>in the 1960s, when the word "computer" still had some magic associated
>with it:
>
>
>
>>Computer analysis has shown that the Indus texts possess only
>>suffixes, not prefixes or infixes. This indicates that the Harappan
>>language was of the suffixing type (like Dravidian), not of the
>>prefixing type (like Indo-Aryan).
>>
>>
>
>This claim, which has been endlessly repeated, is totally unsupported
>even by the raw (if not interpreted) data found in those old studies.
>In fact, as we point out in footnote 5 of our 2004 paper, data from
>your own concordance unambiguously falsifies your own core claim.
>
>Any pretence to conducting a "scientific study" that ignores evidence
>of this sort can't be taken seriously:
>
>
>
>>...the claim is repeated often that positional regularities in the
>>symbols prove that the ‘script’ encoded an exclusively suffixing
>>language (cf., e.g., Knorozov 1968, 1970; Parpola, Koskenniemi,
>>Parpola, and Aalto 1969: 20-1; Fairservis 1992; Mahadevan 1986;
>>Possehl 1996: 164; 2002a: 136) — which not coincidentally would rule
>>out early Indo-Aryan or Munda languages, since these included
>>prefixing and (in the case of Munda) extensive infixing as well.
>>However, even using the Dravidian proponents’ own data (e.g.,
>>Mahadevan 1977: Table 1, 717-23), it is easy to show that positional
>>regularities of single Indus signs (and the same is true of sign
>>clusters) are just as common in the middle and at the supposed start
>>(or righthand side) of Indus inscriptions as at their supposed end,
>>which if we accepted this whole line of reasoning could be claimed as
>>evidence in the system of extensive infixing and prefixing —
>>ironically ruling out Dravidian as a linguistic substrate.
>>
>>
>
>Your response? You can't just ignore this evidence, unless you are
>satisfied with just talking to mass audiences via newspaper articles.
>But that isn't "science," which deals with evidence, counter-evidence,
>etc.
>
>Your other claims about the Indus symbols supposedly encoding Dravidian
>are equally out of date, and have been for a long time. You point,
>e.g., to the "survival" of Dravidian languages like Brahui in North
>India, but most historical linguists today (and Michael can comment
>better than I can on the evidence here) view Brahui as a medieval
>arrival in North India, not an ancient "survival" of an older
>distribution in the north of Dravidian languages.
>
>You also point to the "presence of Dravidian loan words in the Rig
>Veda." Unfortunately, it has been known for at least a decade that such
>loan words are NOT found in early strata of the text, which argues
>again strongly *against* an early Dravidian presence in NW historical
>India. This is again explicitly discussed in our paper (p. 45) and in
>Witzel 1999, 2003.
>
>Any scientific approach to the Indus inscriptions obviously can't be
>based on the kind of evidence you cite, which has been out of date for
>decades.
>
>3. There are lots of other types of evidence that you just ignore. The
>most obvious has to do with the absurdly short length of Indus
>inscriptions, which in your concordance average no more than 4.6
>symbols in length -- no matter what kinds of materials they were placed
>on. That certainly isn't like any writing system encountered in any
>other society, in any part of the world.
>
>Hence our $10,000 challenge to anyone who comes up with a
>(non-existent) well-provenanced "long" Indus inscription, even one a
>scant 50 symbols long! For details on our prize, see:
>
>http://www.safarmer.com/indus/prize.html
>
>We wouldn't make that challenge, quite obviously, unless the data
>indicated that no such inscriptions ever existed. :^)
>
>As we note in our paper, the standard way of getting around the problem
>of the absurd brevity of the inscriptions -- invented in desperation in
>the 1920s by Hunter and Marshall, and unquestioned until 2001 -- was to
>claim that all supposedly long Indus texts were written on perishable
>writing materials. But a close look at this thesis (for details, again
>see our paper, pp. 22-26), shows that the claim is quite impossible.
>
>There are several ways to demonstrate that (for details, see our
>paper, pp. 22-26), but the simplest is to point to a powerful piece of
>cross-cultural evidence, stated a bit tongue-in-cheek (although the
>argument is dead serious) in our "one-sentence refutation of the
>Indus-script myth":
>
>http://www.safarmer.com/indus/simpleproof.html
>
>The punchline:
>
>
>
>>No ancient literate civilizations are known — not even those that
>>wrote extensively on perishable materials — that did not also leave
>>long texts behind on durable materials.
>>
>>
>
>NB: there are no counterexamples, anywhere in the world.
>
>How do you deal with this problem? The Harappans certainly weren't shy
>about public displays of their symbols: they put them on well over a
>dozen different types of materials, and even apparently hung them on
>their city walls, as in the case of the so-called signboard at
>Dholavira. All symbol chains -- and we now have thousands of them --
>are uniformly short. That is not like any "writing system" anywhere in
>the world.
>
>You can't just ignore evidence like this: you have to deal with it, if
>you want to promote "scientific study" of the Indus symbols.
>
>4. Finally, I'd like to comment on something you say about your views
>supposedly being free of any ideology, which is contradicted by a lot
>of evidence.
>
>You write:
>
>
>
>>I should like to lay particular emphasis on the fact that the IRC
>>[your new "Indus Research Centre"] is a forum for scientific
>>investigations without any ideological bias. This does not of course
>>mean that the centre will not undertake research into the linguistic
>>aspects of the Indus Script. After all, linguistic decipherment of the
>>Indus Script is the ultimate objective of research. What we mean when
>>we say there should be no ideological bias is that we should not start
>>with preconceived notions or presuppositions and tailor our research
>>to fit into ideology-driven linguistic models.
>>
>>
>
>The preconceived notion arises from the claim that these short symbol
>chains are supposedly markers of a literate society. You can throw in
>the word "linguistic" as many times as you want, but using the word
>doesn't mean that you've offered any evidence for your views or
>answered all the quite explicit evidence cited against it.
>
>Also ideological is the claim you keep making that the "language of
>the Indus inscriptions" is Dravidian. You've pushed that idea for
>decades in the face of all counter-evidence, as noted above.
>
>There is clearly a nationalistic component at work here. Most
>tellingly, last year, when that supposed Indus axehead of *extremely*
>dubious authenticity showed up in Tamil Nadu, conveniently carrying a
>sign that you (alone) claim stands for the Tamil god Murukan (!), you
>quickly publicized it, despite all the oddities in the piece. You again
>used The Hindu as your outlet, rather than a scholarly forum where the
>authenticity of the piece would be questioned -- as it was questioned,
>sharply, on this List.
>
>To date, not even one high-resolution photo of that inscription has
>been released, I suspect for quite obvious reasons. It wouldn't take
>much to decide on the authenticity or inauthenticity of this particular
>artifact.
>
>Why at a minimum hasn't a high-resolution photo of it been released?
>Can you provide us with one?
>
>*****************
>
>In any event, there is in fact a lot to talk about. If you want a real
>discussion of the evidence, point-by-point, let's do it on the List in
>front of everyone. I promise you we could do it in an orderly way and
>quickly get to the bottom of all this.
>
>My best wishes,
>Steve
>
>
>
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