Kishkumen wrote:You are destroying Stubbs’ work. This is a bloodbath.
Well, I don't mean to be violent! But then you have just successfully put "destroy" and "bloodbath" in the same semantic field as "dispute," and that might be very helpful for discerning the long-distance connection English and Korean someday.
Philo Sofee wrote:Symmachus has demonstrated, for us know-it-nothings, that Stubbs has met his match. This is delightful to read Symm........THANK YOU for all your knowledge and efforts.
On the one hand, Philo, I am certainly not his match for Uto-Aztecan linguistics, but on the other one doesn't need to be. Each entry is headed by a claim about Semitic or Egyptian that supposedly illustrate a phonological rule; beneath each of these is a small-type paragraph containing lists of Uto-Aztecan words consisting of reconstructed forms or attested forms of various stages of Uto-Aztecan or its daughter languages; occasionally there is short commentary in those small-type paragraphs. All of that may be useful for the Uto-Aztecanist, but since almost all of the information in those paragraphs has to do with subsequent developments in Uto-Aztecan or variations of the supposed rules, it is not relevant for examining the question of contact between Semitic language and Egyptian at a given point in time. Only the earliest form matters, and one doesn't need to be an Uto-Aztecanist to see that a supposed rule applies to the earliest form in a handful of examples but not in all.
Furthermore, looking at the head sentences for each entry (the claims about Semitic and/or Egyptian), one can see that he uses Semitic evidence quite indiscriminately. His preferred language, obviously, is Hebrew, but when that doesn't work, he picks Aramaic, but so far all of the examples he cites comes from Middle Aramaic, when the Book of Mormon chronology that he envisions behind all of this requires Old Aramaic or at least Imperial-era Aramaic examples. One problem with that is that includes later grammatical features in his Aramaic examples that would not have existed at the time. Even admitting that, Aramaic was mutually unintelligible with Hebrew at the time the Nephites retired to Costa Rica, to say nothing of Egyptian. It's a bizarre scenario whereby Lehi and his family speak three languages with each other. Usually, multi-lingual (or at least bilingual) families means you speak one language with each other and other languages with those outside the group (perhaps Lehi was very progressive or intuited some Montessori principles, thus speaking Egyptian with the proto-Christians Nephi and Sam but Aramaic with the Sobek-worshipping Laman and Lemuel, and the brothers spoke Hebrew with each other and when they were practicing their early Judaism).
But ignoring that, when he can't find a Hebrew or Aramaic word, he goes to Arabic, which makes no sense since Arabic isn't even attested for several centuries after the Nephite exodus. That's just cheating. It would be one thing to paint a picture of Semito-Egyptian meeting Uto-Aztecan, but Stubbs' appeal is largely in his specificity: his rules, whether they hold up or not, are tightly defined and specific. So, he is specific in formulating rules, but the material out of which he fashions such rules is compiled apparently at random: but of course it isn't random. The conditioning factor in his compilation is the need to make his rule work. He gives himself a wide chronological span across four (and sometimes more) languages from which to draw evidence for all the stuff in the small-type paragraphs. For his model to work, though, he should only restrict himself to attested Hebrew forms and as early as possible.
That's like claiming there is a needle in a haystack and proving it by finding a needle in the drawer where the sewing kit is kept.
I read somewhere a while back Stubbs' response to this criticism, which was that any dictionary of Hebrew cites Arabic and Aramaic forms, so he was just doing what was traditional in Semitic lexicology. I won't charge him with misleading others, but he is at least misleading himself in that analogy. The reason why dictionaries cite cognate forms for ancient languages is 1) to show the evidence on which the lexicographer is basing his evidence and 2) to enable the user to exercise their best judgement in evaluating that evidence in order to determine the meaning of a word in a language for which no native speakers exist. It's a practical help. When you see this in a Hebrew dictionary, it does not mean that the the meanings are equivalent, nor does it mean that the cited Aramaic or Arabic cognate establishes some kind of rule. These are practical guides to help interpretation, not data set to be used in formulating rules. It's amateurish to think otherwise, and I think Stubbs probably knows better. At least I hope so.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie
