Gadianton wrote:It's the only outright quote that admits Stubbs methods rather than his thesis about Near East infusion are non-standard. Lindsay, Peterson, Midgley, Robert F., and the myriad of Junior apologists who have commented mistakenly believe that Stubbs is using tried-and-true methods to demonstrate an unpopular thesis, in particular, they think he's using methods that show descent, which is the mistake Rogers allegedly made (I haven't read his paper myself). Neither Robertson nor Elzinga nor Stubbs himself clarify one way or the other. Robertson and Stubbs certainly have clarified that he is not showing descent, but they do not offer any other work that shows borrowing determined by sound laws alone, however, neither do they say that what Stubbs is doing is atypical. I have a feeling they don't want to clarify that too much because if the method and the thesis is controversial, it's even more hopeless. They don't want scholars tainted before hitting the raw material, as they think the data will wow any honest-minded inquirer. Apparently, that hands-off approach has caused more confusion than anything, as much or more on their own team as with critics.
The lack of clarity about his thesis remains one of Stubbs' central problems. The book implies genetic descent, not least of all by formulating the rules for sound change, and says as much in a quote I provided on the other thread. The same book also suggests a "mixed language" scenario, so it is hardly consistent in its argument.
The concept of a mixed language is itself a little bit controversial, but in any case Stubbs' discussion of mixed languages in his book is quite inaccurate. He mentions Spanglish, which is closer to what a mixed language is, but while I have indulged Stubbs' and Robertson's preferred point of comparison throughout this, the fact is that English is not a mixed language. Stubbs and Robertson treat Middle English (the forerunner of Modern English, obviously) as a mixture of Old English and Norman French, but that isn't so. Perhaps they could contact Royal Skousen to learn more, but the fact is that quite a lot of the grammatical features of Middle English were already well along in the later period of Old English by the time of the Norman conquest in the late 11th century. Most Middle English texts from the 11th to the early 14th century contain very little French influence. More than Old English, to be sure, but anyone who wishes to slog through Layamon's Brut or to delight in Ancrene Wisse will not get very far with French: if you don't know Old English, these Middle English texts will look like they were written by a German imagining what English is. The French element in English consisted of loanwords, with infusion really coming in large doses in the late 13th century and especially the 14th century. A look at history will tell you why: the expansion of the chancery under Edward I on the one hand and the Hundred Years' War on the other. Both of these developments fueled the spread of French throughout all levels of English society. But I emphasize: that spread didn't effect the grammar of English and didn't effect the morphology. The infusion of French was an infusion of loanwords, and the grammatical and phonological structures of English were unaffected by this infusion. Ottoman Turkish and Farsi are further examples; both of these manifest a heavy Arabic element in their vocabulary but no phonological effect and no grammatical effect to speak of (the Arabic plurals of Arabic loanwords don't affect the grammars of these languages, since they can occur only on loanwords and even then don't occur regularly, which is the same as what English does with certain French loanwords like “attorneys general”).
They really need to retire this analogy, because it is not at all what Robertson seems to be proposing, and his use of this analogy adds more confusion about just what it is that Stubbs is proposing. Robertson uses the term "borrowing," but what was borrowed? Assuming that Robertson has actually thought of the implications of what he has said, I can see two possibilities:
1) Robertson’s analogy with English and French, bad as it is, together with some of his replies in the comments section suggest that he thinks that speakers of proto-UA borrowed a huge part of their core, everyday vocabulary from the Egyptian-Semitic hybrid of the Nephites and adapted it to their phonological system. That at least explains why Stubbs formulates rules, which are discussed as if they were sound changes, but on this interpretation he is actually restating proto-UA phonology as he reconstructs it. In any case, this is the position that has claimed most of the attention of this and the other thread, which discuss the problems with this view.
2) Since Stubbs' examples consist of core vocabulary (where are the borrowings of Nephite religious or military or political terms!?), the other possibility is that the Nephites borrowed the phonology of proto-UA, because it is extremely unlikely that a speakers of a language would borrow most of their language’s core vocabulary and do so without borrowing any of the phonology of the donor language—and in that case, they would essentially be adopting a new language. Therefore, whatever language that group spoke before adopting the new one would be beyond recovery in the absence of written records or independent testimony. In short, since 1) is not really possible Robertson on this view leaves us with a scenario in which the Nephites borrowed the phonology of proto-Uto-Aztecan in pronouncing their own language. That is unlikely in the extreme. Yes, you can find situations where close proximity to language A means that language B will be influenced. The Parisian R, for instance, is an areal phenomenon that affected the northern zone of High German, but the south still pronounces R with a trilled R, and until the mid 20th century, large parts of southern France still pronounced R with a trill, as well. Czech, almost alone among the Slavic languages, has word-initial stress, probably because its proximity to German. But these are areal features, not wholesale borrowing of entire phonological systems. 2) is just absurd.
Stubbs himself has added more particularity, as well as more confusion, in later comments. On Jeff Lindsay's blog, I find this statement, which seems to endorse 2) on the face of it:
all the main United Airlines pronouns are from Semitic or Egytian [sic], as is a relatively high percent of its basic vocabulary: head, eyes, nose, cheek, neck, hair, shoulder, chest, breast, waist, leg, calf, finger/toe, sun, sky, moon, rock, water, several kinds of trees / plants, man, woman, several kinds of animals and insects, etc, etc. Of course, much remains to be figured out of how it all happened, yet it’s beginning to look like, rather than a near east infusion into United Airlines, that other things came into the Near-Eastern base that United Airlines actually is, because both Semitic-kw terms (Mulek) and Semitic-p and Egyptian terms (Nephi) are in all branches of United Airlines, besides the actual Semitic terms for Nephites, both masc plural and feminine pl in some United Airlines languages.
Well, let us pretend for now that the confidence with which he makes such assertions is resting on something other than his imagination. Even so, you can see here that he has finally realized a serious problem that I mentioned above in this post and the other above: the core vocabulary. But there are problems with this as well. For one thing, it means that we have no way reconstructing proto-Uto-Aztecan before its affect on the the Nephite mixture of Egyptian and Semitic arrived on the scene—how would we even know that there was a language before that, because all of the rules that Stubbs' formulates could more easily be explained as just sound change from one stage of the language (or his two dialects) to a later one. There is no reason to posit a proto-Uto-Aztecan before that, and certainly no way to detect anything about it. You see, his claim in this quote is basically one of genetic descent. If United Airlines (as reconstructed by Stubbs) arises out of a "Near-Eastern base" of Egyptian and the two dialects of Semitic that he concocts, which themselves consist of language mixture (presumably a Hebrew base, with a heavy dose somehow of Aramaic from a later period, and some Arabic on the margins), then what language is influencing them? I don't know what could be linguistically vaguer than "other things came into." It seems that he must mean a kind of pre-proto-Uto-Aztecan (so, even farther back than proto-Uto-Aztecan, which is that much farther from any actual evidence). But I don't know. "Things" can mean anything. Someone who has Stubb's impossible-to-obtain Uto-Aztecan: A Comparative Vocabulary and the time to do so should see how many words remain after removing every instance used in his Book of Mormon work. That would tell you what is left from which to reconstruct Proto-Uto-Aztecan. Would there be anything left?
As I said early on, genetic descent is the only way that Stubbs' thesis can make any sense. Scenarios of borrowing or "mixed language" either rely on faulty analogies that simply don't hold up or require us to posit absurdities. Stubbs, at least in his comments posted on Lindsay's blog from last year, seems aware enough of these problems to suggest what is in effect genetic descent, even though he seems unwilling to admit it. The most he can claim (and the most he says in the blog comments) is that something else—"things"—effected the Hebreo-Arameo-Egyptian (+ Arabic on occasion) hybrid of the Nephites. If you don't have record of what that is, why posit it at all? My guess is that Stubbs wants to avoid "genetic descent" for the reasons that Kishkumen eloquently summarizes ("an apologetic theory built on exceptions and the multiplication of 'hemicycles.' If the data don’t work, create a new rule, or even a new dialect") and with the effect that Gadianton discerns with his usual piercing eye ("The advantage of as it stands, with methods employed nobody on their side in the know is willing to clarify, is they can retain the mantra of having something really technical that nobody is willing to investigate, and then work that angle at FAIR conferences for the next ten years").
Robertson, at least, should retract this piece. Ostensibly, he is defending Stubbs' book from a review he thinks is wrong. But I note that in attempting to clarify just what Stubbs' book says, he does not cite Stubbs' book under review at all or inform us what it says, so he is at best clarifying what he thinks Stubbs is doing. That he couches this as a correction of Chris Rogers makes it all suspiciously personal. His shoddy reasoning, misleading statements, and espousal of a view that Stubbs' himself doesn't seem to hold does no service to the thesis he seeks to defend.
