quote:

I offer you a new and radical idea that opens up vast vistas for your imaginative intellect and your chief concern is what palaeolithic label is appropriate or what language is spoken.

Hmm... I feel I am being patronised here..

Listen, Open up vistas, but don't open them up if they are badly painted screen sets with fairy tale castles in the distance.

Research, get it right, research again... check to make sure that your entire theory is based on more than just "Maybe" and I will listen to you.

So far I have seen your theory demolished time and time again... I raise my aht that you still eblieve it... but teh best researcher will always be ready to ammend, improve and adjust.. not doggedly continue without being aware of the evidence pressing into the comfort zone.

Based upon the bizzare assuption... and that is all you have... that somebody in england in teh 11th C(who, where) could not understand Chaucer... good grief... save me!

quote:

Originally posted by M J Harper:
Anglo-Saxon was written in the Twelfth century and English was written in the fourteenth century [...] It is our contention that no language can change with this kind of speed

A contention which is wrong, but that aside...
What ACTUALLY in all this Wycliffe - King James- Chaucer and Uncle Tom Cobly special pleading is so improbable in the version accepted by the rest of us? Anglo-Saxon changed in the Early Medieval period just like any other language does, with the establishment of "Norse rule' in various bits of the British Isles, the Norman conquest and the establishment of an 'Anglo-Norman' elite, the use of French in courtly circles and Latin in many others (together with the persistence of the writing of chronicles in Anglo-Saxon alongside others written in Latin), the rich dialect differences across the many communities involved, the spread of literacy in the vernacular starting with works such as Layamon's Brut. This coincides of course with the other great vernacular literatures in Wales and Ireland (earlier) where similar processes were operating. With the establishment of more widespread literacy and then after Caxton printing in the vernacular, the language becomes stabilised, which is why we can understand Chaucer but not Bede or Beowulf (which is NOT as MJH would have it a "Tudor forgery!!!).

I really do not see that this is any great problem, and I CERTAINLY dont see that this illusory "Chaucer connundrum" requires there to have been "English" spoken in pre-Roman Britain.

quote:

Originally posted by M J Harper:
Take my statement about advancing ice sheets destroying all evidence. You all immediately thought, "That's obvious, I knew that." But you didn't, you were hearing it for the first time.

Well, that is unless you had read almost any undergraduate textbook or even a good general book on... British prehistory, the European Palaeolithic, Quaternary geology, Quaternary stratigraphy, palaeoenvironments, the development of archaeologiocal/geological chronologies (that is epistemology isn't it?) or a whole load of other things. Acually the concept is well enough known to about every moderately bright first year archaeology undergraduate I have ever taught or examined. It is the BASIS on which the sequence of the Alpine icesheets (Gunz, Mindel, Riss, Wurm) was established from the 1870s onwards , it is the BASIS of establishing the relative chronologies of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental finds RIGHT ACROSS northern Europe. It is the stratigraphic position of archaeological finds in and between the deposits associated with the advances and retreats of these ice sheets which (a) allowed the antiquity of man to be established in the first place and (b) allows us to establish a relative chronology for various palaeolithic sites and finds.

You wrote about this earlier and there muddled two completely different glaciations saying that the "last" one obliterated all traces of all the previous ones. If that was the case (and it is NOT) 19th century geologists would have had a lot of difficulty seeing that there were more than one would't they? But though I am sure you will label them all "nincompoops" too, they actually cottoned on pretty quickly. There is a sequence of morraine deposits and associated sediments in the Alps and across northern Europe. And its there because what you described as a "fact" (which only you know and the "nincompoop" "authorities" allegedly do not) simply did not take place. Another made up "fact" Mr Harper which actually anyopne who cares to look can check out, its a pity you did not before making such a statement which can only reduce your credibility further.

With reference to your earlier rather embarrassing faux pas about "Ice Age Mesolithic people", there is a huge region of central and eastern Europe which was not under ice sheets and in which various Late Palaeolithic and Epipalaeolithic sites and cultures are very well studied by some really clever blokes and their chronological and spatial relationship with the various Mesolithic groupings (ditto) is entirely clear. In the west these are clearly cultural assemblages with close affinities to those in the North Sea region. I think we can safely put your "iconoclastic" revelation about the possibility of "Ice Age Mesolithic" people that the "nincompoops" dont know about among the other fantasies which I am sorry to say really have no basis in any kind of fact.

quote:

These people (if they were there) were speaking a language and we don't know what it was. But it opens up large vistas of time for the evolution of very slowly-evolving languages.

But if you say that you don't know what this language was, you can't say that it evolved. It may have simply disappeared.

best

Harry A

quote:

But someone writing Anglo-Saxon in 1120 sure as hell wouldn’t have been understood by someone reading English in 1350. Practically every word is different.

Why not make a list of say, 100 of the most commonly used words in 1120 and compare them with the same for 1350?

best

harry A

<<Mr Harper has to explain how it is that his postulated pre-Roman *proto-English survived all that time in the conditions his theory demand of it. Of course he will not.... because the problems only occur if we expect "his" hypothetical language to behave like all others do,>>

Well, PMB, it rather depends on whether you are going to believe the evidence or the experts. You have a fondness for the latter but not the former. (No wonder we all patronise you.)

Experts, and now I am including Classical sources, have a great tendency to overelaborate. When you are writing about a subject this a built-in tendency because you have space to fill (whether it's a book or a lecture). But academia (and Classical sources) are built on precedent ie they cite their predecessors, so academic subjects speedily become a set of Chinese Whispers in which models, speculations, hypotheses et al start to accrete into "fact", or at any rate "things we firmly believe". The tendency is vastly inflated in areas like pre-history and palaeolinguistics where real facts are disconcertingly rare.

Applied Epistemology simply comes along and sorts out what is theory and what is fact. But as many of you here will have observed, just pointing out that such-and-such is actually a theory rather than a fact brings a storm about one's head.

So it is with the death of languages. It is undeniably true that in the special circumstances of an advanced culture meeting a backward culture for the first time, languages get killed wholesale. Because the people get killed wholesale (whether by ethnic cleansing or infectious diseases). But even so it is likely that the number of languages gets wildly exaggerated simply because Conquistadors or British colonists are not, generally speaking, students of languages so by the time linguists do turn up they are left with accounts of "Well, we were seven nations each with a different language..." and that might get entered into the lists as seven languages when in truth it's one language with seven dialects. But as I say, this a tendency, I do not wish here to say that the reported languages of native North America was in the hundreds (some say, thousands) definitely cannot be true. [New Guinea will turn out to be a good test case.]

But anyway let's turn our attention to Western Europe around nought AD. Applied Epistemologists apply the "What is is what was" rule and say the languages then were pretty much what they are now. In other words, far from languages being slender shoots in need of constand tender loving care...they are in fact pretty well ineradicable.

We say this because as soon as we have definite evidence of the language situation (when people started writing in their own language and therefore the evidence is unambiguous) we get a very different picture of "Languages -- Dead or Alive".
English -- ALIVE spoken throughout the British Isles
Welsh -- ALIVE spoken in West Wales
Cornish -- DEAD but now known to be a dialect of Welsh.
Lallan Scots -- DEAD. But now known to be a dialect of English.
Gaelic -- ALIVE but poorly Now known to be a dialect of Irish
Irish -- ALIVE but even more poorly
French -- ALIVE spoken everywhere in France
Breton -- DEAD but now known to be a dialect of Welsh
Occitan -- ALIVE but under pressure
Romansch -- POORLY still spoken in a few valleys in Switzerland
Castillian -- ALIVE spoken all over Spain
Basque -- ALIVE spoken by many people around the Bay of Biscay
Catalan -- Alive spoken by many people in south-eastern Spain
Portuguese -- ALIVE spoken throughout Portugal.

In sum, it would seem that all languages have survived but very small pockets of dialects have died out. However this sample is undeniably skewed by being the ones that were written down and that therefore we have unambiguous evidence for. You are invited to offer up any other languages that you believe to have existed in this area of Europe but have subsequently DIED. Please take care when making your claims that you have checked whether it really is a discrete language.

<<But if you say that you don't know what this language was, you can't say that it evolved. It may have simply disappeared.>>

Yes, that is the case. I am merely pointing out that the canvas on which language change takes place is larger than we normally assume. Orthodoxy uses the Ice Sheets as a terminal point and talks of human beings (that is Cro-Magnon human beings) occupying Britain for the first time in 12,000 BP. I am merely pointing out that it may be the case that people have been intermittently occupying the general area of the British Isles for, say, 100,000 years.

One of the problems in language morphology is that we have this very strange view of Neolithic people. We know they must have been speaking languages but we cannot bring ourselves to think of them speaking OUR languages. But there is absolutely no reason why they can't have been (suitably modified to take into account ordinary organic development).

Both undue assumptions lead to severe telescoping when it comes to contemplating overall time-scales for the Evolution of Modern Languages. The Academics persist in assuming that they have only a few thousand years to go from "Caveman Language" to the New York Times, when in reality it may be tens of thousand of years to go from Caveman English to Todays' English.

I trust you are reading PMB's angry expostulations about how every first year undergraduate knows about ice erasing evidence and drawing the correct conclusions.

quote:

You are invited to offer up any other languages that you believe to have existed in this area of Europe but have subsequently DIED.

MJ, you go as far as Spain but omit Italy and don't include Latin. Don't you include Latin as a discrete language or is it geographically out of bounds?

best

HA

quote:

Both undue assumptions lead to severe telescoping when it comes to contemplating overall time-scales for the Evolution of Modern Languages. The Academics persist in assuming that they have only a few thousand years to go from "Caveman Language" to the New York Times, when in reality it may be tens of thousand of years to go from Caveman English to Todays' English.

I understand that you hold that language may evolve much more slowly than perceived wisdom claims it does. Proving it, or at least gaining more widespread acceptance, requires some 'get down and get dirty' work. You need a working hypothesis and show that the difference between modern and middle english is not as great as scholars would have us believe. Simply stating, "it's obvious" isn't enough. From where I am standing, it looks like a good in between stage.

best

Harry A

quote:

Proving it, or at least gaining more widespread acceptance, requires some 'get down and get dirty' work.

Applied Epistemologists prefer to leave the hard work to you's fellers. We're just here to get you started.

quote:

Originally posted by PMB:
In that case would you argue that the only way the Slavic languages can appear over a huge area of eastern Europe within a few centuries is that "they were spoken across this whole area before"? That is since time immemorial?

That would be our starting position. And it would remain our ending position unless overwhelming evidence is found to the contrary.

We assume stasis unless a different set of circumstances is conclusively shown to have existed in the past.

quote:

Trouble is we know they were not.

You don't "know" anything of the kind. You have a reasonably simple model that appears to fit the evidence and is premised upon this notion. There may be a simpler model but you will never look for it so long as you confuse this state of affairs with "knowledge."

quote:

In the same area there are comparable language replacements of a similar nature (the Magyars someone here mentioned by mistake for example). Languages do replace others. Arabic for example.

All of this, we would be deeply suspicious of, from an Epistemological perspective.

Direct observation does not support the notion of rapid language change. The empirical evidence goes the other way: indicating that languages change at a glacial pace.

It is certainly possible that some languages, some times, in some circumstances changed very quickly. But that so many are said by scholars to have done so suggests there is something seriously wrong with the underlying assumptions of academia in this regard.

quote:

I asked him a question about how identity of its speakers was maintained, he apparently did not understand the question. If the language spoken does not belong to a cultural package which forms individual and group identity, individuals shift to the majority language to be in a group in which it does and offers social benefits.

It appears we've poorly communicated the thesis. I apologize.

To be clear. Harper maintains not only that English was spoken in Britain "before the Romans", he maintains that English was the language of the majority.

It just so happens that the majority was the peasant class, alternately ruled by Romans, Danes, Anglo-Saxons, Normans -- what have you. All of these elites were minority elites. However, the native language was an unwritten language and did not emerge in written form until the political situation resolved itself in favour of the native population.

Unfortunately, I'm sure you will find this model even more difficult to swallow. Nevertheless, we maintain that it is more rational than the only available alternative.

quote:

Originally posted by Harry Amp:
You need a working hypothesis and show that the difference between modern and Middle English is not as great as scholars would have us believe. Simply stating, "it's obvious" isn't enough.

I sort-of tend to agree.

On one hand, I know that my direct experience confirms Harper's view of Middle English. Before I read THOBR, I found Chaucer impossible to read except in “translation.” My brain could not see the words as anything other than an indecipherable alien language. After I read THOBR, I could pick up Chaucer and read him in his own words (and I soon realized the “translations” were indefensibly misleading). Once my paradigm changed, I could see what was before impossible to see (which says a lot about how our brains work).

On the other hand, I too yearn for measurable, quantifiable data that does not rely on a subjective judgment of the relative clarity of a bit of poetry.

To this end, some time back, I attempted to measure the rate of rhythmic and rhyming consistency in Chaucer, as rendered in Standard English. My goal was to contrast this measure with the rhyming and rhythmic consistency in Scholastic reconstructions of "Middle English." Unfortunately, I never completed the experiment as the rigour necessary, for testing purposes, in defining what would constitutes a "standard" modern vocabulary was just way more work than I could possibly justify.

However, I did do a number on "non-scientific" tests along the same lines and the results were excellent. I took Chaucer, transposed his text into my own vocabulary, and then counted the number of rhymes and the number of lines with consistent syllabic counts. I then took patches of Tennyson of similar length and counted the number of rhymes and syllable variances. Chaucer did about as well as Tennyson (Chaucer does very well on rhymes but his syllable count from line to line, in my modern English, is not as consistent as is Tennyson).

Try the experiment yourself. See what you get.

You should also compare your own “modern” rendition of Chaucer with audio-recordings of academic readings. Then you make the call as to which is closer to Chaucer's real language: you're own version of English or the consensus reconstruction of "Middle English" made by academics.

quote:

Originally posted by M J Harper:
Cornish -- DEAD but now known to be a dialect of Welsh.
Lallan Scots -- DEAD. But now known to be a dialect of English.
Gaelic -- ALIVE but poorly Now known to be a dialect of Irish
Irish -- ALIVE but even more poorly
French -- ALIVE spoken everywhere in France
Breton -- DEAD but now known to be a dialect of Welsh

Just to reiterate Ishmael's thrust, when we do put in a bit of hard work it doesn't get us any further. If you remember, I posted up three examples -- T S Elliot from the 20th century, Chaucer from the 14th century, and Caedmon from the 8th century. I thought I had demonstrated that "the halfway house" was not in fact a halfway house but was all-but-Modern English.

I then cut the halfway house in half again by pointing out that 11th century Anglo-Saxon is just as Anglo-Saxon (or at least as non-English) as it was in the 8th century. In other words, the 'halfway house' is in reality about 99% the whole way there.

But as you know, it has done me no good. whatsoever.

But it has done me no good

<<MJ, you go as far as Spain but omit Italy and don't include Latin. Don't you include Latin as a discrete language or is it geographically out of bounds?>>

The situation is the same anywhere you look in Europe (as far as I know, I don't know the east as well as I do the west). I deliberately left out Italy precisely because I didn't want to deal with Latin. Our views about Latin are fairly radical, and I didn't think the horses needed any more frightening at this stage of the proceedings.

quote:

Orthodoxy uses the Ice Sheets as a terminal point and talks of human beings (that is Cro-Magnon human beings) occupying Britain for the first time in 12,000 BP. I am merely pointing out that it may be the case that people have been intermittently occupying the general area of the British Isles for, say, 100,000 years.

My problem here is a state of being where you exist by saying this is true now prove me wrong.. -- give me overwhelming evidence.. ah... but not that.. er... or that.. nope... not that... etc etc... until you can say... see... no evidence.

Cro-Magnon (type site Les Ezyies, France) date range : 40,000 to 10,000

sites from that range in the UK include Cresswell Crags, Wye Valley

Earliest known occupation of Britian
700,000BP from Pakefield
or what about Swanscombe around 1/4 million years ago..

That aside.. I realise it will be impossible to knock you off your teetering ivory perch, as you will fall back on the ... " I can say what I like, becuase you can't prove me wrong' arguement. You don't need evidence, so that make life easier... Well, I am afraid to be taking seriously, you have to have it... and like it or not... you will never have any...

I might write a book about how Mesolithic/Epipaleolithic hunters spoke Broad Scots.. why not...? and while I am at it they were all called McTavish...

go on ... prove me wrong..... you mean you can't... superb, I must be right then.

Am I getting the hang of being an applied Epistemologist yet...?

quote:

Am I getting the hang of being an applied Epistemologist yet...?

Nope. But I'll let you know.

quote:

Originally posted by 1shmael:
Applied Epistemologists prefer to leave the hard work to you's fellers. We're just here to get you started.

Well, no actually that is not what “applied epistemology” means. As for what you lot take it to mean we can look in the index of the text said by devotees of this “subculture” (sic) to be its “foundation”. That is Harper’s self-indulgent little rant, “The History of Britain Revealed, the Shocking Truth about the British Language”. This tells us that the “methodology” (surely a tautology in itself…) of what it calls “Applied epistemology” is set out (only) on page 4 of said rant. It reads:”that’s what we applied epistemologists do: we take a subject […] we dissemble (sic !!) it down to basic paradigms, we examine those paradigms and if we burst out laughing we know we are in business ”. That’s it. Not a word of on what basis the comic qualities or otherwise of “basic paradigms” are defined, neither is the methodology of how those paradigms themselves are defined set out. We have seen here that Harper knows next to nothing about some of the subjects he claims to stand in judgement over (though claiming privileged knowledge superior to those scholars he obviously has a chip on his shoulder about)… so on what basis is this “dissembling” (sic) done? Actually the term Applied Epistemology has a specific meaning which is far different from that which Harper and Ishmael assign it.

It is obviously as much point discussing anything here with either of the members of this mis-called “Applied Epistemological” subculture as it would be discussing it with Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat Sagdiyev. In fact I am beginning to suspect that Harper and Borat have more than a little in common – “just a theory” you understand…

quote:

Originally posted by BAJR:
Am I getting the hang of being an applied Epistemologist yet...?

Looks a lot like it to me. This turns out to be a "subculture" of internet anti-academic happy slapping of a group of sad people apparently with a chip on their shoulder about scholars generally. They have a pathetic website which is "confidential" but I am not going to give them free advertising here.

It seems clear to me that this is just a put-up job of trolling this Forum in order to generate interest in and probably advance orders for Harper's nnext not-yet-published (Feb 2008) book.

Since it is quite clear that they have not the foggiest idea of what they or we are talking about and are just intent on attempting to be patronising and insulting, I suggest not feeding the trolls and let them get back to their own poorly-frequented little site.

Nothing WHATSOEVER supports the idea that English was spoken in Pre-Roman Britain, and I seriously doubt whether in fact even M. J. Harper (if that's his or her real name) actually believes it was. "Its only a theory" he protests. It seems clear only to be a fairy tale, and let's leave it there please.

I still think Henry Root was most influential in MJ's methodology.

best

harry A

Let me try to convey what Applied Epistemology can do for you by replying carefully to BAJR's posting.

<<My problem here is a state of being where you exist by saying this is true now prove me wrong.. -- give me overwhelming evidence.. ah... but not that.. er... or that.. nope... not that... etc etc... until you can say... see... no evidence.>>

All I said was that ice sheets blot out evidence and that you might care to take that into account when thinking about your subject. I have not said people did or did not live in Britain in earlier times. I merely said that orthodoxy (and by implication, you) have hitherto ignored the possibility. That's the first essential function of Applied Epistemology: to point out new horizons.

<<Cro-Magnon (type site Les Ezyies, France) date range : 40,000 to 10,000, sites from that range in the UK include Cresswell Crags, Wye Valley>>

Right. That's the heart of the matter. We have spent our lives thinking of Cro-Magnon as going back to 40,000 years (which is perfectly reasonable given the dates of all Cro-Nagnon sites). We have spent our our lives thinking of Cro-Magnon as going back to 12,000 in Britain (which is entirely unreasonable because we know that for some of the time between 12,000 and 40,000 conditions in Britain were perfectly well within