On the Discipline of Linguistics

We are reminded to use a safety or trigger word before discussing unpleasant or difficult topics – to protect the fragile minds of our readers.  We do not think a word can have the desired protective “alert” effect.  So from now on we will use a “safety picture” – this one – which will signify an upcoming quasi-cerebral section (quasi because this is a blog not a textbook – readers with 90 plus IQs will not notice anything):

Linguistics is an interesting discipline with much to say about language formation, history, etc.  However, we are moved to point out that linguistics is not, as some would have it, a science.  It is no more than the study of patterns, which patterns may or may not be there in reality.  It should then be obvious that the linguists’ “laws” or “rules” are nothing of the sort.  They are in fact merely observations that may, if they are well laid out, more often than not, inform our assessment of some unknown quantity.  Their usefulness should be appreciated for they come against the backdrop of pre-19th century beliefs in the essential randomness of language development.  But, at the same time, their predictions should never be stated with the hubris of absolute certainty, deserving instead, and depending on the scenario, a good mark to the extent they produce more likely than not results in the observable realm of language.  As regards, the languages of the past, however, we must not forget that the linguists’ predictions can almost never be actually tested (we say almost never because one can imagine scenarios where some new artifact hitherto unknown comes to light and proves or sinks the validity of some prediction).  Even physics admits the existence of essentially random events via the propositions of quantum dynamics and linguistics, if anything, should be humbler than physics and certainly humbler than its professors frequently make it out to be.

That is to state the obvious.  But another observation here is, we think, useful.  Linguists live in their own world and seek to establish their propositions for reasons of their own.  To achieve that they frequently borrow from historians and archeologists without analyzing what the “other-disciplinary crutch” they just borrowed actually rests on.  When historians and archeologists look for their own crutch by, in turn, relying on linguists statements (and they should all fess up because, loathe that they may be to admit it, they – being all academics – actually do borrow from across the intra disciplinary aisle) it may happen that both sides come to realize, too late, that there is, in fact, no crutch there at all.

As we have seen already, historians have asserted that linguistics may help us determine the location of the “homeland” of the Slavs.  These ingenious folks took a look at certain words and, seeing as some of them were described by their colleagues the linguists as Germanic, classified them too as such and proceeded in turn to appropriate areas where such words may have relevance for the Germanic tribes and conversely exclude from those areas the Slavs.  This logic has its evident problems such as, for example, assuming the assumption as to the nature of a given word is correct, one must further assume no existence in the remote past of a similar Slavic word that then was not replaced by a Germanic one for a variety of reasons.  Nonetheless, as no one can be expected to prove a negative we are willing to let such considerations be put aside initially.  There is however another problem here.  The linguists themselves are interested only in linguistics and they look to the historians to help them with their own assumptions.  This raises what is a classic “chicken and the egg” problem.

Sometimes, the linguists can own the entire chicken/egg problem themselves even without resorting to other disciplines.  To give one recent example from the otherwise very interesting “The Germanic loanwords in Proto-Slavic” book by Saskia Pronk-Tiethoff:

“In view of the probable location of the Proto-Slavic and the Proto-Germanic homelands, it is highly unlikely that the contacts between the Slavic and Germanic tribes started before the time the Proto-Slavs began to spread into central Europe and onto the Balkans, and before the time the Goths had moved into the Pontic area.  It can therefore be excluded that any Slavic loanwords were borrowed into Proto-Germanic, for when the first contacts came about, Proto-Germanic as a linguistic unity had ceased to exist.  If it is possible to prove or put a convincing case for Proto-Slavic loanwords in Germanic, these must therefore be words that were either borrowed into Gothic or into West Germanic (or possibly even into Northwest Germanic); if an alleged loan-word is attested in all branches of Germanic, the word is hardly likely to stem from Slavic.”*

In other words, if you want to determine the homeland of the Slavs, you cannot use linguistics to do that.  Why?  Because linguistics cannot answer what was borrowed from what without relying on assumptions about the location of such a “homeland.”

So… take a word a version of which appears in all Germanic languages.  Say, buk for our notorious beech tree.

This word is Germanic in origin.

Why?

Because it cannot have come from Slavic.

Why?

Because it is in all Germanic languages and therefore must have been in Proto-Germanic.

So what?

Well, Slavs did not live close enough to Germans when there was in existence one proto-Germanic language so Slavic > Germanic cannot have occurred.

How do we know that?

Because Slavs do not have their own word for a beech tree.

But don’t they have buk?

No, silly – we’ve already explained that this is a Germanic word (see above).

End of story.

So what does this actually look like? Like this:

[S-T at 4.1.4 discussing “Proto-Slavic” homeland: “Proto-Slavic inherited the word[s] for beech… which was borrowed from Germanic – see 5.2” below and, therefore, according to her, the proto-Slavic homeland must have been to the East of the beech line – so now we know where the proto-Slavic homeland was]

[S-T at 5.2 discussing “beech”: “The word could have been borrowed by the Slavs in connection with the writing on slabs of beechwood… Alternatively, the borrowing might be connected to the spread of the Slavs from their original homeland to the west [as we know this location was established at 4.1.4 above]”; S-T then talks here about the Kaliningrad/Elbe-Odessa line and concludes regarding buk: “origin: Germanic” – stating that the only thing that is yet unknown is which Germanic language the borrowing was made from]

This kind of an issue is more easily determinable (assuming you are willing to scratch your head for a moment) but S-T’s other gymnastics actually require some effort to look behind the curtain.  She says, for example, that Slavic did not have its own marine vocabulary citing Schenker’s work.  If you actually trouble yourself, however, and shell out some cash or visit a library, you will note that Schenker does make this claim but… (perhaps this should be obvious?) cites precisely no one for the proposition (it seems that the claim can be traced back to Meillet and we will deal with that in due time).

* This is merely a flavor of the problem.  One may also ask why the word could not have been Proto-Indo European? (Supposedly, amongst other reasons because we know that there are no beech trees in the East and we know that the PIEs migrated from the East.  But did they? We get into the same quandary here).

One too may ask why a Slavic word could not have spread to all Germanic languages after contact was made (In whatever century – even if only in 5th/6th)?

Now, there are other reasons why buk may be Germanic but they are irrelevant to the above illustration which could have been done with any number of other words.

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