[lit-ideas] Re: On linguistic and genetic uncertainty
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 6 May 2014 16:15:55 -0400 (EDT)
Helm raises an interesting topic. It may be that when it comes to questions
of genetics, science gets involved with politics!
Anyway, some more detailed comments below. Oppenheimer was born (somewhere)
in England, of German ancestry, and he is now affiliated with I think the
newest college in Oxford.
The Wikipedia entry has two links on the 'myth' of genetics -- in the
second of which, carried out like a questionnaire, he gives some answers which
I
excerpt below.
Philosophers, like Grice was, are ALL sceptic. So my views are biased here.
Philosophers (like Grice) think that only
2 + 2 = 4
is necessary and apodeictic and certain. And that because it's vacuous!
Everything else has some degree of uncertainty! (And I treasure Grice's
lecture, "Intention and uncertainty"-- he thinks his own knowledge of his own
intentions (never mind his linguistic or genetic background) are
_uncertain_.
There is of course objective uncertainty ('it is uncertain that p') and
subjective uncertainty too ("I am uncertain as to p").
In a message dated 5/6/2014 10:24:46 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
I’ve been reading "The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of
Britain" by S. Oppenheimer and ran across a comment that may pertain to
something someone said a while back – I only recall the strangeness of the
comment,
something along the lines of a statement or an argument must mean one
thing and one thing only. No doubt I misunderstood the context (now that I
think more about it, I suspect the context may have had to do with philosophy
and not linguistics), but I believe the opposite of that, that almost
everything is ambiguous and probably means something different to everyone who
reads or hears it – not utterly different in most cases, but marginally so,
that is “not quite what the speaker intended.”"
Well, Grice calls this (or rather Judith Baker, his disciple, calls this)
psi-transmission.
The shepherd cries, "Wolf!"
The idea is that he believes that there is a wolf.
More importantly, his _point_ is that his addressee will believe there is
a wolf.
As it happens, there isn't, but that's neither here nor there.
But Grice wants us to consider the primeval scenario for communication,
and it can NOT involve 'entrenched ambiguity'. People like their
psychological states (beliefs and desires -- hence psi) TRANSMITTED.
---
Helm goes on to quote from Oppenheimer:
Oppenheimer writes:
"There are basic differences between the disciplines of archaeology and
linguistics on the one hand, and sciences such as geology and biology on the
other. In their attitude to the scientific method, some linguists seem to
misunderstand the meaning or, or are unable to accept, uncertainty."
Well, it is good that he does not EVEN consider 'philosophical
linguistics' or philosophers of language. Quine made his career based on one
example,
"Gavagai" and the INDETERMINACY of translation!
Similarly, Grice calls his 'conversational implicature' INDETERMINATE (or
disjunctive in form), which relates.
Oppenheimer goes on:
"They interpret the scientific method as implying authority, rigour and
certainty, while scientists accept that, in many situations, comparisons have
to be made using measurements that have some degree of error and theories
of classification with a degree of uncertainty. A statistical approach has
to be used to handle such uncertainty. Unlike disagreements between
academic authorities, there are standard methods of dealing with sources of
observational error and of uncertainty. Archaeologists, in contrast to
linguists, have learnt through experience that if a method such as carbon
dating
gives inaccurate results at first, it should not be thrown out of the window,
but attempts should be made to sort out the problems of error and improve
it."
Helm notes:
"The context of Oppenheimer’s comment was in regard to dating
Celtic-language splits. The mathematical approach to language diversity is
called
lexico-statistics and the dating method glottochronology, and as one might
suspect disagreements amongst the archeologists, linguists, geneticists, and
geologists are rife. I was hoping for a bit more certainty than I’ve found in
Oppenheimer thus far. I mentioned some place that I had my DNA checked on
Ancestry.com a couple of years ago. Interestingly, though a DNA check
sounds scientific; my results have changed over time. Instead of something
like 60% British Isles and 20% Scandinavian (probably from the Viking
colonies in Britain) I am now something like 60% Western European and 20%
Irish.
No Irish has ever been mentioned or seen in my family tree (begun by one of
my grandfathers). In the Ancestry.com definitions, one can find British
(which I find in my genealogic tree) under Western Europe and Scottish (also
in my genealogic tree) under Irish. And that ambiguity can be found in
recent studies such as Oppenheimer’s; so perhaps the Ancestry people are
updating results as new arguments are advanced. There is no consensus on the
reasons for the difference between the Scots and the Irish, for example, or
whether they originally came from central Europe as many have believed or
through Southern France and Spain as Oppenheimer and later scholars now
believe. Having read Collingwood and Gadamer I am used to and accepting of
ambiguity in written and spoken language, but like the linguists Oppenheimer
complains of I have difficulty with so much ambiguity in (primarily)
genetics."
A lot of the taxonomy seems arbitrary. I don't think it matters whether we
label the Scots under 'Irish' -- as Ancestry.com does -- since we KNOW
that ultimately the origin IS European (whether via Southern France and Spain
or central Europe).
I found that the Wikipedia entry for S. O. lists two sites, including this
one below.
Cheers,
Speranza
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestryrevisited/#
.U2kGXYK69DI
"[There is] an aspect of the evidence that I understate in my book, namely
the near-absence of Celtic influence in modern English place names."
As a matter of fact, most river names are CELTIC, including my favourite
river: the Avon.
"Whereas there are a couple of examples of near-complete “language shift”
with absence of borrowing from a previous aboriginal vocabulary,
indigenous place names are in general more resistant to extinction. This can
be seen
in America and Australia, which retain a considerable number of indigenous
place names."
That is SO true. Connecticut must be the LIMIT, but then TOWNS where people
live are called "New London", or "Oxford" (in Connecticut).
"These two examples," Oppenheimer says, re: the question he is addressing,
"are interesting, not only because massive replacement and genocide took
place, but also because Australian and American English retain far more
aboriginal vocabulary than native English retains Celtic."
Again, I think there is a LOT of Celtic toponymy in England! The source
here should be the English PlacE Name Society -- trust the English to have
such a society! (It's based in Notts).
"England itself retains pre-Indo-European place and river names, but few
Celtic names, and the English language has literally only a handful of Celtic
words."
OK -- so perhaps I was wrong or uncertain and river names are NOT Celtic
pre pre-Indo-European. Still, the Celts used them! ("Let's go fish in the
Avon," one Celt would say to another). This reminds me of W. H. Hudson, when
travelling in the English countryside:
Hudson: What's the name of that hill?
Farmer: God knows. We call it "Eagle hill", but that's how we call it, not
its name.
Hudson was confused.
Oppenheimer goes on:
"The fact that England is such a “Celtic desert” is a problem for
linguists who believe that Anglo-Saxon triumphed in what had been a totally
Celtic-speaking region, even given the gory stories of massacre."
There is also the theory of Anglo-Saxon supremacy that, since we were
considering empires, was, some say, at the root of the idea of the British
empire, say.
Oppenheimer goes on:
"This problem is because the Angles and Saxons apparently carried out a
much better job of language extinction than in Australia and America, where
genocide and massive replacement are so well documented. The “overkill”
problem is acknowledged by English place name authority Richard Coates in a
recent article “Invisible Britons: the view from linguistics""
He is an expert on Sussex placenames and knows of Hudson!
"where Coates concludes either that the genocide was complete or that there
were few Britons actually living in England to interact with the invaders:
“I argue that there is no reason to believe large-scale survival of an
indigenous population could so radically fail to leave linguistic traces.”
Rather than pause to question scholarly assumptions that England had been 100
per cent Celtic-speaking until the 5th-century invasions, Coates prefers to
use the linguistic evidence to challenge the genetic evidence: “These are
the questions that need to be answered by those who propose a massive
contribution of Britons to the “English” gene-pool.”"
Oppenheimer goes on:
"I guess I would see it the other way around."
Trust him to be controversial!
Oppenheimer:
"While there is no reason to expect that language change, resulting from
invasion, should necessarily be massively reflected in the genetic picture,
there is every expectation that complete genocide predicted by linguists
should be—if it really happened."
Well, for that matter, the Romans were also there, and I guess they did not
succeed in teaching ONE BRITON Latin as a 'first language'. In Gallia,
Latin was all the rage! (Witness French!).
Oppenheimer writes:
"It seems some still long for the good old days when historians,
archaeologists and linguists could speculate on European invasions by
Indo-Aryans,
Kurgan horsemen and Celts, free of troublesome biological evidence. If you
read my article and book, you will realise that your refer to [what
Oppenheimer, almost alla Popper, calls] null hypothesis: that connections
between
culture and genes are likely to be tenuous and that individual cases where
this is claimed have to be tested appropriately."
Casuistically, as it were.
The culture/gene distinction is the old nature/nurture one, no?
Oppenheimer writes:
"It is misleading to talk about frequencies of the R male lineage in
different European countries as if this constituted a uniform genetic
background, since there are actually two main R groups, which split tens of
thousands
of years ago outside Europe and had completely different modes of spread
and present distributions in Europe. R1b expanded from the Basque Ice Age
refuge and predominates in extreme western Europe, being found at only 20 per
cent or less in Russia and the Baltic states. R1a1, on the other hand,
predominates in eastern Europe, and to a lesser extent in Scandinavia. I deal
with the spread of both major R lineages at length in chapters 3 and 4 of my
book The Origins of the British"
which Helms finds it sort of fills him with unwelcome uncertainties on
linguistic and genetic matters!
---- I wonder what Oppenheimer teaches at Oxford. He was a physician for
years, but when it comes to Oxford teaching, I AM surprised that he dwells on
uncertainties like that. Imagine being his student! ("What did you learn
at college with Dr. Oppenheimer today, son?" "Well, it's all rather
_uncertain_").
Oppenheimer goes on:
"I have indeed read the research of Weale et al. I discuss it and similar
papers at length in chapter 11 of my book, where I register my disagreement
with their method of reconstruction from relative gene group frequencies,
presenting instead my own phylo-geographic re-analysis of their data, based
on fine detail of individual founding lineages. ... I have read several of
Graves’s books, but not The White Goddess. I shall rectify. Incidentally,
another European scholar, linguist Theo Venneman, has a reconstruction of
post-Ice Age recolonisation of the British Isles, which gives a relative of
the Basque language primacy of place as the first entrant. I outline his
theory in the new paperback edition of my book The Origins of the British."
So look out for it!
The Basques, the Minoans and the Brits -- a genetic 'detective story' in
three parts!
Since 'detective story' features in the subtitle of the book that Helm is
referring to, I should point out that Popper does not argue like Agatha
Christie.
A detective, like Poirot, does not work INDUCTIVELY or DEDUCTIVELY, but
ABductively. From a null-hypothesis as it were, to the 'best explanation'.
There's creativeness in detection that you don't find in some of the more
boring sciences. On the other hand, the results, as in law, say, are
'probable,' or 'reasonable', rather than, er, certain.
Oppenheimer goes on:
"[T[he re-expansion of paternal group R1b and maternal group H from the
Basque Ice Age refuge spread up the coasts of all the countries facing the
Atlantic, after the ice melted. The British Isles retained higher rates than
the other countries, for several reasons related specifically to early
movements directly from the Basque country rather than from general diffusion
from western Europe."
Do Basques know about Oppenheimer!? He should be lecturing there, too!
"First, as a result of lower sea levels, the British Isles, in particular
Ireland, were connected and at the furthest edge of the extended Ice Age
European continent, and thus received the bulk of early coastal migration.
Then, as sea levels rose, first Ireland then Britain became islands,"
I tend to believe that in the old days, they were called "British Isles",
together with all the little islands in between and around. "Great" Britain
is supposed to translate the greater of the two British islands. This gives
Ireland as being British, too, Minor Britain or Lesser Britain, as opposed
to the Greater British Isles, but I should double check all that!
Oppenheimer goes on:
"relatively insulated from further migration from elsewhere in Europe, thus
preserving their high rates of R1b and similarity to the initial
settlements. The means by which I could separate the R1b types in the British
Isles
from those on the other side of the channel is by the use of “Founder
Analysis.” That is, looking at the detail of their gene types (so-called STR
haplotypes). These revealed 21 founding clusters, which could only have
arrived direct from the Basque country."
As we now call it!
And they ARE related to the Minoans, then, no?
Oppenheimer: "Their descendant twigs are unique to the British Isles.
Furthermore I was able to date the arrival of these individual clusters using
their diversity. The Isle of Man"
from where philosopher W. V. O. Quine (of 'the undeterminacy of
translation' fame) comes from
"received more Norwegian gene-flow than anywhere else in the British Isles,
except for Shetland and Orkney, which received the most. This does not,
however, account for more than 20-25% of the male Isle of Man gene pool. Fig
11.4b in my book gives a very approximate genetic distance map,
illustrating this in more detail."
-------
I think the link in Wikipedia starts with a puzzle which reminded me of
Defoe, with whose poem I end this in ps.
Cheers,
Speranza
The True Born Englishman
BY DANIEL DEFOE
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.
Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow,
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame.
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their rank daughters, to their parents just,
Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.
This nauseous brood directly did contain
The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.
Which medly canton’d in a heptarchy,
A rhapsody of nations to supply,
Among themselves maintain’d eternal wars,
And still the ladies lov’d the conquerors.
The western Angles all the rest subdu’d;
A bloody nation, barbarous and rude:
Who by the tenure of the sword possest
One part of Britain, and subdu’d the rest
And as great things denominate the small,
The conqu’ring part gave title to the whole.
The Scot, Pict, Britain, Roman, Dane, submit,
And with the English-Saxon all unite:
And these the mixture have so close pursu’d,
The very name and memory’s subdu’d:
No Roman now, no Britain does remain;
Wales strove to separate, but strove in vain:
The silent nations undistinguish’d fall,
And Englishman’s the common name for all.
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
What e’er they were they’re true-born English now.
The wonder which remains is at our pride,
To value that which all wise men deride.
For Englishmen to boast of generation,
Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation.
A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.
A banter made to be a test of fools,
Which those that use it justly ridicules.
A metaphor invented to express
A man a-kin to all the universe.
For as the Scots, as learned men ha’ said,
Throughout the world their wand’ring seed ha’ spread;
So open-handed England, ’tis believ’d,
Has all the gleanings of the world receiv’d.
Some think of England ’twas our Saviour meant,
The Gospel should to all the world be sent:
Since, when the blessed sound did hither reach,
They to all nations might be said to preach.
’Tis well that virtue gives nobility,
How shall we else the want of birth and blood supply?
Since scarce one family is left alive,
Which does not from some foreigner derive.
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
