Jaison Jeevan Sequeira, Swathy Krishna, George van Driem, Mohammed Shafiul Mustak, and Ranajit Das have an article (in preprint, open access) called “Novel 4,400-year-old ancestral component in a tribe speaking a Dravidian language“:
Abstract
Research has shown that the present-day population on the Indian subcontinent derives its ancestry from at least three components identified with pre-Indo-Iranian agriculturalists once inhabiting the Iranian plateau, pastoralists originating from the Pontic-Caspian steppe and ancient hunter-gatherer related to the Andamanese Islanders. The present-day Indian gene pool represents a gradient of mixtures from these three sources. However, with more sequences of ancient and modern genomes and fine structure analyses, we can expect a more complex picture of ancestry to emerge. In this study, we focus on Dravidian linguistic groups to propose a fourth putative source which may have branched out from the basal Middle Eastern component that gave rise to the Iranian plateau farmer related ancestry. The Elamo-Dravidian theory and the linguistic phylogeny of the Dravidian family tree provide chronological fits for the genetic findings presented here. Our findings show a correlation between the linguistic and genetic lineages in language communities speaking Dravidian languages when they are modelled together. We suggest that this source, which we shall call ‘Proto-Dravidian’ ancestry, emerged around the dawn of the Indus Valley civilisation. This ancestry is distinct from all other sources described so far, and its plausible origin not later than 4,400 years ago on the region between the Iranian plateau and the Indus valley supports a Dravidian heartland before the arrival of Indo-European languages on the Indian subcontinent. Admixture analysis shows that this Proto-Dravidian ancestry is still carried by most modern inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent other than the tribal populations. This momentous finding underscores the importance of population-specific fine structure studies. We also recommend informed sampling strategies for biobanks and to avoid oversimplification of ancestral reconstruction. Achieving this requires interdisciplinary collaboration.
I’ll be interested to see what knowledgeable Hatters think about this. Thanks, Dinesh!
Interesting, I just posted on fb a discussion of a strange Dravidian-related ancestry in the Coorgs
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08073-0
(I strongly suspect that the Coorgs’ unusual DNA composition isn’t very ancient, though, but stemmed from many generations of reproductive isolation in a small community; my interest to the paper came more from a surprise at the Coorgs’ traditions and beliefs)
So either the subcontinent was mysteriously lightly-populated as of four or five millennia ago, or there was a huge massacre and/or cultural subjugation of the Andamanese-like “ancient hunter-gatherer” population at the hands of invaders, or?
Or germs. Domesticated animals brought germs, and the herders were better adapted to that than the local hunter-gatherers.
I noticed Dmitry’s Facebook post earlier today, but hadn’t had time to look at it, so I just assumed this was the same paper. It’s even more interesting when they’re not, and they differ.
Not necessarily a completely violent scenario. A higher density of agricultural populations should have contributed to gradual displacement of the hunter-gatherer DNA in all but the most favorable conditions for the latter (just like in Europe, hunter-gatherer ancestry lingered in the North due to very rich aquatic resources).
The Coraga paper in this post, BTW, also deals with an extremely bottlenecked population following long reproductive isolation and low numbers, and I am just a skeptical that it truly represents something ancient
Or you just amend my “mysteriously lightly-populated” to “no more densely populated than you would expect for societies that weren’t yet doing the agriculture thing,” although I don’t have a very good sense of what that means in terms of the humans:acre ratio.
I like it, but the linguistic evidence for Elamo-Dravidian is quite tenuous – Elamite (as understood today, which isn’t terribly much) shares about as much or as little with some other language families of the wider region.
My academia.edu page presented me just now with this paper by Juha Janhunen as its top suggestion (for once getting it right that I would find it interesting):
https://www.academia.edu/45035334/The_differential_diversification_of_Mongolic
(Can’t find any other open-access link, sorry.)
I plonk it in here as an excellent case of genetics in the DNA sense not correlating with “genetic” in the language sense, but everybody knows what I think about all that so I’ll leave well alone, and just say that it’s a very interesting paper anyway.
What actually appealed to me about it was that it talks about what a remarkably diverse family Mongolic is, given its very shallow time depth – something that would also be the case for Western Oti-Volta if its current spread is all down to the Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms. Very similar timescale, in fact …
On the other hand, the distances involved in Mongolic are vastly greater, and the exact origins of the chiefly and peasant strata in WOV-speaking societies are not known. But the point about the rate of language change not being a constant on any metric is very much to the point. My point of comparison with WOV diversity has tended to be Romance, but Mongolic might be nearer the mark …
may i be the rather uninformed voice of total skepticism?
based on the abstract, this sounds like (1) we found a possible new lineage cluster in our sample, (2) our reconstruction of a hypothetical timeline for that lineage can be interpreted to line up with the hypothetical timeline of someone else’s linguistic reconstruction, (3) we can pick a hypothetical geography that sutures those hypothetical timelines perfectly to reflect the racial ideology of the ruling party in the country where we’re taking samples!
all i can see it demonstrating is that BJP/SS rule continues to ensure a steady stream of race science.
rozele’s comment made me realize that I have no idea how the more hardcore Hindutva / “Out of India” folks account for or explain away the seemingly dramatic differences between Indic languages and Dravidian languages if they do not attribute the former to “invaders from out of town.” A few minutes of quick googling left me no more enlightened and I feel that I may lack the attention span I had back when I was seventeen and being handed Hare Krishna agitprop in a dubious part of Philadelphia full of barbed wire and broken glass.
I’m not sure the idea that “the region between the Iranian plateau and the Indus valley” spoke Dravidian is in line with the ideology of the party. (because of what JWB mentioned: its incompatibility with the Out of India scenario)
I came across a line “A slightly more sophisticated attempt at getting around the linguistic differences between Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages has been made by Subhash Kak” (here) which I found promicing.
Even though the paper that contains it did not answer the question of what is the stance of Modi’s government (and couldn’t answer it because it predates this government), I was much amused by how the quoted line is placed between
“According to Rajaram, no well-informed scholar today takes either the Aryan invasion or the notion of the foreign origin of the Vedas and the Vedic civilization seriously” (same page, with disapproval)
and
“According to Dixon, there is no reputable historical linguist anywhere in the world who accepts the claims of the Nostraticists.[101]” (page below, with approval)
I think I’ll stay away from people who use the adjective “reputable”:-)
Funnily, it is not the usual effect of the fact that Western scientists were poorly informed of the work of Russian-speaking scientists (you may not subscribe* to Nostraticism but many Russian linguists who either accept the claims or work on it are “reputable” here). Dixon footnote makes me think he knew about its greater acceptance in USSR – he simply did not think Soviet linguists are “reputable”.
But he also says “claims of Greenberg and Nostraticists”.
*I’m indifferent to it and don’t understand why feel so strongly about it as some do. A hypothesis, promicing enough for some to work on it, not quite promicing for others, but without serious consequences for anything until proven because it’s a hypothesis. Yes, sadly some treat hypotheses as the truth. That is stupid and unscientific, but bullying, as Dixon does, enthusiasts of whatever hypothesis by referring to reputation is exactly same brand of stupid.
“Russian linguists… ‘reputable’ here” – I mean (as is known) people engaged in conventional historical linguistics and who don’t practice sloppy methods, at least (for those of them who work on it) outside of their “Nostratic” work which I’m poorly informed about. Because there is a plenty of scholars reputable in India who believe that historical linguistics is long-discredited racist bullshit from 19th century. One more reason to avoid referring to reputation “anywhere in the world” only to specify in the footnote that the whole world was an exaggeration.
PS au village, sans prétention, j’ai mauvaise réputation…
No reputable scholar believes in action at a distance – it’s mystical nonsense.
No reputable scholar believes in plate tectonics – there simply isn’t any plausible physical mechanism for it.
(But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown…)
All very no true Scotsman. I can use my own judgement to find a linguistic theory unconvincing or even absurd; why invoke a poorly specified bunch of other people’s?
@rozele: I haven’t followed Indian politics closely, but Hindutva ideology as I used to encounter it on the ‘Net would be fiercely opposed to the idea that anything could have come from outside and (implied) before Sanskrit. There’s a different Tamil nationalism that also could come into play, bur I don’t recognize that either. If anything, I detect a sympathy towards the peoples that were marginalized by the Brahmin purity prescriptions, but that could be wishful thinking on my part.
That said, I share the skepticism of your points 1 or 2. There could be something there, but without independent confirmation, there’s no way to know.
Greenberg was most certainly a well-informed and reputable scholar. It’s opinions that are reputable or disreputable. You can be a reputable scholar in one area and a total crackpot in another – even a different subfield of a discipline in which you are actually a highly competent expert in your own.
Many an excellent linguist has no idea at all of how to go about comparative linguistics, for example, in which they are so flaky that they’re don’t even know how ignorant they are.
(Greenberg himself was actually in a somewhat different category; I think he’d more painted himself into an intellectual corner. Perhaps more of a risk for a truly eminent scholar than for a merely competent one, even. Like being an author so successful that editors dare not point out your infelicities any more.)
I seem to recall that George van Driem has some pretty odd ideas in certain domains. But then, don’t we all?
Greenberg lucked out that, in spite of the flaws of his work, his posthumous reputation is nevertheless that of a great scholar, while his acolyte Merritt Ruhlen got a damning description by Larry Trask that probably still rings true: “Ruhlen is not recognized by anybody in linguistics as a member of the profession. Every single linguist who is acquainted with his work regards him as a crackpot and a charlatan.”
(I have remembered Trask’s first sentence verbatim for decades, but I was able to fill in the second because, a Google search reveals, I had commented about this here on LH before back in 2006.)
Back when I was young and naive I assumed that Ruhlen was not a crackpot or charlatan because obviously a respectable establishment/gatekeeper publisher like Stanford University Press wouldn’t have published his books if that were the case. I no longer subscribe to the premises underlying that reasoning.
It seems to be an actual trope in the more excoriating bring-popcorn type of academic reviews of monographs, to add a envoi reprimanding the “respectable academic publisher” for their involvement.
I think I first came across this in a review of the – truly, very bad – Transforming the Images, by Elke Novak, which deals with Inuit syntax. The reviewer, more in sorrow than in anger, pointed out that the guilty publisher had recently reissued Kleinschmidt’s classic Greenlandic grammar – a painful coincidence, they felt …
It has recently been determined by statistical analysis of a wide range of human genetic samples that all human beings are genetically related, at a approximate time depth of [N].
Excitingly, this is consistent with the view held by linguists* that all human languages descend from an ancestral “proto-World”, at an approximate time depth of [N].
This momentous finding …
[I meant to be satirical, but I think we actually did that very paper not long ago …]
*Merritt Ruhlen and Noam Chomsky! What more proof do you need?
You can read more about the tribe whose genes got analyzed in wikipedia, including the bad treatment by their neighbors that eventually prompted the state legislature to enact the Karnataka Koragas (Prohibition of Ajalu Practice) Act, 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koraga_people
Reminds me of the last infuriating book I read, Latin Alive: The Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages by Joseph Solodow, published by Cambridge University Press. Half of the book is decent pop-sci showing how Latin, and specifically Vulgar Latin through French, had a major impact on the development of English. In the other half of the book, the author boldly attempts to “reconstruct Proto-Romance”, yet he completely ignores Balkan Latin (Romanian gets a single, vague mention in the book, other Balkan Romance none). I looked up the author and he was a classicist who, though presumably highly competent in Classical Latin, was a mere dilettante in matters Romance. What’s really disappointing here is that his CUP editor didn’t realize that Romance linguistics is a whole field of its own, with its own important literature to cite, and the manuscript needed competent review from that community.
@Christopher Culver: Lots of discussions of Proto-Romance just blow past the many questions related to Romanian.
rozele is on to something, but that something is not, I think, Hindutva ideology: of the five authors, the primary one has a Portuguese (presumably Christian name), two have Hindu names, one has a Muslim name, and one is European.
The guiding light here is, I think, the idea that Dravidian came from the northwest, and specifically that Harappan civilization was Dravidian, and that its script was indeed a script, representing a Dravidian language, and therefore Yay Dravidians! It’s less jingoistic and deluded than Tamil The Primordial Language and such, but it still rests on too-thin evidence.
The inspiration for these ideas come from several sources. I think those are, first, McAlpin’s Elamo-Dravidian, which also places the Northern Dravidian language Brahui (spoken in Pakistan) closer to Elamite than to Dravidian. Elamo-Dravidian is no better than any other wild long-range theory. Second, Parpola, Mahadevan, Zvelebil, and maybe others claimed the Indus/Harappan script is Dravidian, based on identifying supposed rebuses that only work in Dravidian. The supposed decipherment never got very far, but the idea stuck. Thirdly, Koraga, first described in the late 1960s, was claimed to be North Dravidian, despite its location in Karnataka. That was first suggested in Bhat’s 1971 description of the language (p. 3). Of the six similarities to Northern Dravidian in his list, only one is universal to North Dravidian and to Koraga, namely the past verbal suffix –k~g~gg, which Emeneau apparently figured to be a NDr innovation. On the other hand, Krishnamurti’s 2003 The Dravidian Languages (p. 300) says, “In my opinion this is an innovation in Koraga of giving a past meaning to a non-past suffix just like Kota, which uses -p- (<∗-pp), a non-past marker, as a past marker.”
The current paper was preceded by another in 2024, which argues similar same points, and also mentions the -k past suffix as its only evidence to consider Koraga NDr, then states that affiliation as a proven fact.
All this, along with the social, genetic, and geographical isolation of the Koraga, must make them a tempting subject for genetic studies. I know very little about genetic phylogeny, but a couple of things make me uneasy, and I hope the experts here will help me out. If I understand it right, the supposed uniqueness of the Koraga is based on the admixture analysis (fig. 3 of the most recent paper). The admixture diagram is based on choosing K=10 (that is, the number of components in the admixture.) As I understand it, choosing K is a bit of an art: too few components, and significant signal is lost: too many, and you see artifacts. That is why in papers of this sort you often see versions of the diagram for multiple K’s. Here all they have, in the supplementary information, is a cross-validation error vs. K diagram (fig. 2). At a glance, I would say they might have chosen too many components.
Other populations in the admixture diagram (“Other tribal populations across India” and “Mainstream Indian populations”) both look unrealistically uniform. The rest (Toda, Jarawa/Onge, “British”, etc.) each look even more uniform. Does that diagram make sense?
The PCA diagram (fig. 1) puzzles me too. I am not sure what the principal components are based on, perhaps on Asia in general, or the world. That makes discerning South Asian significant PCs less distinct. The Koraga are off the main “Dravidian cline” in the diagram. The authors say they belong to “clusters that have drifted away from the ANI-ASI cline”, without a clear explanation. Am I right to be puzzled?
Finally, one of the coauthors, George van Driem, has done a great deal of important and pioneering descriptive fieldwork on Himalayan languages. Since then, he has dabbled in long-range theorizing (Burushaski-Yeniseian in particular, which Vajda has very graciously criticized), and some grand hand-wavy theories of language evolution and population spreads. He would be the linguist in charge here, and yet he signed off on this paper, which takes Elamo-Dravidian and NDr Koraga as established facts.
@Y, thanks! I mean, for the information about Koraga.
But I’m confused now. The book you’re referring to is accessible for free via google scholar, I checked p 300 and other mentions of Koraga – there is not much.
“Koraga (Bhat 1971) is almost like Tuḷu in most respects and is tentatively shown as an off-shoot of Pre-Tuḷu.” ; “The location of Tuḷu in the family tree is doubtful and Koraga needs to be appropriately located in the subgrouping scheme.” ; “Koraga past -k-/-g- may appear to be like that of North Dravidian, but there are no other features that it shares with North Dravidian.”
So he simply treats it “as an off-shoot of Pre-Tuḷu“.
Contrast this to Sequeira et al: “has been influenced for centuries by surrounding by Tuḷu speakers, and many Koraga are bilingual in Tuḷu“.
Is that all?
Only one suffix which some scholars (without further comments) treat as divergence from Tuḷu and some (also without argumentation?) treat as a link to North Dravidian on the background of convergence with Tuḷu?
Or is there more to it?
The work of Zvelebil referred to in the article is of the same nature, Dravidian Linguistics: An Introduction and its treatment of Koraga is even less detailed (link):
“If we add to this the possibility that Koraga, a small Dravidian language of coastal Karnataka, may belong to this “Northern” branch of Dravidian (as its linguistic features seem to strongly indicate), then a location of Kuṛux-Malto on or near the coast is not unlikely.”
“…an isolate, as is the recently discovered Koraga which is at the moment a true enigma.”
“takes Elamo-Dravidian and NDr Koraga as established facts” – The paper intorduces Koraga with references to books that treat it as either NDr or an independent branch within D and does not mention the opinion that it is SDr. I don’t know whether it then speak about the hypothesis as a fact or not.
References to Elamo-Dravidian are not numerous, it does not take Elamo-Dravidian as a fact. Unless characteristics “hypothetical” and “a theory” amount to such treatment:) Also when you place them “between the Iranian plateau and the Indus valley” – if of course such a placement was not motivated by the E-D hypothesis, you can’t avoid mentioning it (as a theory and a hypothetical group).
“dabbled in long-range theorizing” – and mastrubates, I bet. Sloppy science is sloppy science and should be called so, but why speak disrespectfully about a scientist’s interest in “long-range theorising”? An interest is an interest, and nothing good will come out of censoring interests.
I do understand that historical linguistics lacks a solid foundation. In a sense.
I don’t mean that its methods are not good or its results are not reliable. They are.
What is lacking is an exact (as in exact sciences) procedure which would allow us calculate precisely (and quantitatively) how reliable (or likely) a theory or reconstruction is, and where it is circular and thus delusional. If such a procedur were available, there would not be conflicts over reconstructions.
Reliabilily is maintained by the use of excessive data. Or intuition. And there is the fear of less reliable (and hypothetical) connections – that alongside with teaching of hypothecal and unlikely results as facts and also individual scholars who waste years of their time on working on false reconstrcutions with circular motivation. Yet fear (in science) is always irrational and per se indicates that missing foundation.
Of course there are people who want to reach beyond the limits of reliable.
That is natural for curious people (and researchers who are not curious are not researchers but robots).
I admit, I’m not attracted by [time] depths and [enormous] scales but I understand people turned on by these. It is reasonable to still demand from them self-critical attitude.
I too would rather walk on a shakier ground in uncharted land, but if I were a linguist I’d be drawn to exploring things horisontal rather than vertical (language areas that is). Those are exactly shakier grounds.
P.S. my comment about NDr Koraga and E-D was meant as a partial confirmation of what Y said, in the NDr Koraga part. As I said – I’m confused:/ Brief mentions in introductory textbooks the first of which calls it an enygma and isolate, while the second treats it as a part of Tuḷu-Koraga don’t help with this confusion:( (I disagree with Y’s characteristic of the paper in the E-D part)
Lots of discussions of Proto-Romance just blow past the many questions related to Romanian.
Well, as every Dacianist knows, Latin is in fact descended from Romanian, so Romanian wouldn’t enter into a discussion of Proto-Romance.
In light of Christopher Culver’s post about a crackpot work with the imprimatur of Cambridge Univ. Pr., I certainly cannot be confident w/o reading it that another CUP-published work bearing on “Proto-Romance” is crackpottery-free, but _The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC – AD 600_, by the late J. N. Adams (published in 2007) certainly sounds interesting. By pushing the thesis that “Latin” at least once it had expanded pretty far away from Latium “was never geographically uniform” it strongly implies that there never was any sort of not-directly-attested “Proto-Romance” that can be distinguished from Latin itself. A glance at the table of contents suggests that Eastern/Balkan Romance may (yet again!) get short shrift, but that may just be due to the paucity of contemporaneous textual evidence, since it sounds like Adams is focused on indications of variation that can be found in that sort of evidence rather than in conjecturally reverse-engineering from daughter-language evidence many centuries later.
I got an 88 page preview of the book J.B. just mentioned. This includes the first half of the introductions, followed by sequences of 3-4 pages of intro and 2 pages missing. It continued that way into the chapter on Republican inscriptions.
I’m not clear whether everyone who clicks such things gets the same preview, so if anyone is interested, I hope you get a big chunk of it.
Ryan, that book by Adams (and in fact the whole series of monographs by Adams of which it is part) has been on internet shadow libraries for over a decade now. Why are you limiting yourself to 88-page previews?
With regard to Mr. Brewer’s comment:
“Crackpot” is a strong word and I wouldn’t use it about Sokolow’s book. It isn’t all that different from a number of pop-sci books on Romance from the twentieth century that, as a rule, ignored Balkan Romance. What’s disappointing is that scholarship had moved on and CUP put out a book that didn’t reflect that. To give one example, those old treatments of the Romance languages that Sokolow regurgitates describe monophthongization of *au to *o as pan-Romance, but this did not happen in Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. I’d like to see about Dalmatian, but not sure what reference to consult.
I think “crackpot” was in my earlier post that was the jumping-off point for Mr. Culver’s discussion of Sokolow, but I should not have assumed that he was suggesting a perfect parallel (in that regard) with his example. And I was sort of taking others’ criticisms of Ruhlen at face value without going back and devoting time to considering whether crackpot/charlatan were excessively strong labels.
That fits this paper from last year, which found there’s no difference between Proto-Romance and Classical Latin in basic vocabulary. From the conclusions:
It sounds like Proto-Romance was mainstream Latin as spoken during the Crisis of the Third Century.
>Ryan, that book by Adams (and in fact the whole series of monographs by Adams of which it is part) has been on internet shadow libraries
Cool. JWB didn’t provide a link. I looked at 5 or 6 sites to see if there was one, and the best I found was what I linked, I thought helpfully. I’d note that in disparaging my efforts, you didn’t bother to offer a better link.
Sigh. Hat, I must have made a typo in the html code when I tried to link above at 10:50 am. Any chance you can check and maybe correct it?
If you can reply with the actual error, I’d be interested. It’s odd that I made a typo that eliminated the link, yet still put the word in red letters, which is why I thought at a glance that the comment came out right.
I can’t correct it — it just says <a>preview</a>, with no URL. (I just sent you a link to the Adams book.)
Christopher Culver: As I recall Vegliote (I recently explained here at Casa hat why the term “Dalmatian” should be avoided) also preserved Latin /au/ (The same is true of Old Provençal and a great many modern Occitan varieties, and it must have persisted quite late in pre-Old French, as the evidence of “chose” from CAUSA shows: /k/ was palatalized before /a/ but not /o/, indicating that the change must have taken place before the reduction of /au/ to /o/).
The best summary of the sound changes from Latin to Vegliote which I know of is found in volume II of Pierre Bec’s MANUEL PRATIQUE DE PHILOLOGIE ROMANE (Basic summary: the consonants are amazingly conservative, in some ways even more than those of Sardinian, but the vowels have changed even more radically than those of French. The next time I teach a historical linguistics course this is the example I will be using to highlight that languages can be amazingly conservative in some aspects and amazingly innovatory in others).
(Some of it may now be out of date -I know that recent research has shown that in Vegliote, Latin /kt/ became /jt/, not /pt/ despite the evidence of “guapt” as a reflex of Latin OCTO. Because other instances of Latin /kt/ -notably irregular past participles such as FACTUM and DICTUM- show /jt/, it is now accepted that “guapt” owes its /pt/ cluster to the analogical influence of the Vegliote reflex of SEPTEM).
Only because I didn’t know how Hat feels about linking to or mentioning specific names of shadow libraries. But it’s getting rare now to meet someone interested in linguistics who doesn’t use them. Even hoary, starchy-collared old professors might pull a book off one in the middle of a lecture in order to show some example.
shadow libraries
Didn’t know the expression, but immediately found shadowlibraries on github.
Mr. Culver’s discussion of Sokolow
Confused me for a moment — the author of Latin Alive is Solodow (as in Christopher’s first mention), not Sokolow (as in his second).
Yes, sorry. I wish the edit button here worked for longer.
Ryan, red means the tag <a></a> worked, but the href part didn’t.
I wish the edit button here worked for longer.
Present help in time of need.
realizing i never spelled out how i saw the paper working within hindutva: it provides a Noble and Antient World-Historical genealogy, crafted specifically for the substrate on which The Fathers of the Nation rose, and whose latter-day heirs are thus Our Brothers in Both Faith and Blood. it’s hard to get classier than the elamites for that kind of thing – after all, they invented Civilization.
i noted the very precisely calibrated, quite unambiguous spread of the names, and said “o! that’s interesting – it’s the same demographics-forward move the u.s. far right formations are making these days.” but i know nothing, in fact, about these authors, so i have no idea whether the match i’m describing is an engineered result, or good-faith data presented through the dominant metanarrative, or what. i’m agnostic about all of that – the congruence is meaningful whether it’s accidental or not.
I see that one of the authors, Ranajit Das, has coauthored a couple of papers with Paul Wexler et al. on the origins of Ashkenazi Jews. Ooooo-kaaaay…
@JWB, you’ll find it comforting that Trask says this in his textbook:
“The best history of the attempts at classifying languages into families is Ruhlen (1991); be warned, however, that the book contains a few errors, and that Ruhlen accepts as valid some recent very large-scale groupings that are rejected as unsubstantiated by the vast majority of historical linguists.”
(in Wikipedia this reference supports words about criticism of a certain tree which is not Ruhlen’s)
@drasvi: Good to know although now I’m wondering if “Ruhlen (1991)” is just a different edition/printing of what I think of as “Ruhlen (1987)” or something else entirely I can’t immediately figure out from googling.
Trask is online* for free, sunlit not shadow, Ruhlen 1991 is what you think:
A guide to the world’s languages, vol I. Classification
* I mean, if anyone is curious.
Hat wrote:
>I just sent you a link to the Adams book.
To my email? I do use my real email to sign my posts, but I haven’t received anything.
I’d be interested. I did just get my copy of The Making of Europe. Thanks for the recommendation!
Shadow libraries: I think the lagest (but not most convenient) is Anna’s Archive.
That’s the one I use. I just re-sent the link, Ryan — let me know if you get it.
Got it. Thanks.
WP says, most of criticism of Ruhlen is caused by his support of mass comparison.
Is this a serious understatement?
_____
Also, Nichols (about Africa): “Greenberg 1963b is a paradigm case of scholarly success, its analysis still largely intact in received view and its method generally accepted in mainstream thinking.”
Is this true, about the method?
Fair enough about Ruhlen, since most of his original work has been in mass comparison and the defense thereof. The classification book was useful for lower-order families, as an imperfect but OK compilation of the then-current state of the art, but it’s outdated now.
As it turns out, Nichols’ enthusiam for Greenberg was misplaced. She was one of many who didn’t accept Amerind, Indo-Pacific, or Eurasiatic, but were willing to accept the African classification. By now, three of his African phyla (all, if Omotic is not AA) and many of the sub-phyla have now been broken up, for the same methodological faults that invalidate Amerind and many of its subdivisions.
@drasvi:
Sure. It’s largely accepted among people who know nothing about African comparative linguistics (who, after all, greatly outnumber those who do.)
Is that Johanna Nichols? She belongs in the aforesaid majority group.
(What has actually endured in G’s classification is what he adopted – largely without attribution – from previous studies. His own innovations have fared poorly. As you’d expect from his methods.)
Anyone who says that mass comparison is a “method generally accepted in mainstream thinking” in comparative work reveals that they should not be taken seriously at all when talking about comparative work – whatever real contributions they may have made elsewhere. (As both Nichols and Greenberg have done.)
“Niger-Congo” has lasted longer than “Amerind” (a) because it contains a very large core (Volta-Congo) of languages that really are genetically related, unlike “Amerind”, and (b) because there weren’t at that stage nearly so many highly capable scholars working on African languages as on American languages, who could point out the multiple vitiating errors in the data and the analyses.
As far as I understand, what has endured of Greenberg’s methods is the attempt to classify the languages of Africa – as opposed to classifying their speakers and imagining this gets you at least halfway to classifying the languages.
I do hope he lifted that from earlier work…
He did get that from predecessors – although the prestige of promoters of “race”-based classification, especially Meinhof, had caused better linguists, like Westermann, to either resile from previous correct views or at least downplay them. Greenberg does deserve credit for killing all that off, even though he didn’t himself originate the ideas he popularised, it was he who made them mainstream (again.)
Even Guthrie (unlike Meinhof, certainly no Nazi) refused to accept that Bantu was related to the “Western Sudanic” languages. So someone like Greenberg was certainly needed to undo the damage, whatever his own mistakes.
As you imply, that is itself a lasting contribution worth honouring.
[I just (not before time) got hold of a nice dead-tree copy of Bargery’s Hausa dictionary. It has a long intro by Westermann which is still worth reading.]
I was just looking at a good recent account of Dompo, a Ghanaian language of which the only previous notice was a very brief study by Roger Blench, who thought it was an isolate. Looking at it myself, I’m pretty sure it’s actually Volta-Congo, though I applaud Blench’s caution.
Seems to me that Blench has the makings of a true Splitter, if only he could rid himself of the idea that what Greenberg hath said, stands forever (or until someone can prove that the languages G lumped together are actually unrelated – i.e. forever.) Where G has not spoken, Blench seems to be wholly sensible. He’s sensible on subclassification within genuine genetic groups, too, very often.
On both of these points I recommend his article “Declassifying Arunachal”. It’s about regarding a lot of languages of Arunachal Pradesh as isolates or two-member families; they had all been referred to Sino-Tibetan on almost no evidence.
(Those recent papers purporting to support speculative long-distance language relationships by appeals to genetics-as-in-DNA are, of course, attempting to recreate the very mistake that Greenberg so successfully opposed.)
Crimes are not typically committed with clues just subtle enough that exactly one clever Poirot will see through them. Usually they get solved soon, or never (or until some new technology appears). Likewise language family relationships are typically either transparent, or hopelessly impenetrable, with a few in between. Prehistory is not obliged to give us any clues, archaeological, genetic, or linguistic, though I am grateful for the ones it does.
Indeed. The important thing is to have the ability to say “alas, we just don’t know.”
Tom Stoppard remarked somewhere “all hope must be built on a foundation of solid despair”; I think that knowledge, likewise, can only spring from frank confessions of ignorance.
[IIRC, Stoppard was either discussing or actually quoting from the remarkable play Next Time I’ll Sing to You, by James Saunders.]
@Y, thanks!
“Mass comparison” is a method of processing data. I think it’s untrue – and can’t be argued – that its output is total noise and tells nothing about the world. I think, like any such method it has a certain place in science, though many methods won’t ever be practiced by anyone because there is a better method who does the very same job but better. And of course it shouldn’t be used out of this place. Thus I think supporting it can’t make one a crackpot.
There are always questions of what exactly its output means (this is what people are arguing about), where and why its wide practice will lead us, and, like any method (e.g. comparative method) – and I believe this is what makes one a “crackpot” – unless implemented as a computer program it can be done well or it can be done bad.
Or happily and carelessly bad, leading to happy and careless delusions, that is crackpottery.
So what I want to understand is whether Ruhlen does it, crackpot support and implementation of the method. When Trask says “crackpot” I understand it this way.
I followed some references for “objections” to Ruhlen in WP and was disapponted: say, the 5 objections in the Kusunda section (and it is not even a “Ruhlen’s” work, it is four people) are supported by a reference to Poser’s mail with 2 objections to…McWhorter.
In the context of the artcile but without reading it.
The proper use of mass comparison is in suggesting hypotheses for testing by comparative methods. Doing that is entirely valid and not evidence of crackpottery.
Deciding that the testing by comparative methods is unnecessary because the issue has already been settled by mass comparison is either stupidity or crackpottery.
Presenting the results of mass comparison which have not been tested by comparative methods as being established facts is scientific fraud; the culpability of this may be mitigated by how stupid you are or how much of a crackpot you are. (M’Naghton rules.)
(Greenberg himself did not – quite – proceed to this Stage Three. Ruhlen did.)
It can be legitimate to present unverified mass-comparison results as worthy of interest in cases where the comparative work has not been done at all, is at a primitive stage, or is proving very difficult. It is not legitimate to cross the line and to suggest to your readers that they are being told established facts.
Mass comparison cannot demonstrate that languages are genetically related. Ever. It can only ever suggest that the possibility is worth investigating.
@DM, oh, that’s one the first artciles (the second one, if I haven’t forgot anything) by Blench I ever read.
It made me hm… No, not a “fan”, but very determined to follow his work. I realised that he’s extremely itneresting.
DE, I agree of course with your first paragraph – and that’s why I asked if what WP says is understatement. Because it is not a serious problem, that someone supports something.
I slighly disagree with the second: I’d call that idiocy. Not stupidity (too mild) and not crackpottery either.
As for the third… Er. I don’t know what is the “fact” of classification. Tell me what exact historical process is claimed to be a fact here, and I’ll know what to think.
But it is normal for scientists to have contradictory very firm beliefs that this or that etymology is true or untrue, and I’m not ready to call them ALL “stupid crackpots”.
P.S. Ruhlen maintains that such classification is the first step in the comparative method and that the other operations of historical linguistics, in particular the formulation of sound correspondences and the reconstruction of a protolanguage, can only be carried out after a hypothesis of classification has been established. – WP, again, without references.
“…and not crackpottery either…” – because there is a plenty of people who happily keep doing incredibly sloppy and delusional work without slightest intent to refine their methods or otherwise be self-critical and sometimes even make extra-terrestrials part of their theories:) We need to call them somehow.
To clarify: by “comparative methods”, above, I mean, looking for regular phonological and morphological correspondences, working toward reconstructing protolanguages, and developing criteria for recognising loanwords. All that neogrammarian stuff. I’m specifically not including mass comparison in the term.
Mass comparison is just the warm-up to the real event. Warm-ups have their place. But I’ll demand my ticket money back if all I get to see is a warm-up.
I’d call that idiocy. Not stupidity
I was subsuming ignorance under stupidity. That was a bad move: many of the most egregious perpetrators are not stupid at all, they’ve just never quite got the hang of comparative linguistics, for some reason. Trouble is, they don’t realise that they haven’t got the hang of it …
Their productions then go on to pollute the noosphere. There seem to be entire self-reinforcing and self-referencing subcultures of Crap Historical Linguistics.
I expect that many are in between in that they become reasonably transparent after a lot of hard work.
I think we’re seeing this in the fact that new sound laws are still being discovered within IE, indeed within Germanic for instance; they just have fewer examples and more counterexamples-at-first-and-second-but-not-third-glance than the classics do.
Sure, there is endless work to be done on subclassification. I meant discovering new relationships between top-level families. Even not so transparent language families were recognized early on, like Sino-Tibetan.
There are a few outliers-yet-not-true-crackpots who deny that Chinese is related to to Tibeto-Burman genetically, attributing the many clear resemblances to thousands of years of contact instead. (Not so much Splitters as Antilumpers, I guess. Atheists rather than mere agnostics. The true Orthodox Splitter only declines to be persuaded, rather than actively denying the very possibility of a genetic relationship.)
So do I, because I don’t see a reason to view this as qualitatively different – having read attempts in both.
Are there? I thought Laurent Sagart was the last one, and he gave up around the turn of the millennium (though he still maintains, or did as of 10 years ago, that the closest relative of Sino-Tibetan is Austronesian).
the 5 objections in the Kusunda section
I’ve met the first two authors of that paper; at the time, they were energetic but untrained amateurs, trusting rather too much in Ruhlen’s judgment. One gave up on historical linguistics, and the other, under the influence of Sergei Starostin, eventually became a serious historical linguist and realised that his first paper was basically worthless.
David Eddyshaw: Tom Stoppard remarked somewhere “all hope must be built on a foundation of solid despair”
Can you be more specific? The passage from Saunders that Stoppard notably quoted was this:
What you quoted sounds more like this, from Bertrand Russell:
Also, the internet informs me that Tom Stoppard did the film script adaptation of a novel by Nabokov called Despair, but that doesn’t seem to be relevant to the quote.
Can you be more specific?
Unfortunately, no.
I think I remember this from a television interview, from the distant days when I watched television (so early 1990s, or before.)
I’m pretty sure of the wording (which is memorable, as you’d expect from Stoppard); he may very well have had Russell in mind, of course, or indeed have been directly quoting him (more or less.)
I’m certain that my immediate source was Stoppard, not Russell himself. I admire Russell (mostly) in an abstract sort of way, but have never been able to get on with his pop-philosophy writings.
The passage you cite from Saunders is the one I recall Stoppard citing. (It, too, is very memorable. I actually bought a copy of the play after hearing it.)
@Y, @DE, thanks!
Yes, Johanna, from the introduction to her book.
No, I don’t think she means “all people think it is good, be with all people!” (neither an opinion nor a fact and hardly good for a scientific work)
I think she means “folks think it’s good”. But I think she too thinks it’s good.
What made me wonder:
If you’re building a tower and have sewn and pitched a tent, waitign for workers to arrive, and it is a good tent (and workers sleeping in your tent agree fully) it would be strange to say: bricklayers and stonecutters “accept” your sewing method.
Your tent is to be replaced with stone tower. The sewing method with stonecutting and laying methods.
Africa is Very big.
Greenberg’s work was done by one man in a few years.
IF it is warm and dry, then it is a “tent”, and the method is “sewing”: a method which is good for one researcher working with data from all over Africa for a few years.
If the method is “masonry”, then rain wets you and sun burns you and snow or sand pile inside: a “tower” is too much for one man and few years.
This, I think, true for any talented researcher and any wonderful method.
I don’t mean that Nichols’swording are “strange”, but I wonder if people think of his method that it is (good or bad) masonry.
@Lameen, thanks!*
I haven’t yet read the Kusunda paper:
I hoped to find serious criticism, but with zero knowlege of the area it will be difficult for me to evaluate the work. I honestly don’t know what to think of correspondences listed in WP (in terms of “the chance of coincidence”: I’m much more accustomed to either longer lists or, conversely, individual words).
One of the objections listed in WP is “borrowing”. This actually refers to the exchange between McWhorter and Poser: McWhorter said pronouns are rarely borrowed (“languages do not exchange pronouns much. Usually, a language’s pronouns are original stock, not the result of later bartering“), Poser objected that it is not true that they are never borrowed, both claims are true:-/ I think some people do this hedging when speaking but not when thinking and have such strange argumenets.
What made me curious is that if there are arealisms (pronouns rather than cultural wanderwords) extending from Nepal to the Andamanese islands – to say nothing of New Guinea (with less perfect matches) – that would be no less interesting for me than shared origin of the languages. Unless of course, the area in question is already too well-known to have such arealisms. The historical processes underlying exchange of whole langauges and of their fragmetns are similar: human contact.
Do you rememeber if the paper is bad becuase
– bad processing of data (say, the forms listed are in reality different)
– the match is though to be chance coincidence
– the match is though to be a result of borrowing (which would have made it uninteresting for Power and maybe Ruhlen, if growing trees is of some sportive interest, but not me)?
* Also I’m of course pleased to hear that Starostin’s influence was towards more ratehr than less serious approach:) As I said, I’m not too interested in long-range work. But he is highly esteemed here (he and Zaliznyak are our celebrity linguists) and I know some people from his family.
@Lameen, and as I began asking question here and if you will have time to answer, I have a more practical (for me) one: What do you think of Stolbova’s work on Chadic? Reconstruction, the lexical database, the etymological dictionary*.
It is not talked about in English too often. In Russia she is simply a (or the?) leading specialist in Chadic and her work won’t be questioned. And it is not talked about often in Russian anyways because not many Russians work with Chadic.
I understand that it is more reliable than Orel and Stolbova’s HS dictionary but nothing comparable to what we have for IE or even Semitic. There is an enormous range in between. I don’t understand how sceptically I must take everything. I can understand something on my own, but what I can’t control is cherry-picking forms to support false reconstuction. Chadic languages are many, and I merely want to learn more about them, I don’t know them.
* Russian title, English contents as I rememebr. The DB is in English.
@DE: The Comparative Method is wonderful, but I think you are missing the point of where Greenberg (and Ruhlen) went astray.
Mass comparison, of the crudest Greenbergian sort, works as advertised — crude data, superficial resemblances, reliance of sheer numbers — within narrow circumstances. An English speaker can tell that speakers from London, New York, and Mississippi are speaking related languages, with justified certainty, while never working out any sound correspondences. Likewise a linguist looking for the first time at poorly recorded early wordlists of Polynesian, or California Athabascan, would be right to assert their genetic relationship by inspection.
Greenberg himself gives a toy example, of a short wordlist in several IE languages, where the overall relationship and the broad division into subfamilies is evident by inspection. That is fine as far as it goes. But then he goes too far.
If you compare wordlists of several languages, and 100% of the items agree perfectly in form and meaning, you need go no further. If for each gloss 90% of the languages have a near match, you’re good. The problem comes when one further drops that percentage, and loosens what is meant by “near match”. Greenberg took it to the extreme, where in a large set of languages any match between any two languages for a given gloss would count as support for group membership. If you look for matches between all or almost all languages in your set, having more languages lessens the probability of chance matching, even if you use impressionistic comparisons. In Greenberg’s method, having more languages increases the probability of chance matches. In a sense, megalocomparison baits you with one set of assumptions and then switches to where they do not apply.
This is quite a general issue, and the logic here is the same even in systems which don’t have the equivalent of the Comparative Method, e.g. anthropological classification by cultural traits. Linguistics is lucky to have such a thing as regularity in sound change, which enables the CM, and dramatically reduces the probability of chance matches. It is unlucky to not have the equivalent for semantic change, and unlikely semantic matches are still prevalent in the literature everywhere.
There is no exact definition of “crackpot”, but to me it carries a whiff of the aggrieved fanatic. By all accounts Greenberg was a pleasant and low-key person. I do think he was deluding himself at the same time that he was deluding others.
@Y,
One good thing about mass comparision is that now, when we have computers, it can be improved (and statistical measures of significancance applied). it is easier to algorithmise.
The other is good for me, and horrible for others:) It is sensitive to arealisms:))))
But I find those interesting and I do not find classifications terribly interesting: they’re but the first step that helps us in chosing what to reconstruct and what other work to do.
@Y:
I certainly wouldn’t characterise Greenberg as a crackpot. However, crackpots can be perfectly nice people, and quiet crackpottery is, in anything, probably commoner than the loud obnoxious kind.
https://poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com/2010/03/w-h-audens-kingdom-of-number.html
The problem comes when one further drops that percentage, and loosens what is meant by “near match”.
This is a far more general problem; Normalization of Deviance gives a good description (and explains how it causes actual disasters):
It goes on to describe what happened with Challenger:
@David E. An association between crackpottery and loud obnoxiousness, in some circles, can be seen here.
At first reading I thought that was Feynman’s voice. It’s very compelling.
@Jerry: Baez says nothing at all about loudness or obnoxiousness. It sounds as if he has been annoyed by not a few physics crackpots in the past, but he is admirably restrained about it.
Of course,
– LOUD crackpots are the ones you notice.
– OBNOXIOUS crackpots are the ones you want to insult (by telling others that they’re crackpots)
This creates bias. (I know the name of the loudness bias, but not sure how to call the obnoxiouness bias:)).
What do you think of Stolbova’s work on Chadic? Reconstruction, the lexical database, the etymological dictionary*.
I may be biased against it by having encountered HSED first, but I haven’t gotten anything useful out of it; it strikes me as overreach to try to reconstruct that many lexical items without first reconstructing the intermediate languages, and without a clearer understanding of the rather complex morphology. My usual starting reference is still Newman’s proto-Chadic. From my own work, I would say a big issue in Chadic is that you really need to pay a lot of attention to contact to be able to do reconstruction without getting swamped by false cognates.
@Stu: All-caps is usually considered loudness, and writing to physicists one doesn’t know is at least not keeping one’s physics theories quiet.
Obnoxiousness is a matter of taste. I’d say it’s obnoxious to name something after oneself, compare oneself to Newton or Einstein, or say one deserves a Nobel Prize, and more obnoxious to say that those who rebut one’s theories are hidebound reactionaries, self-appointed defenders of the orthodoxy, or a conspiracy; to compare them to Nazis, stormtroopers, brownshirts, or the Inquisition; and to fantasize about show trials in which they’re forced to recant. Also to tell Baez that his index suppresses original thinkers.
I am not familiar with Greenberg, his theories, etc., but from what I’ve encountered on LH this doesn’t seem like crackpottery at all. He took a plausible scientific idea and extended it probably well beyond its known area of applicability. But that’s how science works. (In part, science works in many ways) If he didn’t hit a jackpot, that’s just what happens with most ideas.
For anyone unfamiliar with the reference to Feynman, he (chosen as probably the most prominent physical scientist in America) was on the commission that investigated the Challenger shuttle disaster. He famously demonstrated, on live television, what happened when an o-ring (of the real materials and transverse dimensions, but only a few centimeters across) was soaked in ice water and how rigid it became. His appendix to the commission’s report is also fascinating reading.
As aggressive crackpots go, few have ever topped the International Flat Earth Research Society, which existed in the latter half of the 20th century. Favorite quote, at the conclusion of a flyer of theirs I once picked up (text here, accurately transcribed):
which existed in the latter half of the 20th century.
Not that I’m supporting their claim “The International Flat Earth Society is the oldest continuous Society existing on the world today.”, but its origins are more like 1838 [see the second para of that WiPe].
It wasn’t until after the invention of the steam locomotive that humans got stupid enough to believe in a flat earth. Nowadays we have LLMs.
If you like reading about old-style crackpots, Fads and Falacies is probably still be the best book.
But is not so-called “roundness” (or “flatness” if you prefer) is a mere question of terminology?
In reality (or as some would say, locally) it is flat.
Of course at certain distances its metric is not Euclidean, which leads to some interesting effects. For example, the so-called horizon, when our perception is fooled by the metric.
But that’s some complicated mathematical abstraction. Professionals resort to this convenient abstraction when calculating routes, but it is not a real thing, it is math and nothing more.
I came across “what is doing” in a text from the 19th century. It did not occur to me that not only houses are building, but things are doing.
I wonder what is the semantical role of “you” in “how do you do?”, is it the agent or…?
Was tut sich…
Perhaps the most intriguing sentence in the wiki description of Feyman’s role in the so-called “Rogers* Commission” investigating the Challenger disaster is “Feynman later reported that, although he had believed he was making discoveries about the problems at NASA on his own, he eventually realized that either NASA or contractor personnel, in an apparent effort to anonymously focus attention on these problem areas, had carefully led him to the evidence which would support the conclusions on which he would later report.” In other words, inside whistleblowers who knew what had gone wrong but didn’t want to get in trouble for having been the source, had arranged to carefully set out a trail of breadcrumbs for Feynman, having astutely assessed that a “wow, famously brilliant guy apparently figured it out on his own!” narrative would minimize the odds of bad actors within NASA/contractor management trying to identify and punish the whistleblowers. General Donald Kutyna, USAF (apparently still alive at age 91), was the key link in the chain (as a technically knowledgeable guy who also understood the bureaucratic politics and bad incentive structures) in deliberately putting the clues under Feynman’s nose in a way that let Feynman initially think he had figured it out by himself.
*Bill Rogers was a very well-pedigreed Establishment guy – certainly not a technical rocket-design guy but he had served as both U.S. Attorney General (under Eisenhower) and Secretary of State (under Nixon, until he got marginalized by Kissinger) and was thus a natural choice for this sort of Important Blue-Ribbon Commission.
It speaks well of Feynman that he figured that out. Being able to make the assessment that his own (very high) capabilities were, in fact, not high enough to explain how he had really solved the problem. Admirable.
Henry Petroski talked about the normalization of deviance, though not by that name, in his essay on bridge collapses. For more than a century we have had a major collapse about every 20 years. I don’t remember most of them, but1940 was Galloping Gertie,1963 was the Silver Brldge. 1982 was the Mianus Bridge, and 2000 was the Millennium Bridge (which was fixed before it collapsed).
The recent Philadelphia and Baltimore bridge collapses don’t count because they resulted from traumatic stresses. But should the I-35 collapse of 2007 be in the list?
The Tacoma Narrows bridge (Galloping Gertie) is a fascinating example of normalization of deviance. As soon as it was built, it was observed to be susceptible to resonant interactions with the wind, but the resulting vibrations were analyzed and not deemed dangerous. However, over time the stresses weakened the structure, and when the fatigue had weakened things enough, cross coupling excited genuinely dangerous torsional oscillation that tore the decking apart.
For more than a century we have had a major [bridge] collapse about every 20 years.
“we” means USA? Or does that include Canada? And do dam collapses count in the toll?
AFAICR, there’s been no such collapses in Europe over that timescale. (Power outages seem to be their gig.) Nor in Aus/NZ. (Devastating floods. Earthquakes in NZ, happening places which are supposed not to be geologically active.) China, yes; but ‘tofu dregs’ construction means stuff collapses/needs to be demolished often before it’s even put into operation; it’s not wear and tear.
AFAICR, there’s been no such collapses in Europe over that timescale.
If only… (those are just the two that came to my mind immediately; there probably were more.)
I do a lot of bicycle travel around Europe and have had to re-route due to a collapsed bridge on more than one occasion.
Ponte Morandi is the first thing that comes to mind when I hear “bridge collapse”, that was quite the scandal.
Wikipedia has lists of “bridge collapses” both in German https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Br%C3%BCckeneinst%C3%BCrzen#21._Jahrhundert and English. Interestingly the lists are not identical, so you would need to combine for the full list.
Looking at the list Vanya linked to, I will say that I do not remember any English-language media coverage (which isn’t to say there wasn’t any, of course) of e.g. the Ponte Hintze Ribeiro disaster of 2001 in Portugal, despite the quite substantial number of fatalities. Not enough dead foreigners to be newsworthy if they don’t match up with some broader narrative about “terrorism” or political strife?
There really doesn’t seem to have been much coverage of the Ribeiro disaster in the US at the time. As far as I can tell the NYT never mentioned it, there were some items on CNN and CBS. To your point, the IRA bombing of the BCC in London was probably considered more newsworthy, as was the crushing to death of 35 pilgrims in Mecca during the Hajj.
Somewhat odd, because it really is quite the story, a 19th century landmark collapses on the same day two protesters are being hauled into court for previously blocking traffic because they believed the bridge to be unsafe.
I can’t find a mention either, and I too am surprised — you’d think there would at least have been a “Bus Plunge”–style paragraph.
Well, the point of the classic “bus plunge” story was to fill up a one-and-a-half-column-inch hole that was sitting there conspicuously unplugged very late in the layout process for the next day’s edition. I think changes in the news business have made that sort of niche less relevant.
When I was 19 my friend told me that apart of Die schöne Müllerin by Müller (lyrics) and Schubert (music)* there once was competing Die schöne Müllerin by Müller (lyrics) and Müller (music), with music by a cerain then known Müller.
I’m not sure this is true, but I learn that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Müller is a son of Wilhelm Müller, the poet from my friend’s joke.
* Thanks to the friend, some songs from their Winterreise even occasionaly play in my mind, in Russian…
(The context is that DM’s comment about Greenberg and classifiyng speakers made me read the classification of Cust – and of Friedrich Müller, an Austrian Müller, whose large gropings are used by Cust and in Müller’s books are made a part of even larger racial groupings. When I was googling for him, I found the WP article about [Friedrich] Max Müller)