MOTHER CONTENTS ASLIP Business plus Important Announcements TONGUE 4 Obituaries: John Swing Rittershofer (1941-1994) 6 Reviews of Cavalli-Sforza et al's History and Geography of Human Genes. Reviewed by: Rebecca L. Cann, Frank B. Livingstone, and NEWSLETIER OF Hal Fleming THE ASSOCIATION 30 The "Sogenannten" Ethiopian Pygmoids: Hal Fleming FOR THE STUDY OF 34 Long-Range Linguistic Relations: Cultural Transmission or Consan­ lANGUAGE IN guinity?: Igor M Diakonoff 41 Statistics and Historical Linguistics: Some Comments PREHISTORY Sheila Embleton 46 A Few Remarks on Embleton's Comments: Hal Fleming 50 On the Nature of the Algonquian Evidence for Global Etymologies Marc Picard 55 Greenberg Comments on Campbell and Fleming Joseph H. Greenberg 56 A Few Delayed Final Remarks on Campbell's African Section Hal Fleming 57 Some Questions and Theses for the American Indian Language Classification Debate (ad Campbell, 1994): John D. Bengtson 60 A Note on Amerind Pronouns: Merritt Ruhlen 62 Regarding Native American Pronouns: Ives Goddard 65 Two Aspects of Massive Comparisons: Hal Fleming 69 Proto-Amerind *qets' 'left (hand)': Merritt Ruhlen 71 Arapaho, Blackfoot, and Basque: A "Snow" Job: Marc Picard 73 World Archaeological Congress 3. Summary by: Roger Blench 76 Comment on Roger Blench's Report on World Archaeological Congress: Hal Fleming 77 Announcement: Seventh Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference 78 Announcement: 11th Annual Meeting of the Language Origins Society 79 Quick Notes 86 A Valediction of Sorts: Age Groups, Jingoists, and Stuff Hal Fleming Issue 24, March 1995 MOTHER TONGUE Issue 24, March 1995 OFFICERS OF ASLIP (Address appropriate correspondence to each.) President: Harold C. Fleming Telephone: (508) 282-0603 16 Butman A venue Gloucester, MA 01930 U.S.A. Vice President: Allan R. Bombard Telephone: (617) 227-4923 73 Phillips Street E-mail: [email protected] Boston, MA 02114 U.S.A. Secretary: Anne W. Beaman P.O. Box 583 Brookline, MA 02146 U.S.A. BOARD OF DIRECTORS Ofer Bar-Y osef John Hutchison Philip Lieberman Harvard University Boston University Brown University Ron Christensen Mark Kaiser Daniel McCall Entropy Limited Illinois State University Boston, MA Frederick Gamst Mary Ellen Lepionka Roger Wescott University ofMassachusetts Cambridge, MA Southbury, CT COUNCIL OF FELLOWS Raimo Anttila Joseph H. Greenberg Karl-Heinrich Menges UCLA (USA) Stanford University (USA) University of Vienna (Austria) Luca Luigi Cavalli-Sforza Carleton T. Hodge Colin Renfrew Stariford University (USA) Indiana University (USA) Cambridge University (UK) Igor M. Diakonoff Dell Hymes Vitaly Shevoroshkin St. Petersburg (Russia) University of Virginia (USA) University ofMichigan (USA) Aaron Dolgopolsky Sydney Lamb Sergei Starostin University ofHaifa (Israel) Rice University (USA) Academy ofSciences ofRussia (Russia) Ben Ohiomamhe Elugbe Winfred P. Lehmann University ofIbadan (Nigeria) University of Texas (USA) © 1995 by the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory ---- --·---------- ---------- MOTHER TONGUE Issue 24, March 1995 ASLIP BUSINESS PLUS IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS We are putting the business of the Association at the front of this issue because of the importance of its being read. We do not wish to have scholars writing us later, saying they did not know what we were doing. Please read on. It is important to you and to us. The Board of Directors met on January 7, 1995, and had long discussions on all the points brought up in ASLIP Business in MT-23. Before reviewing that meeting, we want to state at once the things that concern members the most. 1. Everyone's membership in ASLIP expires upon receipt of this issue. If you see your membership as a subscription only, then that ended too. 2. Everyone can apply for new membership in ASLIP under a new contract. 3. Mother Tongue has changed. It becomes a new Journal plus 4 newsletters. 4. Annual dues change too. Annual membership will be $25.00 everywhere. BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEETING The Board met under the threat of ASLIP's demise. The key problem was how to liberate Allan Bombard and Harold Fleming from the excessive labor involved in running ASLIP and producing Mother Tongue, while at the same time preserving the good work already achieved and increasing the quality of our enterprise. The discussions were long and the concentration intense. However, the Board and the officers are satisfied that the crucial problems have been solved. Here are the most important results: First, we decided that Fleming's contribution was excessive; not only in the amount of time he spent but also in too much personal, colorful, or idiosyncratic style. The best solution to that would be a journal edited by someone else and playing more closely "by the rules". Second, the main scientific thrust of ASLIP would be presented in a new annual journal which had peer-reviewed articles - that includes MT* Treatment articles- basically along the lines of Current Anthropology. The editors of that entity, Mother Tongue: The Journal, will be Allan Bombard and Roger Wescott for the next two years at least. The journal will publish original articles, full data reports without peer review, and reports or summaries of important symposia. While it is published annually for now, it is possible that it will expand in the future, depending entirely on the flow of articles. The Journal aims to be on the frontiers of human origins science and will hesitate to publish articles which merely tidy up small points. Third, the more newsy parts of Mother Tongue will be presented in a new short publication, Mother Tongue: the Newsletter, to be published four times a year, roughly Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. Letters and sundry comments from members, small arguments and discussions, announcements of things ·of interest to members (from other members), and short blurbs on significant discoveries in human origins science - all will be included. This will be edited by Harold Fleming, with luck soberly or at least not too flamboyantly. The Newsletter is intended to be short and will not publish long heavy articles. Since it is essentially dependent on information given by colleagues, it may be very short indeed if nobody tells the editor what s/he is doing or thinking. Fourth, what one member has described as "trawling the media for curiosa", i.e., attempts to keep members informed on developments in a wide range of fields, will not be a feature of the newsletter. That feature was aimed primarily at those who had little access to major journals in our key disciplines and at those excessively blind to other disciplines. It has proven too time consuming for one person. Significant discoveries still will be reported briefly in the Newsletter. Fifth, however, individual members are encouraged to send in summary reports on developments in some discipline or part of one. These can be published in either the Journal or the Newsletter, depending on size and significance. --·-------------- MOTHER TONGUE Issue 24, March 1995 Other matters of importance decided at the Board meeting include these: Membership. The meeting rejected the suggestion that ASLIP should discourage "passive members" and encourage active researchers and their communication. The changes made in our plans (see above) removed the strains on time and effort which prompted the suggestion in the first place. Still, for three reasons, we decided to ask for application forms for new members. They are: (a) The information on the applications is vital to the operation of our peer review system. In order to determine what experts are available to review or "critique" a submitted article, we must know our collective expertise. (b) The application form when filled out is a tacit acceptance of a new contract with the new member. So many publications are expected and so much money is asked in dues. (c) Since ASLIP is a scientific organization, we reserve the right to reject some applications- for whatever reasons. We still do not want to be mistaken for a magazine subscription. Dues. The meeting was caught in a mild dilemma. Apparently we were offering less but charging more, as a Japanese comrade kindly pointed out. Here again there were three reasons for increasing the dues by two-thirds. (a) Members would be getting more in publications. (b) The quality of the Journal increased and thus its value. (c) USA postage costs have gone up sharply. Domestic mail now must pay 45% more for an issue the size ofMT-23 and it must go First Class. International mail has doubled in price to some countries. Old members may recall that postage costs have always bedeviled Mother Tongue. For the Journal, we may resort to Surface mail, possibly, but not for the Newsletter. Research. The Board acknowledged that most research was individual, except in biogenetics and archeology (often). While ASLIP should encourage the publication of research, especially in our Journal, still we would have to increase our monies tremendously in order to support actual research. But we will be searching for grants, gifts, and other sources of funding to support some research and our data base and other things. We do ask members to think about money they have left over, or someone they know who has extra money, for possible donations to our research. It is tax deductible for Americans, of course, since we are a non­ profit corporation. Apropos of gifts: Hal wants to thank individual members for their donations to the "printer fund". We made the full $300.00 and paid offthe debt. Merci! Data Base. Paul Whitehouse of London has a fine idea for building up a data base which will be portable and salable. Rather than attempting to follow the increasingly high standards of contemporary linguistics, he suggests that we do an introductory and practical thing, instead of trying to share huge dictionaries and full grammars. Like many really good ideas its virtue is simplicity, utility, and universality.