RE: Names of places in Croatia
April 7, 2023 at 12:06 pm
(This post was last modified: April 7, 2023 at 12:16 pm by FlatAssembler.
Edit Reason: Fixed formatting...
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(April 1, 2023 at 9:22 am)emjay Wrote:(April 1, 2023 at 8:51 am)FlatAssembler Wrote: People do armchair psychologising on Internet forums all the time. If I didn't want to hear a lot of psychologizing, I wouldn't be here.
Cool, that's good to know; I'm glad I didn't make you feel uncomfortable.
What does make me feel uncomfortable are people suggesting that I am being a liar. For example, a user called Nyittiuny from forum.hr said that he thinks that my latest paper about the names of places in Croatia is a hoax intended to trick people who are educated in informatics but don't know historical linguistics. Suggesting that somebody is being downright dishonest is very unlikely to be productive. Maybe suggesting that somebody is being dishonest with themselves is likely to be productive, but saying somebody is being a liar is not.
Informatics is arguably a significantly harder science than historical linguistics is. So, if the consensus among informaticians is that my arguments are compelling, and the consensus among historical linguists is that my arguments are not compelling, then informatics trumps historical linguistics. Even if my arguments are contradicting something from historical linguistics that's based on evidence. But I don't think I am even doing that, I don't think I am contradicting something from historical linguistics that's based on evidence. I think it's more groupthink than evidence. The argument for the mainstream interpretation of the river name Karašica, as presented in the Melich Janos'es paper (which I am citing in my paper), goes something like this: "The medieval names of the Karašica (the tributary to the Danube, not the bigger one that's tributary to Drava) are Feketeviz, Mogyoros and Karassou. Since Feketeviz means 'black water', 'Karassou' then probably means the same. Since 'Karassou' sounds vaguely similar to Turkic 'kara sub' (black water), it probably comes from that.". That's not a good argument. And even if it were, good arguments from informatics trump good arguments from historical linguistics.