Valentyn Stetsyuk as an Independent Researcher
Being a complete autodidact, for decades I have been doing independent research in the field of ethnology based on my own graphic-analytical method, first described in 1987 in the article "The Determination of Habitats of Ancient Slavs by a Graphic-Analytical Method" in the magazine "Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The Series of Literature and Language. Volume LXIV:1, Moscow" (in Russian). However, for a more complete reconstruction of prehistoric ethnogenetic processes, additional scientific materials, beyond comparative linguistics, are utilised, including maps, archaeological data, historical sources, mythology, onomastics, and ethnography. I would willingly be engaged in this great work with a group of like-minded people of different professions, then the work would be made faster, the results would come to readers more efficiently and cause more confidence. Each science develops through the collective efforts of many researchers, while individual work, even if novel, will always appear amateurish in the eyes of professionals. Unfortunately, I could not inspire the interest of the scientific world by my research and findings despite made efforts. Now, following in the linguistics and archeology over the internet, I have the impression that I live on another planet. Even though some of my work has been published, I've never met links or criticism to them. Now I submit the results of my research on this site, but serious scientists do not look here. Linguistics, and, especially, archeology develop in a roundabout way, and I even wonder whether those problem issues of ethnogenesis, which have been resolved by my method, would be resolved otherwise.
While the realm of human interests does not have and cannot have any restrictions, any science is developing successfully if it brings specific benefits and enriches our knowledge about man and the world. In our pragmatic time, more attention is paid to the natural sciences, but historical knowledge is more intended for the self-knowledge of humanity and has in this its value. At the same time, archeology, closely connected with the study of material evidence of the past, does not lose interest among the general public. As for linguistics, it is now in such a state that some of its branches cannot even answer the question, why do they even need it. Such a question arises after acquaintance with the themes of works of many contemporary researchers, not only among ordinary people but also among rectors of Universities in limited funding. Although some linguists understand that "without a past, no future", their perceptions of the past have mostly a hypothetical and sometimes mythological character, because they were hastily formed even in the years when linguistics was used for political purposes and had no effective methods of research. Therefore, without a solid foundation of historical truth, it cannot provide specific recommendations to humanity worrying about its future, and for many, it is obvious.
As a policy tool, linguistics is influenced by ideological attitudes formed on the pseudo-scientific foundations and perceived by society. On the other hand, linguistics, becoming a closed guild, does not accept new ideas from outside, which can turn into dust result of the efforts of traditionalists for many years. Thus, there are some forces that, for various reasons, are interested in the long-term preservation of ruling false theories, and these forces inhibit the penetration of new ideas into linguistics. In this case, freedom of expression does not really matter because you have to be heard and understood. On the other hand, a new idea or theory can be criticised mercilessly or swept under the carpet, and its author can be represented as an amateur, a dreamer, or even a mentally ill man. This situation is, if not only one of the evidence of moral decadence of modern society, then at least characterises its moral underdevelopment
Such sad conclusions contradict the very nature of science, which is optimistic by design. Therefore, one must express confidence that the recognition of a certain crisis not only in modern linguistics, but in all humanities in general, will force a new generation of scientists to turn to new research methods and ultimately overcome reaction and conservatism.
We can not say that the humanities absolutely refuse accurate research methods. Talking about the use of mathematics in linguistics goes not less than a hundred years, but it is a tribute to the time. Characteristic in this respect is the subtitle "On the possibilities and limits of 'exact methods' in the humanities" to one of the articles dealing with this problem. As if the author doesn't reject such a possibility, though with a caveat about the boundaries, the poetic title of the article "You do not have numbers and measures" and in quotes taken "exact methods" betrays hidden scepticism about their effectiveness in this sensitive area of science (SHAPIR M.I. 2005: 43-62).
To say that scientific progress in linguistics will soon prevail, there is no reason to. It is still not seen to meet an understanding of the logic of arguments, like this:
… the laws of nature and the laws in the humanitarian sphere, are not significantly different from each other, so that, contrary to the opinion of M.I. Shapir (and many of its influential predecessors), between the natural sciences and the humanities have no "abyss". Anyone who denies the possibility of studying laws in the world of the creations of the human spirit by exact methods will be forced, if he conducts a thorough analysis of the logic of his arguments, to conclude that laws of nature, too, are impossible to study by precise methods (GLADKIY A.V. 2007: 35)
If we talk about historical linguistics, even without reproaches in the absence of precise methods of research, at present, secondary phenomena, which only confuse the ideas about prehistoric ethnogenetic processes, are the objects of its study. To its state, one can fully apply the words of the Australian philosopher:
The subject to be investigated is, in fact, analogous to the archeological sites in Europe, which were only discovered after the invention of the helicopter. Archeologists on the ground could not identify these sites because the order, which was clear from the altitude of the helicopter, simply did not exist within the range of their vision. Those scholastics who, in the name of professionalism, deny the possibility of characterising broad historical sweeps are simply rejecting the possibility of there being the order of long durations because it does not exist in the trivia amongst which they compulsively immerse themselves (GARE ARRAN. 1996, 72) .
With "knowledge of the matter," the state of modern Indo-Europeanism, the experience and methods of which are used by specialists of other sections of linguistics, is characterised by one of the modern scientists so:
Indo-European linguistics has never been so well-documented as it is today. The precision of description and argumentation has never been so good. One must continue on this path with ever greater precision and adequacy. Openness to new approaches is of great importance (MEIER-BRÜGGER MICHAEL. 2003, 15).
Perhaps the author of these lines did not read Jean Baudrillard, who back in 1982 claimed that when information becomes more, then sense (clearness) becomes less and less (BAUDRILLSRD JEAN. 2013: 110). While doing my own research and trying to attract academic science to them for almost 40 years, I understood very well how right this French philosopher was.
Currently, scientists predict a new flowering of mathematics in the next 50 years, both in its existing sections and in the newly created ones. Among other things, by 2050, the emergence of a mathematical theory describing the interaction and dynamics of complex systems is predicted. It will be used in the sciences that deal with a large number of relatively simple components that interact with each other in simple ways. Such complex systems arise in biology, finance, sociology, and even art and politics (STEWART IAN. 2008, 44-45). A similar system can be created in linguistics to accurately determine the relationship of related languages on the basis of a large mass of their common features. It is for the study of such a system that the graphic-analytical method was used, which is based on the construction of a special graph, which has not yet been studied in detail in theory, but which can be called "weighted" in advance. The results obtained by this method provided some basis for the reasoning presented here.
Particular hopes are placed on artificial intelligence. The successful advancement of large-scale language models testifies to the mental degradation of that portion of humanity destined to become its vanguard. These people do not believe in the possibility of the natural development of human intelligence, but paradoxically believe in the possibility of human creation of an intelligence superior to human intelligence. This reminds me of Baron Munchausen, who pulled himself out of the swamp by his own hair. A look at the results of AI's work shows that it has nothing new to offer, but merely selects the most popular from all the information available in the world. This is clearly evident when asked to determine the ancestral homeland of the Turkic languages. In this case, AI will provide an answer that is accepted by the majority of Turkologists. A clear example of the triumph of democracy.
Meanwhile, there are sources of information that lie literally on the surface, neglected even in cases where there are already examples of their successful use. This applies in particular to onomastics, toponymy, and anthroponymy. True, onomastics, despite the abundance of data on the settlements of ancient peoples, cannot by itself ensure their localisation. However, it does provide reliable confirmation of results obtained through other means. Over more than twenty years of research, I have discovered more than 1,800 place names in Eurasia decipherable using Old English outside the modern Anglo-Saxon settlement area, 1,750 Chuvash place names in Europe outside the Chuvash settlement area, 650 Kurdish place names in Europe, 500 place names decipherable using individual Finno-Ugric languages outside the settlement area of their modern speakers, and 450 place names decipherable using Germanic languages without Old English outside the settlement area of modern Germans, North Germans, and Dutch. Their total number approaches five thousand. Despite such a wealth of toponymic material, which already speaks for itself, no one has bothered to continue this work, which often requires minimal knowledge of languages. I discuss the reason for this phenomenon in the articleНаука, розум, віра і мораль, but, in short, it is in the absence of "hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories" (BERTRAND RUSSELL 1095: 46).
This site shows the results of nearly four decades of work and their total volume exceeds a thousand pages, but the full picture of the processing can be got in five minutes, if you go to the section The Review of Methods and Results of Research in Ethnogenic Processes .
e-mail: valentyn_ua@yahoo.de
