Re: aestimare


Peter T. Daniels wrote:

Showing that you don't post anything relevant to linguistics.

We can read Homer, but do we understand him? My point
is that we have to read the Odyssey and plenty other early
writings in a different way than we read a book of our time.
We have to understand the symbols. For example Helen,
cause of the Trojan war, was a symbol of tin: coming from
the ore mountains and from Central Asia, bound to pass
the Dardanelles where the Trojans led hands on it. Now
the story of the Trojan war becomes plausible, and this
certainly has philological consequences that also concern
linguistics, for words aren't so narrow in their meaning as
many linguists are telling us. Words have a meme at their
center, and many planets, asteroids, and dust clouds
revolving about them like around a sun.

Why "certainly"? They are found in only one very restricted part of the
world, with a couple of kinda sorta innovations elsewhere.

I say "certainly" on the basis of my physiological study
of words. Lick your lips, getting in the last remains of
a fine meal, and your tongue will produce sounds that
may easily go over into a word such as -: I -: (produce
the sound given as -: by touching the lips with the tip
of the tongue, a sound that may also be called lip lick),
a word that became ancient Greek lilaomai for to desire,
Ugaritic DD for loved, Minoan Dadu for loved by, Dido
in Carthago. When you ponder the pyhsiology of words
you can't miss the L-click that is produced by the tip
of the tongue moving along the palate, whereupon the
tongue falls with a smack on its wet bed. I believe that
clicks were a part of the language of game hunters in
Southern Africa in the Middle Stone Age 75,000 years
ago. Clicks must have persisted for a long time. My
evidence are words for holy: Magdalenian O ! L G
(clicking L) became haleg holeg holy, German heilig,
and the given name Olga via a Scandinavian word
meaning holy. I asked you and others around here to
explain how these words hang together linguistically,
neither you nor anyone else answered my question,
so I go on saying that the explanation is provided by
a clicking L, given as !L in O!LG. Recently the clicks
have been refuted as a myth. I don't follow that author.
Early language was not entirely made of clicks, it had
many other sounds, such as licks, smacks, hummings.
But I dare say clicks were a part of early language.

Assigning meaning to individual phonemes.

Physiological meaning, not cabbalistic meaning.
Humming Mm for indicating myself, my inner me,
has a physiological meaning. Charles F. Hockett
rejected meanings of sounds. I have to contradict
him here. Some sound did have a meaning, either
on an onomatopoetic or a physiological level.

Except that no human language works that way.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx

I was speaking of the evolution and development of
human language, of the way how the verbal morphospace
was by and by filled up, in analogy to the filling up of the
biological morphospace. Language, in my opinion, is a basic
feature of life. We can learn much about language via biology.

Franz Gnaedinger

.

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