Re: Etymology of "Ketzer"


"Holly" <noon_union@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1149372919.157935.185880@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

me wrote:
Holly wrote:
I read that the Dravidian word for fish "min" is the same sound as
their word for star; therefore they use the fish pictogram with other
pictograms when writing about a star.

Dravidians don't use pictograms and use [mi:n] only for "fish", not for
star. Star is [vel.l.I] in Tamil.

One of the places that I got my information was from here.
http://www.ancientscripts.com/indus.html

You want to be careful about not overstating the claims made. Here's how we
could put this:

1) A proposed reconstruction for the Proto-Dravidan word for fish matches
that for star, giving *mi:n. (I suppose that Dravidianists will be able to
give us the evidence for these reconstructions; it is of course not nearly
good enough to say that because one particular langauge, Tamil, has no
reflex for *mi:n in the meaning 'star' that the word could not have existed
in that meaning in Proto-Dravidian, which me is suggesting. I'm not a
Dravidianist, I'm an Indo-Europeanist if I'm anything, so I don't know what
the evidence for that reconstruction is; I have seen it in more than one
place, though, so it seems to have acceptance amongst scholars of that
language family.)

2) We do not know either how the Indus script worked or what the language it
is in could be.

3) It is possible, but not proven (and indeed often disputed), that the
language of the Indus seals is either Proto-Dravidian or a very early member
of that family.

4) It is possible, but essentially 100% speculation, that there is a single
symbol used to correspond to both 'star' and 'fish' in that script, if it
does record a Dravidian language.

At the end of the day, there is simply not yet nearly enough evidence to
decide in favour of any of the proposed 'decipherments' of the Indus script
offered. They are still as speculative as 'decipherments' of other mystery
scripts. As with those, there are several people who have (often
ideologically motivated) commitment to and belief in some theory or other,
but the only thing that we can do responsibly is reserve judgement.

On the other hand, your original question was an interesting one (even
though the Dravidian bits of your posting present as given what is 100%
speculation). If in Chinese, the character for 'bat' is used as a totem or
symbol of good luck because of its resemblance to another word, that is
interesting in itself; one can compare the way that numbers containing
'four' are bad luck, because the words for 'four' and 'death' differ only by
one phoneme, the tone. Can anybody tell us whether the characters for these
pairs of words contain the same phonetic element, or in other ways look
particularly similar? Does anybody have examples of this in other languages
with non-alphabetic writing? We have had to reserve judgement with Dravidian
(although if the Indus script claim could be confirmed - a very big if, of
course, and not one likely to happen any time soon - we would be able to
find that interesting too), but examples from other writing systems would be
quite interesting as well.

I don't know of anything like this happening in Indo-European languages;
based on what I know of their writing systems in history, I would think that
the most promising places to look would be the Anatolian branch, Middle
Persian (which, though using an alphabetic writing system, used spelled-out
Semitic words as logograms), and perhaps runic or ogham texts.

I don't know if there is a name for this phenomenon in English. Is there one
in Chinese?

Neeraj Mathur


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Etymology of "Ketzer"
    ... pictograms when writing about a star. ... We do not know either how the Indus script worked or what the language it ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: "I cant accept I just stink"
    ... Still that does not excuse her bad writing over the past years. ... At Risk had 203 reviews on Amazon.com for a low average of 1.5 stars ... Blow Fly had 716 reviews for a 2 star avg. ... sales must be pretty bad. ...
    (rec.arts.mystery)
  • Re: GL Harley recast?
    ... been so unhappy with the writing that he has apparently threatened to walk ... the writing over there on the wall. ... The workplace sucks. ... So you want to help recruit a new star. ...
    (rec.arts.tv.soaps.cbs)
  • Re: GL Harley recast?
    ... been so unhappy with the writing that he has apparently threatened to walk ... numerous times. ... The workplace sucks. ... First, you hope the new star will change the system dynamics, and re-energize the place. ...
    (rec.arts.tv.soaps.cbs)
  • Re: vocabulary...
    ... Algol 68 lives on in S3, which is the systems language of the ICL VME ... RP0085 _Using SCS_, Second Edition ... Continuing the star connection I see. ...
    (alt.usage.english)