Re: Plausibility Check

Nathan Sanders and John "pile of" Bulkington can't
expect a reply from me, instead I repeat my message
from this morning. Peter T. Daniels: I answered your
question several times in the course of the past weeks,
must I do it again? No, instead I tell you about a Dylan
group I found this afternoon. One poster had just heard
Dylan's album "time out of mind" for the fist time and
was deeply impressed by it. A quote (typo removed):
"Also what is very interesting about this album is
that it manages to be profound while using mostly
monosyllabic language." Another poster replied and
recommended "John Wesley Harding" with equally
impressive songs. How come that the short words
hold such archaic power on us?


Phonetic laws, I find, have a limited range of applicability,
and lead to the paradox effect that early, very early words
require ever more complicated notations while we can
safely and soundly assume that early words were short.
I propose words of two and three letters and follow their
changes through time by means of a method I invented
and developed myself: by mouthing the words, by
pronouncing them silently, without giving voice, not
even whispering them, just moving the lips, tongue
and jaw silently, no air at all passing the vocal chords
- I can even do it without actually moving lips, tongue
and jaw, just by innervating the muscles (which requires
more experience). I pronounce the words like that, over
and over again, having in mind a recent form.

An example. PAD is my word for activity of feet,
comparative form PAS for everywhere (in a plain),
here, south and north of me, east and west of me,
five places, denoted as domino five, or the five dots
on a dice, identified in the Brunel chamber of the
Chauvet cave by poster Holly in past spring. Here
the illustrations on my website:

www.seshat.ch/home/pas1.JPG
www.seshat.ch/home/pas2.JPG

The sign in the Chauvet cave is between 32,000 and
30,000 years old, the one in the cave Pech Merle
(second illustration) 26,000 years old. So I assume
that PAS and PAD are words from the Aurigniacian.
The permutation groups of 6 D-words and 6 S-words
were filled up in the Magdalenian period of time.
The cluster of 12 words allows to define the single
words on the semantic level - an aspect I leave out
here.

Now the hypothetical word PAD for activity of feet
would have many descendants in recent languages:
ancient Greek pous podos Latin pes pedes English
foot feet German Fuss Fuesse, French patte English
paw German Pfote, English to pad along, also paddle,
Sanskrit pathi English path German Pfad, probably
also ancient Greek pataer Latin pater English father
German Vater as the one who goes ahead and leads
the way. A further descendant is the male given name
of David, from DA PAD --- away from (da) activity of
feet (pad): delivered from the paw of the lion, delivered
from the paw of the bear, delivered from the hand of
Goliath. The semantic relations between hypothetical
PAD and the above words from recent languages are
clear. How about the phonetic relations? The phonetic
laws have a limited range of applicability, so I use my
own method of mouthing or just innervating the words,
in this case PAD. I mouth or innervate it over and over
again, having in mind the form I wish to arrive at:

pad pad pad pad ... ... ... ... ... ... pod-
pad pad pad pad ... ... ... ... ... ... ped-
pad pad pad pad ... ... ... ... ... ... vid

In these cases I don't need long to reach the goal
word, which tells me that the phonetic shifts involved
are plausible. For the time being this suffices for me.
If my method could be standardized, it might one day
also be used for estimating the time needed for a shift
to occur, allowing to tackle a problem from both sides
-- from the present looking backward, from the past
looking forward. However, at this experimental stage
of work, I can't provide a phonetic clock resembling,
say, the mitochondrial DNA clock in biology.

Moreover, phonetical "malleability" is not the only
aspect to be considered. Words are kept whithin what
I call the verbal morphospace. You can't just look out
for a single word, you have also to consider close
phonetical variants. Why father in English and Vater
in German? Vather in English were too close to water,
while German Wasser is at a safe distance from Vater,
so the P of ancient Greek pataer and Latin pater could
soften only to F in English while to V in German. P, F
and V are not only a question of inherent phonology but
also of phonetical neighbors in the verbal morphospace.

Franz Gnaedinger

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