Re: More Etymology!

On Feb 16, 3:58 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Kindly excerpt from your above maunderings exactly those passages that
you believe constitute an "argument."

Perhaps you don't recognize my arguments because
they walk about in casual wear instead of a suit?
I clad my arguments in common language and not
in academic terminology (apart from a few terms
I tailored myself, for example verbal morphospace,
a loan from biology). Let me give you a line up of
my arguments in favor of permutations in language.
You may then choose one paragraph, or a quote
from one paragraph, for further discussion. As
Google swallows my long messages I divide my
reply into three parts, hoping they will get through.

(part 1)

First argument. Our long words consist of syllables,
which, in my opinion, testify to short words of early
language - comparable to the eukariotic cell that
originated as symbiosis of bacteria (Lynn Margulis,
for example in her publication Early Life, a book
I keep at home). Short words of one or two or three
letters or phonemes limit language, yet, as every
restriction, also allow some specific possibilities,
in this case a small and overseeable number of
permutations that may have played a similar role
in early language as rhymes in recent poetry.

Second argument. children love playing with words.
Many children go through a phase when they talk
backward, and some really excell at it. Ask around
among your friends, and you'll be amazed at how
many played that innocent game as kids. An ex of
mine saved the joy of word playing into her adult
life. When she comes across a pleasent word she
warbles variations of that word, effortlessly and
happily turning it around in every which way, and
making new sense of the variations. You can tell
she is in a good mood when she does that warbling.

Thrid argument. Permutations lost their importance
with our long words, yet rudiments can still be found.
British English _metre_ means a unit of length (I am
1.72 metres or 172 centimetres tall), while British
English _meter_ means a device for measuring
an amount of gas or eletricity. These permutations
(-re versus -er) have related meanings. German
Topf and Pott have both the same meaning,
namely pot. As you will easily recognize, they
come from inverse forms. Pott is of old usage,
and now more often used for an old ship. You
could never use Topf for a ship, really never.
So the word has doubled into a pair of inverses,
and one of the two initially equivalent inverses
has began to take on another but still somehow
related meaning. This process reflects the brain's
evolution: doubling of areas, then, by and by,
taking over specialized tasks (more in my last
argument).

(end of part 1)



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