Re: More Etymology!

In article <1171721789.684241.281980@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Feb 17, 4:17 am, "Franz Gnaedinger" <f...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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."

You should know by now that Franz doesn't know the meaning of the word
"excerpt"! Why would he say in ten words what can be said in one
hundred?

Perhaps you don't recognize my arguments because
they walk about in casual wear instead of a suit?

When closeted in that Benedictine monkish cell, did you not study
Euclid, to learn how to set forth an argument? Or Aristotle, to learn
the simple patterns for convincing someone to your view?

I think by now it is painfully clear that "argument" is another word
Franz doesn't know the meaning of. As you point out, he seems to
think it includes opinions, anecdotes, speculation, and analogies...
pretty much everything possible *except* real arguments!

children love playing with words.
Many children go through a phase when they talk
backward, and some really excell at it.

There is a sizable literature on language play, and without some hint
of what you mean by "talking backward," this assertion is meaningless.
If you refer to uttering a sentence by uttering all its phonemes in
reverse order, there is no evidence that such language play exists.

It's obvious that Franz hasn't read any of the relevant literature, in
particular work by Don Lay***, who (unlike Franz) actually looked at
cross-linguistic variation in types of play languages. While total
segmental reversal can be found, it is very rare across languages and
unstable within a language. Much more common and robust are play
languages in which dummy prosodic units are infixed or existing
prosodic units are rearranged (in which case, it's almost always just
edgemost prosodic units that are affected).

But when has Franz ever let data stand in the way of fantasy?

German
Topf and Pott have both the same meaning,
namely pot. As you will easily recognize, they
come from inverse forms.

_I_ will easily recognize no such thing; I would prefer to learn what
the cognates of the two words are, in order to know whether they have
any etymological connection whatsoever.

Peter, "cognate" is academic terminology! Franz doesn't do academic
terminology.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/

--
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