Re: More Etymology!

On Feb 17, 3:16 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@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."

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 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.

There is no need to do so. I will restore them to a single message, in
case there's anything worth replying to in the next two.

(part 1)

First argument. Our long words consist of syllables,

This is a self-evident fact. We could call it an axiom.

which, in my opinion, testify to short words of early
language -

This is an opinion. There is no room for opinion in an argument. (The
known facts of language change also suggest that it is a mistaken
opinion, but as it is an opinion, and thus has no place in an
argument, it is irrelevant.)

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).

Analogy and personal anecdote have no place in an argument.

Short words of one or two or three
letters or phonemes limit language,

Another opinion; clearly contrary to fact, so not acceptable as an
axiom or even as a postulate. (We didn't explore Non-Euclidean
Geometry until centuries after the standard kind had been mastered.)

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.

Speculation, not argument.

Second argument.

Whoa, there hasn't been a _first_ argument yet!

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.

So this is an assertion that is either meaningless or false.

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.

More anecdote. But unless you made note of the "every which way," you
cannot state that one of the "ways" was to reverse the order of
utterance of the phonemes.

Note that if such a phenomenon existed, there would be no need to
investigate techniques of phonemic analysis -- one would simply utter
an utterance backward and discover exactly how to analyze clusters,
length, sandhi, etc., etc.

Thrid argument.

Still waiting for a first 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.

_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.

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).

Even if there were the slightest grain of truth in this speculation,
it would have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic of the argument
you are supposed to be making.

{Part 3 happens to fall on the other side of the ten-messages
boundary, so I can't scroll to it to be sure, but I see that Part 2
contains mothing but further irrelevant anecdote and no arguments, so
I shall not comment on any further parts.]


.

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