Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

In article <1180045303.063108.281650@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Darkstar <darkstar100@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 24, 10:40 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1180027614.823798.178...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

Darkstar <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 22, 6:37 am, Darkstar <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
This short, preliminary web article consists of two main parts: (1) a
table of cognates apparently found within certain languages of Central
Asia and the Middle East, and (2) the discussion of the mechanism
which could explain why languages located so far apart could possibly
have anything in common with each other. Since the matter is highly
controversial, there are no conclusions.

http://www.geocities.com/indo_european_geography/Central_Asian_cognat...

Has anyone found any mistakes or inconsistencies in this work, and

Lack of systematic correspondence.

You mean "colors" don't look convincing? One would need something like
*A = *B = *C?

I mean "Where language 1 has phone X in environments E and F, language
2 systematically has phones Y and Z respectively".

What you have is, roughly, "Where language 1 has phone X, language 2
randomly has V, W, Y, or Z".

Just because [b] and [m] are both voiced bilabial stops doesn't mean
that they are randomly interchangeable between languages. Allowing
that level of arbitrary, unpatterned correspondence results in an
essential guarantee that you can find a good 20-40% of the vocabulary
of two unrelated languages to appear to be cognates (this is homeowrk
problem I give my historical linguistics students, and they are
consistently able to come up with dozens of apparent cognates between
language like Spanish and Chinese).

The kind of mass comparison you're doing (scouring word lists looking
for whatever superficial similarities pop out at you) is well-known to
be pointless, because it doesn't distinguish between true cognates
(which have rule-governed sound changes that derive them from a single
proto-sound) and chance resemblance.

Nathan

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

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