Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

On May 27, 1:11 pm, Darkstar <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 25, 8:20 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Trying to derive PIE from English and Spanish would be an epic
nightmare!

It's good to adjust for the margin of recent phonological deviations
by going to a family proto-state. But you're making it look as if
stand-alone isolates couldn't be compared at all.
If English and Spanish had no family realtives, would we never prove
they are related??

Some hints of relationship might be found in a few paradigms of
auxiliary verbs, but nothing definitive could probably be said.

2) Moreover, I always adjust for lexical stability. Some lexemes are
particularly stable (I, not, this, that, thou, mother, water, foot,
fauna/flora, numerals), while others can be slangy, compound and
semantically vague (fat, good, kill, cloud, rain). For instance,
"rain" is "falling water" in Turkic. "Tear" is "eyewater" in many
Altaic and many SEA languages. But "water" itself is semantically
stable, because it's not similar to any other things, it's just a
generic name for "something wet". On the contrary, "kill" can be
easily substituted by "croak", "ice", "take out", "beat down",
"shoot", "murder", etc.
Fauna/flora names are also quite stable.

Splork!!!!!! One of the hugest problems with "Woerter und Sachen" is
that cognate nouns in closely related languages need _not_ designate
the same species.

Would you _PLEASE_ learn something before you continue typing?

Such words as "moss",
"goose", "birch" have very few synonyms (in fact, none) and they are
rarely used so they don't get a chance to change, hence Russian "moh",
"gus'", "bereza" and Spanish "musgo", "ganso", "abedul".
The high stability of numerals can also be demonstrated (by refering
to Rosenfelder's page).

People have shown you time and time again that numerals are NOT
"highly stable."

For this reason, I make ordered subgrouping within the main list.

4) There is supposed to be some typological similarity in grammar,
otherwise you won't be able to reconstruct grammatical morphemes. For
instance, the absence of classifiers in English indicates that it
would be difficult to relate English to Niger-Kongo. Of course,
grammatical similarity alone proves nothing. But the absence thereof
may cause difficulties when doing comparison.

Nonsense. There are Niger-Congo languages that don't look anything
like other Niger-Congo languages.

What you're forgetting is that for infinite changes, you will need
*infinite* amount of time. So for a phone to move ten steps away, it
will take ten temporal units, which in practice might be as long as 10
thousand years. In a finite amount of time, sounds don't change
infinitely.

There is no timetable for sound change.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages
    ... by going to a family proto-state. ... If English and Spanish had no family realtives, ... The high stability of numerals can also be demonstrated (by refering ... There are Niger-Congo languages that don't look anything ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages
    ... by going to a family proto-state. ... The high stability of numerals can also be demonstrated (by refering ... There is supposed to be some typological similarity in grammar, ... There are Niger-Congo languages that don't look anything ...
    (sci.lang)