Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

On May 28, 11:11 am, Darkstar <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

First of all, I'll have to thank you (and Peter T. Daniels) for
indicating the importance of finding regular changes. My only
objection is that you seem to be setting the standards too high - no
regular correspondences have ever been found within some of the well-
established (?) families, like Afro-Asiatic, for instance.

Oh, fer cryin' out loud. The basic handbook on Afroasiatic, chock-full
of correspondence sets, was written by your own eminent countryman, I.
M. Diakonoff. (ist ed., *Semitio-Hamitic*; 2nd ed., *Afrasian*).

If I give
you (say) Dahalo, would you be able to indicate in what way it's
regularly related to Hebrew? Even in the main Omo-Cushitic group there
might be many inconsistencies. And the main IEL's are not entirely
unproblemetic, either.

Having already established that on the basis of Spanish and English
alone, we cannot arrive at PIE, why would you now ask exactly the same
question about Dahalo and Hebrew, especially given that the time-depth
of AA is considerably greater than that of IE?

Where did you get "Omo-Cushitic"???

But if you say that finding regular laws is absolutely crucial, I'll
probably have to agree. The only question is how regular these laws
are supposed to be? Can you provide a perfect example of "good laws"?
If you use the old IE laws for this matter, it just might turn out
that many generally-accepted families simply don't live up to this
standard,

Then again, it just might not. Linguists have been working on the laws
and the correspondences for just about 200 years now (beginning with
Franz Bopp), and the kinks are largely worked out.

and by this reasoning will have to discard Afro-Asiatic,
Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, let alone Altaic, or most Amerind
families.

Certainly Altaic. What do you mean by "Amerind families"? There are
something like 58 indisputable families of North American languages,
and some of Sapir's suggestions for grouping them into six "stocks"
have been demonstrated to be valid.

What IS the standard that this kind of work is supposed to comply to?

Suppose, I give you some laws, and you or someone else points out a
few errors and debunks the whole idea just by saying "these
correspondences are not regular enough, period". So which ones are,
then?

What's an example of a "not regular enough" correspondence?

Sometimes explanations for classes of exceptions are found -- such as
Verner's codicil to Grimm's Law.

You have labials randomly corresponding to other labial: m~m~b, m~b~m,
v~b~m, b~b~b, p~b~u.

Ditto for dorsals: k~g~x, k~q~q, k~kh~q.

But bilabials-to-bilabials and dorsals-to-dorsals seem to be regular
to me for the purposes of a quick-and-dirty analysis!

I again refer you to 200 years' experience with regular phonological
correspondences. NO progress was made in the field until _regularity_
was discovered.

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