Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

In article <1181669807.526501.41290@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Franz Gnaedinger <frgn@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jun 12, 6:49 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

No it doesn't. It says that we cannot identify a common root. Those
are two completely different claims, and if you can't understand the
difference, you have no business discussing historical linguistics.

So the correct way would be to say that we don't know
whether fungor and fungus have a common root,
whereas to say that they have no common root is not
correct.

Correct. We do not know anything further back than the separate roots
that have been reconstructed. Simply imagining that they have a
common root is not science. With a sufficiently perverse and
uninformed imagination, I could claim that all words go back to just
various repetitions of the same proto-word "ug". Such a theory would
be no more fanciful or farcical than your Magdalenian delusions, nor
would it be any more scientific than claiming that modern languages
sprung up fully formed when God created the universe five seconds ago.

There are no assumptions about actual word lengths in the comparative.
However, there is a lack of assumption about particular word lengths.
Again, a crucial difference that you seem not to have the capacity to
grasp.

Peter T. Daniels just told me that the idea of short
words only can be excluded.

No, he told you that we cannot assume outright that a proto-language
only has short words.

There is a very big difference between assuming not-X and not-assuming
X. You are doing the former, assuming an artificial restriction on
"early" language (that all words were short), without any evidence to
support your claim. Real historical linguists allow for both long and
short words, because real language allows for both, and until you
explore the language in question, you don't in advance what kind of
words it might encounter.

And the PIE reconstructions
I see are always as long as the words they wish to explain,

They are as long as they are reconstructed to be. Their length is not
chosen in advance.

the possibility of a compound has never been considered.

There are plenty of reconstructed compounds in PIE and in many other
proto-languages. The comparative method does not exclude compounds.

A serious shortcoming of the comparative method as
practized today (I stress that relativation, because the
method can be further developed).

The only serious shortcoming that's relevant here is your pathetic,
Swiss-cheese knowledge of how actual historical linguistics is
practiced.

There are plenty of robust, scientific, well-supported theories about
early language. None of them can say anything about specific words,
however. It is a mathematical impossibility given our current
evidence.

And none of them wonders about word length ???

What is there to wonder about? Some words are long, some are short.
Word length is an arbitrary variable across languages. Chinese has
short words while neighboring Mongolian has much longer words.
Culture and word length are completely orthogonal, as are culture and
phonemic tones, culture and ergativity, culture and noun cases,
culture and verb agreement, etc.

Language mirrors the level of life, and human language
mirrors the cultural level, hence the level of technology.
The vocabulary increases, words are getting longer,

Then why are Chinese words still typically only one syllable long? Is
their culture so drastically primitive in comparison to the cultures
of people who speak Mongolian, Nahuatl, Bantu, or Inuktitut, languages
that have systematically much longer words than Chinese?

Your fantasies about language are in direct contradiction to reality.
With your supposedly vast array of linguistic experience (for which we
only have your word), how is it that you have utterly failed to see
that cultural complexity has absolutely no correlation at all to word
length? Have you overstated your expertise, or are you just truly
that inept?

Human language has two aspects: biology and technology.

Technology has only a trivial impact on language (the existence of
particular vocabulary items). It has no substantial impact on the
underlying structure of language.

Another idiotic statement, and nothing that can be derived from what I
have said.

Your false assumption is that a language made of short
words would be less than our language.

The assumption you falsely attribute to me is not a logical
consequence of what I've said.

You seem utterly incapable of rational thought, so I'll spell it out
more explicitly for you: I do not think that languages with short
words (like Chinese) are "less than" languages with long words (like
Mongolian).

Further, unlike you, I do not see any inherent link between short
words and simplicity of either culture or language.

Nathan

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

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