Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

On Jun 13, 5:30 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

(Me, FG):

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.

(Prof. Dr. Nathan Sanders):

Correct.

Thank you for confirming this.

We do not know anything further back than the separate roots
that have been reconstructed.

Reconstructed under the assumption of given word lengths,
of proto-units, no compounds involved. You are very fond
of the comparative method, and you give it a p value of 1
or almost 1. However, to be strictly scientific you must
multiply it by the p value of the assumption that those
proto-forms were no compounds, agglomerations of
short words.

Simply imagining that they have a
common root is not science.

My work is more than simple imagination. It is based
on a thorough understanding of pictoral language,
and especially - relevant in this context - of cave art
and rock art.

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.

Peter T. Daniels believes that language sprang up
fully formed somwhere in the past. He believes that
language arose with Homo sapiens sapiens, and that
no early language could possibly be discerned from
a recent language. This means language was ever
the same, in principle from the first day onward, so
there was no language, say, on March 20, 187 359 BC,
and there was language on March 21, 187 359 BC ...

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

I just need the admittance that early language(s) could
have contained short words. This already allows compounds.
Whose possibility is never considered let alone pondered
by the authors of PIE reconstructions. A serious shortcoming
of the comparative method as practized today.

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.

Repeating myself: for my argument I need only the
possibility of short words that, by and by, agglomerated
to compounds.

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

The question I raise has apparently never been raised before.

the possibility of a compound has never been considered.

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

Now we are back to invectives. Know that invectives
can't replace scientific arguments. But I see that invectives
are a crucial element in the methodology of edus.

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.

If some words are short, we can raise the question
of compounds. And Chinese is an example that
a language of short words and of compounds can
work very well, without being primitive or whatever.

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?

My argument. Early language was not primitive at all,
even if it should have consisted of short words only.

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?

I discern between complex and complicated. Let's take
the example of Japanese. It was a very complicated
language in the 1950s, judging by what Richard P. Feynman
said in his funny book "Certainly you are joking, Mr. Feynman!"
Now, with the young urban generation, Japanese changes
dramatically. It is getting simplified, which doesn't make it
more simplistic, less complex, on the contrary, it gets
more complex, as it allows to handle more topics than
before. Chinese will undergo similar changes within
the next decades. My prediction. Technological change
is mirrored in language. Overcomplicated forms are
given up, language is getting simplified, and thus more
complex, namely able to handle more topics than before,
and to cope with a more industrialized civilization. You,
Prof. Dr. Nathan Sanders, have a mathematical training,
so you should know a little about information theory and
the insight that simple goes along with complex ...

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.

The underlying structure of language is biological
and neural, and doesn't change much, as I said in
my reply. But other aspects of language do change.

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.

I say it all the time: simple and complex go together,
simple does not mean primitive (in the bad sense of
the word).

This goes on and on, while the main point is getting lost.
And the main point is that PIE reconstructions take
the given word lenghts for granted, their authors never
think of - let alone ponder - the possibility of compounds.
A serious shortcoming.

Franz Gnaedinger


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