Re: new book on the spread of IE

On Feb 14, 8:38 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

That's one of the many reasons why your "definition" isn't a useful
one. It is far, far, far too broad.

It is very useful. The latest cry in biology is system biology,
in Switzerland www.systemsx.ch (if memory serves):
instead of taking further apart an organism, biologists wonder
and study how the parts work together, and, I say, language
plays a key role in these processes, language on every level.

Grimm enunciated only a single "Law," and I don't know whether he
called it a "Lautgesetz."

Clearly, you did not understand what "Lautgesetz" means. It is the
label for an observed regularity of correspondence among a group of
daughter languages, from which an ancestral proto-form can be
reconstructed and from which the steps they can be supposed to have
undergone in turning into the attested forms can be posited.

A Lautgesetz is not a Law of Nature like Kepler's Law or Boyle's Law
etc. etc.

Either sound laws hold and are scientific laws and deserve
the term law, or they don't hold and are no scientific laws
and don't deserve the term law. Make up your mind.

If it doesn't make sense to you, then you should get into your time
machine and visit Leipzig in the 1870s, when the terminology was being
developed, and let your objections be known.

Sound laws, in my opinion, are somewhat like a shadow
of the physiological conditions of the vocal tract, which is
why I don't apply sound laws in the first place, but go for
the real thing, namely the vocal tract, pronouncing a
Magdalenian word silently, over and over and over again,
while observing what happens. If I pronounce the word
or compound silently, not even whispering, no minimal
amount of air flowing along the vocal chords, the verbal
morphospace that keeps words in place losens its grip
on the words, and they begin to shift. My way of following
sound changes may be less accurate and precise in
a special case than the known sound laws, on the other
hand it covers a far greater period of time, and includes
all sound laws, the known ones and the ones that may
be discovered in the future. As in archaeology, where we
have the precise methods of dendrochronology and of
radio carbon dating, and then we have the less accurate
method of thermoluminescence which, on the other hand,
allows to date objects much older than 8,000 and 6,000
years, time depth of dendrochronology and C14 dating
respectively (numbers as I remember them).
.

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