Re: new book on the spread of IE

On Feb 15, 3:25 am, Franz Gnaedinger <f...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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 Switzerlandwww.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.

Q.E.D.

If you pervert the word "language" for that, then you need to invent a
new word for human language. What word will you invent for human
language?

Discussion of anything _but_ the latter is OT at sci.lang (whose name
cannot be changed to suit your fancy).

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.

It's not _my_ mind. It's more than a hundred years of history.

See Peter Giles, A Short Manual of Comparative Philology for Classical
Students (1901, readily available through google books), pp. 46-57,
for a short history of the field and a discussion of its "scientific"
nature. The formulation of the motto "Die Lautgesetze kennen keine
Ausnahme" was formulated by August Leskien in 1876; I cannot say when
the term itself was introduced.

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

Why should your _opinion_, which is grounded in ignorance, be taken
into account at all?

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,

<...>

I hope you have all that crap stored in your computer somewhere so you
don't have to retype it every time.
.

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