Re: proof that most etymologies are only fairy-tales

On Wed, 06 Aug 2008 04:50:58 GMT, John Atkinson
<johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:S4amk.25859$IK1.25623@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in
sci.lang:

[...]

If you look at an alphabetical list of PIE roots, there
really are an incredible number of apparent homophones.
Lots more than just about any modern language I know of,
except perhaps Mandarin. In the case of Mandarin we
know that it's due to pretty extreme phonetic erosion
over the previous millenium or so; but it seems unlikely
that this is the case with PIE, which is phonetically
pretty complex as languages go (more so than just about
all the other "Nostratic" languages). Seems to me a
perhaps more likely explanation is that lots of these
roots were never really homophones, but differed in ways
that can never be reconstructed via the comparative
method, due to phonemes that merged or dropped in *all*
the daughter languages (like the laryngeals, only more
so, since they left no traces at all). [...]

But most of the root homophony disappears when you look at
reconstructible *words*: you get different ablaut/accent
patterns, different extensions, different suffixes,
different parts of speech, etc. I seem to remember having
seen a figure suggesting that at that level the percentage
of homophones is comparable to that in English.

Brian
.