Re: proof that most etymologies are only fairy-tales

John Atkinson wrote:
Ekkehard Dengler wrote:
John Atkinson wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Aug 3, 9:26 pm, analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Aug 3, 6:32 pm, Harlan Messinger wrote:
Dusan Vukotic wrote:
On Aug 3, 6:42 pm, Harlan Messinger wrote:
Dusan Vukotic wrote:
Is there anyone who is able to explain the homonymy of English
bear (carry, cause to be born) and bear (omnivorous
animal/mammal)? Why and how has it happened?

Because there isn't any reason why it *wouldn't* happen, and
both words evolved in unsurprising ways to become, as it
happens, homonyms.

And how that "unsurprising way" looked like? Could you be more
specific? What bear (carry, cause to be born, bring forth) and
bear (animal) have in common?

Why don't you LOOK THEM UP and find out for yourself if you want
to know what they are? If you haven't bothered to look up the
details, then you have no basis for disputing them.

Maybe you believe it happened by chance?

Yes.

But
what if there is no accidental word-developing within the IE
vocabulary?

Who said anything about "accidental word-developing"? What does
that even mean?

In French, the words "ou" ("or"), "où" ("where"), "houx"
("holly"), "houe" ("hoe"), and "août" ("August") are all
homonyms, derived, respectively, from the non-homonymic words
Latin "aut", Latin "ubi", Old High German "hulis", Old High
German "houwâ", and Latin "Augustus".

thats very instructive. Thanks.

But of course I would use something like this to poke holes in the
standard PIE model.

I am sure there are no homonyms in any PIE reconstruction - since
the

Sheesh, you've never even opened a "dictionary of Indo-European
roots" and noticed all the homophonous ones????

neogrammarian principles would prevent two words that sound alike
in the parent language from evolving along dfferent paths in the
daughter languages.

Very true.

But nothing prevents them from having taken on different affixes,
surviving with different vowel grades, different accents, etc.

All of which seem to have occurred in the case of *bher-, which was
apparently four- or five-way homophonous in PIE:

*bher- [boil] > Latin fermentum, Greek porphu:ro:, Sanskrit bhurati

*bher- [brown] > English brown, Greek phru:nos, (with suffix, via
*bhruHnos); and Sanskrit babhru-, Gaulish beberu-, Latin fiber,
English beaver, Lithuanian bebrus, Russian bobr, Avestan bawra (with
reduplication, via *bhebhru-); and English bear, Lithuanian be:ras
(via bhe:ro-)

*bher- [carry] > Old Irish beirid, Latin fero:, English bear,
Albanian bie, Greek phero:, Armenian berem, Sanskrit bharati,
Tocharian p&r, Russian beru, Lithuanian beriu; and OCS breme, Greek
ferma, Sanskrit bharman (with suffix, via *bhermn-); and Latin
fors, English birth, Sankrit bhrti- (with suffix, via *bhrtis)

*bher- [cure] > Lithuanian burti, Albanian bar, Greek pharmakon

*bher- [strike, bore] > Latin ferio:, English bore, Greek pharao:,
Irish bern, Lithuanian bar(i)u, Russian borju, Armenian brem,
Persian burrad, Sanskrit brna:ti; and Old Irish bruid, latin
frustum, English bruise, Albanian bresh@r (with suffix, via
*bhreus-)

*bher- [weave] > Lithuanian burvam, Greek pharos (with suffix via
*bhrw-, bolt of cloth)

How does one decide that *bher-, *bher-, *bher-, *bher- and *bher-
are separate roots, though, other than on the basis of perceived
semantic plausibility? How does the fact that they've undergone
different changes show that they were different to begin with?
German "saugen, saugte, gesaugt" and "saugen, sog, gesogen" both
mean "suck", for instance, and go back to the same root, as far as I
know, but they're not always interchangeable. There must be better
examples, but I can't think of any. Now supposing German were
Proto-Indo-European and supposing the weak variant of the verb had
changed its meaning to, say, "drink" or further to "get drunk", "be
drunk", "talk indistinctly", "talk unintelligibly", "talk nonsense",
"clown around" or "be a fool", how would one avoid concluding that
they must be homonyms? I realise these are uninformed questions, but
they're not rhetorical.

I have no answer to your specific question, other than what others
have already said.

ISTM that in the case of *bher- [strike, bore] and *bher- [weave],
it's just about plausible from the semantics that they're the same
word (primitive weaving involves sticking something through
something).

Thank you for your answer. I would regard the semantic distance between
"bore" and "weave" as comparable to that between an earlier meaning of
"warp", namely "throw", and "arrange (strands of yarn or thread) so that
they run lengthwise in weaving", from which it's only a small step to
"weave".

My source, Mallory and Adams, lists them separately, but
I said "four- or five-way homophonous" to allow for the possibility
that these two were really the same. But in the case of *bher-
[carry] and *bher- [brown], for them to have ever been the "same"
root seems semantically impossible.

I agree that there's no obvious link between the two, but that doesn't mean
that they *must* be unrelated. The semantic bridge might conceivably be "tan
healthy > strong > able to carry heavy loads". Of course I'm not
suggesting that this is what actually happened, but it could have, and we
wouldn't necessarily know. Take "red" and "robust", which I understand are
both ultimately derived from *reudh-.

And apparently stranger things have happened. My favourite
weird-but-(probably)-true etymology is "tabby": "al-3atta:biyya(t), a suburb
of Baghdad" > "striped silk" > "striped cat" > "cat" > "spinster" >
"gossip". That's quite some distance covered in a handful of centuries.

I don't think it's ever safe to say that the meaning of a word whose history
isn't well known couldn't have evolved in a particular way, since, unlike
sound change, semantic change is largely unpredictable.

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).

It is indeed hard to imagine how PIE could be a simplified version of
anything.

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). Which I
suppose leads back to the old question "Is the linguists' PIE
intended to be an approximation to an actual past language, or is it
simply the best set of abstract formulas that lead to the IE
languages we know?"

At any rate I doubt that it can serve as a basis for reconstructing PPIE
etyma.

Regards,
Ekkehard


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