Re: proof that most etymologies are only fairy-tales

On Aug 6, 9:17 am, "Ekkehard Dengler" <ED...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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".

When you weave by hand, you throw the shuttle from side to side
between the threads that are alternately raised by the foot pedals.


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.

? Where did it take the last two steps?

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.

What's "predictable" about sound change?

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.

It's not. It's a collection of formulas from which the earliest
attested forms can be derived.

But once you've collated and correlated all the formulas you can
discover, you find patterns within them, which allow you to find
earlier regularities.

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.

Which isn't what internal reconstruction does ...
.

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