Re: proof that most etymologies are only fairy-tales

Franz Gnaedinger wrote:
On Aug 16, 3:38 pm, Harlan Messinger
<hmessinger.removet...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So they just magically appear in the reference books without anyone ever
having done the research and written up the analysis that arrives at the
conclusions reported in the reference books? Just because you haven't
seen them doesn't mean they doesn't exist. Meanwhile, stop disagreeing
with things you haven't even seen.

They don't appear "magically" in textbooks,
they have been proposed: bear as the brown
one (from *bher- brown) and bear as the wild one
(from *gwer-),

Are these, then, presented only as proposals? Well, OK then. In that case, I suppose your point is, why are their proposals any better than yours? Well, possibly because those proposals fit in with the overall history of language evolution as documented and extrapolated, whereas yours is a folktale told without regard for whether it fits with the larger scheme; and because your general reliability as a source of intuition is way low: for example, see my comment further down.

but I don't see anyone in sci.lang
defend one of these etymologies

As I noted before, linguistic scholarship doesn't revolve around whether ideas have been defended in sci.lang in particular.

, nor propose
another one, and above all Mallory and Adams
2006 don't mention any etymology of English
bear German Bär Dutch beer. So there is no
convincing etymology, a fact all the aggressive
and humiliating replies to me can't conceal,
on the contrary, all your aggressive and
humiliating replies, and the killrating campaign,
confirm my opinion.

Since I've never rated a post from anyone on Google Groups, the fact that you occasionally bitch to me about your "killrating" as though I have anything to do with it or care about it and the fact that you keep calling the one person who seems to rate your regularly as a "mob" and now a "campaign" just shows how divorced your thought processes are from reality and therefore how unreliable it is as a source of inspiration for scholarly consideration.

Centuries of IE and PIE
studies involving thousands of scholars, and
still no convincing etymology of English bear
German Bär Dutch beer ...
.