Re: elementary Sanskrit blunder by Harvard professor

analyst41@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Sep 15, 11:13 am, Harlan Messinger
<hmessinger.removet...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
yeah right - one, three, five and nine are purely Indian but seven
alone got influenced by Hurrite.

First, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth
are purely Anglo-Saxon and second alone came from French. Once again you
are expressing strong and disdainful disbelief of a phenomenon that is
readily demonstrated to exist.

Because the place of "twoth" was already taken by "tooth"?

But interesting as this maybe - why should the only Mitanni form (from
amongst 1,3,5,7,9) that is undeniably MIA if it is IA be the only form
that was influenced by Hurrite?

It may be true - but simply asserting it isn't proof.

Simply questioning it isn't proof that it isn't.

When a speech
community is under the influence of more than one language - the form
chosen for a word from among different choices would never be through
an "eeney-meeny-miney-mo" mechanism.

Really? Why not? Because you used the words "would never"? Keep in mind that once a language has several synonyms for each of a number of related concepts, no one remembers any longer which words came from which languages. So if the selection later comes to favor one word for each of those concepts, there isn't any reason why it would be uniformly down the line of language of origin.

Look at the mix-and-match nature of the basic color names among the Romance languages. See http://www.ielanguages.com/romlang.html#colors .

Any number of pre-existent forms
for related words (and also the need to fit in with pre-existing rules
of inflection) would affect the choice

Really? What pre-existing rules prevented the substitution of "second" for the Anglo-Saxon word? Oh, wait, that's right, nothing prevented it. There is no such barrier. (One might wonder how you think English has ever absorbed any vocabulary from any language that has inflections foreign to English.)

and make it unique (even if
multiple choices result, the chosen forms would accord with the rest
of the language better than the discarded ones). This is a rich,
virgin field for research,

In other words, "I'm making this up, but I'm so full of myself I'm sure I'll find I'm right (never mind how many times I've learned that I've been wrong about things about which I've been similarly cocky)". It's your usual pattern of assuming a priori that the universe follows your personal impulses as to what must be or what would never be. And yet look how often, and how easily, people here come up with counterexamples to refute all these intuitions of yours.

but I fully know the likelihood of the the
calcified denizens of linguistic academia pursuing it.

Correct, people tend not to follow academic pursuits that contradict what's already known.
.

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