Re: open letter to the Google company, on the value of the scientific groups

On Sep 26, 2:03 pm, Franz Gnaedinger <f...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 26, 6:13 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The Ausnahmlosigkeit of sound laws has nothing to do with whether what
they lead to are actual words in the language suggested by the
reconstructions! If details of the original forms happen to have been
lost in all the extant descendants, then those details cannot be
reconstructed.

Note, though, that every once in a while, a reconstruction predicts a
form that is later discovered in a related language that had not been
taken into account in doing the reconstructing. A famous example was
discovered when a certain cluster reconstructed in Proto-Central-
Algonquian by Leonard Bloomfield, but not attested in Fox, Cree,
Menomini, or Ojibway turned out to exist in Potowotami, when that
language was studied for the first time by C. F. Hockett.

If you'd ever actually read any of Eric Hamp's hundreds of two-page
etymology articles, you'd find many, many examples of this sort of
thing, in IE and in Native American languages.

The bear paper is longer than two pages, perhaps five pages
(will have to look it up next week). And hopefully PIE makes
predictions and is confirmed by unexpected evidence from
various sides, otherwise it wouldn't be a theory. It is a most
precious theory, but not omnipotent, it has its limitations,
as all serious and honest PIE scholars freely admit.
Mallory and Adams say that sound laws uncover only
a small part of the PIE vocabulary, while the many other
words can't be recovered.

"Sound laws" do not "uncover" anything. "Sound laws" are observations
of the extreme regularity of sound change.

Ancestral forms are "uncovered" when cognates are found in daughter
languages that strictly correspond in conformity with the sound laws
observed in large numbers of correspondences.

But how can you exclude that
a new approach based on different laws and actual laws
reveal more levels of the early language(s) of Eurasia?

I doubt that you'll ever understand what "law" means, so just go right
ahead asking such meaningless questions.

The comparative method, stretched in
Nostratic and Proto-World, has to be complemented
by other approaches. A promising one is the bottom
up approch by Nicolas Marr and Richard Fester
and-

And who, praytell, was to be the third crackpot in your list?

We know that Marr was seriously unbalanced. We know nothing of Uncle
Fester save what you print here. That inspires no confidence in
whatever you're interpreting his method to be.
.

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