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

On Sep 29, 9:33 am, Ruud Harmsen <r...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

As I perceive it, both phonetics and semantics are considered in
mainstream etymology. When it is posited that Latin caput and Dutch
hoofd are related, it is because they obey sound laws observed in many
other pairs, _and_ because the words have similar or at least related
meanings.

Just going by semantics is prone to produce false hits: Dutch kop is
_not_ related to Latin 'caput'.

Not related according to the sound rules of the comparative
method, which also can't connect Latin habere and German
haben and English have, whereas all those words and
many many more go back to Magdalenian CAP from
the permutation group around the meme of horse hunting.
Look up Mallory and Adams 2006, they say that they
can reconstruct only a small percentage of PIE words,
only the regular cases, while all other cases - the vast
majority of PIE words - escape them, and this means
they also miss connections. When they can't relate
Latin caput and Dutch kop and Latin habere and German
haben English have, then it does mean that these words
can't be related in the light of the sound rules only,
and not that they are not related per se. The same
mistake as always: a successful theory (PIE) is
generalized and absolutized and turned into fact
and truth, outside of which nothing exists. But no,
PIE is a successful but very limited theory, and
I trust only scholars who admit this, for example
Mallory and Adams.

That's one of the thing that makes Franz' theories unlikely: if we see
quite a lot of sounds shifts in attested languages over 2000 or 4000
years, how could there have been so little change in the period
between Göbekli Tepe (11,500 years ago) and 2000 years ago?

Wrong, I say that agriculture, invented in the region
of the Göbekli Tepe at the begin of the Neolithic revolution
also revolutionized language by introducing the whole
grammatical system that was absent in Magdalenian,
which relied on the grammar of gestures, body language,
mimic. Change of life and technology induces change
in language.

.

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