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

On Sep 30, 11:45 pm, Franz Gnaedinger <f...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 1, 3:51 am, analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:-







You are obviously attacking a straw-man version of Franz's thesis.
Establishment scholarship declares an unattested word a "root" if it
can be deformed into attested later forms via "plausible" and
(loosely) systematic sound changes.

The root itself is guessed at through phonetic reverse-engineering of
the attested later forms and in many cases "cognate' later forms are
allowed to vary quite a lot semantically.

I think this is what Franz means when he says phonetics trumps
semantics in traditional IE linguistics.

Missing from the traditional method is

(1) Whether the "roots" are actually pronounceable by actual human
beings

For example:

bheudh-   to wake, rise up

dhǵhom-  (nom. dhǵhōm, gen. dhǵhm̥-(m) ós) earth

ghrendh-   beam

dn̥ǵhu-H-   tongue

reagrding the last one,  Hans Heinrich Hock fears to tread where fools
have rushed in - he simply gives up and says that "tongue" is subject
to taboo distortion.

(2)  whether the earlier speech-community that putatively spoke the
"root" words had evolved sufficiently in material and spiritual
culture to have needed a word that approximately semantically matched
all the later attested forms.  ( A classic case is numbers - sure
enough there are "PIE" numerals - but that begs the queston whether
they had learnt to count when "PIE" existed and its "descendant"
didn't  - especially when unusual numbers such as 34 are attested in
the Rig Veda).  And in case traditional scholarship postulates a
semantic shift from the root to the reflex(es) ("wild" to 'bear")
whether it violates the common sense law that an indirect abstract or
derivative word cannot give rise to a direct primitive word of vital
importance to human culture at the time the putative meaning-change
took place.  Ringe is wrong when he cites chapter and verse how the
"labio-velar" of "ghwer" gets dropped and eventually becomes "bear" -
only to be upended by Franz's brilliant thesis  that humans in Europe
would have named "bear" from "fur" way before they evolved the notion
of a "wild animal".

Franz's thesis is that some Eurasian forms evolved directly from the
living conditions of humans in the remote past and that these forms
exhibit combinatorial relationships.  He is of couse guided by later
attested forms to guess these primitive forms (but he is unencumbered
by the  sound-change law shibboleths of the establishment) - and he is
able to tell a story of the evolution of words that parallels human
material and cutural evolution.  He does make semantic leaps such as
fur = bear but he is able to tell a plausible story why it could have
happened.

I have no doubt that his method would find the relationship between IE
and semitic languages - but the dominantly phonetic methds of
establishment scholarship would fail to do so.

I am sure that he would concede that once he traces a word to say
Latin, "sound change laws" would govern what happened to the word in
French or Spanish.  Sound change laws happen in conditioned (only
partially linguistic)  environments - but that will be the subject of
my forthcoming book.

Thnak you for all that praise, and I hope you can stand
the new wave of contempt that will surely wash over you
for this. One thing intrigues me. PIE is believed to have
originated at a quite specific locality, most likely, in my
opinion, south and southeast of the Aral Sea, yet PIE
covers a very wide area, large parts of Eurasia. How can

You probably should learn something about what you're criticizing
before you criticize it.

a new language have spread so quickly some 5,500 years
ago? The only explanation I can see is that there was
a substratum, an older language, the language of Ice Age
Eurasia that was fully developed in the Magdalenian era
and which, therefore, i call Magdalenian.

Your imagination can come up with a "language" unlike anything ever
spoken by humans ... but you're unable to comprehend the explanations
that take into account the actual facts relevant to the location,
diversification, and spread of the IE languages?
.

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