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

In article
<4d4af7f4-7125-4241-9c3c-062cbb7b5ca7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
analyst41@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Sep 30, 9:22 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <ir06c5t0phji77gfo75vfp7ngfg0371...@xxxxxxx>,
 Ruud Harmsen <r...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:27:21 -0700 (PDT): Franz Gnaedinger
<f...@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

the brown one is a lame etymology. One of my big
pleasures in exploring early language is how well
the words are coined,

Words aren't usually coined, they are learnt by infants.

sayings goes. But I have no intention of ruining
his business, I just say that the one-dimensional
phonetic approach is not sufficient and has to
be complemented by semantics.

As I told you before, traditional etymology doesn't rely on phonetics
only.

The fact that he thinks semantics has been ignored by historical
linguists is yet further proof that he has never even looked at the
table of contents of an actual historical linguistics textbook, let
alone read one from cover to cover.

You are obviously attacking a straw-man version of Franz's thesis.

Which part of "one-dimensional phonetic approach" didn't you
understand?

Establishment scholarship declares an unattested word a "root" if it
can be deformed into attested later forms via "plausible" and
(loosely) systematic sound changes.

"loosely" is incorrect, even in parentheses.

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.

And yet, consider the English and Hindi cognates [wil] and [tSakka:],
which are very different phonetically, yet both mean 'wheel'.

Or consider the English and Russian cognates [Saw@r] and [sever],
which are very similar phonetically, but mean very different things
('shower' and 'north', respectively).

Or the Polish and Armenian cognates [krova] 'cow' and [sar]
'mountain', which differ drastically both phonetically and
semantically.

Or the Norwegian and Latin cognates [mus] and [mus], which are
identical phonetically and semantically ('mouse').

Sometimes cognates vary in pronunciation only, sometimes they vary in
meaning only, sometimes both, and sometimes neither. No matter how
much you assert that phonetics trumps semantics in historical
linguistics, it simply isn't true.

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

Unsurprisingly, Franz is wrong. There is no trumping.

Missing from the traditional method is

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

You've apparently never seen Georgian. Nothing proposed in Proto-Indo
European is any worse than the Georgian word for 'you peel us' (which
is the monstrosity [gvprtskvni]. If human beings can pronounce that
(and they can), then they can pronounce PIE.

(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.

None of what you just wrote makes any sense! Why would you suppose
that PIE speakers hadn't "learned" to count? (Learned from whom?!)

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".

How would you know what "notions" they would have "evolved"? If they
encountered wild animals (and surely they did), why wouldn't they have
"evolved" a "notion" for it?

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.

And there's the problem. No human language operates or has ever
operated with the kinds of "combinatorial relationships" he proposes.
So whatever it is that Franz is describing, it ain't a human language.
Perhaps his Magdalenians were aliens?

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 Gene Roddenberry was unencumbered by the physical law shibboleths
of the establishment. While true, it doesn't make warp drive a
plausible means of transportation in the real world.

- and he is able to tell a story

With extra emphasis on "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.

Nothing about his Magdalenian laws is "plausible", given how human
languages work in the real world.

I have no doubt that his method would find the relationship between IE
and semitic languages

The fact that you use "the" shows that you already have an unwarranted
bias: the belief that there is in fact a relationship to be found.

- but the dominantly phonetic methds of
establishment scholarship would fail to do so.

They fail to do so for the same reason that mathematicians fail to
find out what number x is in x+2=y. There just simply isn't enough
information available 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.

How on earth did the human brain, ear, and mouth change so radically a
few thousand years ago that language change operated so completely
differently prior to Latin than after Latin?

Don't you realize how completely nonsensical it is to argue that human
biology underwent such an enormous evolutionary change so recently?

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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