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

On Sep 30, 11:31 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<4d4af7f4-7125-4241-9c3c-062cbb7b5...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,


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

and that is questionable. The PIE "kwekwlos" might be a myth or
derived from Sanskrit "chakra" - which might have come frrom Sumerian
"gilgul". Mechanical phonetic reasoning is useless here - you need to
invoke archeology, geography ,ancient trading patterns etc. and get at
who might have invented the wheel and which speech community might
have been in earliest contact with them.

Is palatal to velar a "plausible sound change"? Yes - but you'll have
to wait for my book to see the evidence.


much you assert that phonetics trumps semantics in historical
linguistics, it simply isn't true.

It is, of course. There are no root words in traditional linguistics
without the nexus of the "plausible sound change" from parent to
descendant. And I can see why they set it up this way - to filter out
coincidences, borrowings, Onamatopoeia etc. As our own Petey put it so
well once to the effect that - "If two words in different languages
are too similar, it indicates a borrowing relationship and not a
genetic relationship" .

You are saying that all four possibilities of the two by two grid of
similar/dissimilar versus semantic/phonetic exist. But the phonetic
dissimialrity always has to be linked through "plausible sound
changes" as in the celebrated Armenian "erku" being derivable from
"PIE" "dwo".


Unsurprisingly, Franz is wrong.  There is no trumping.

No, you are wrong. Purely phonetically conditioned sound changes are
the heart and soul of traditional reconstruction - I am astounded that
the other professionals in the ng. have not challenged you on this.


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.


I meant monomorphemic forms of course. Sanskrit is perfect in this
respect - no inflection/prefix/suffix ever combines with any noun,
pronoun or verb or adjective to produce a tongue twister (Even the
"long compounds" are child's play to native scholars/reciters - I can
still remember the beauty "chirapiPasitachAtakapotake from Sanskrit
class in school ("for the bill of the long-thirsty ChAtaka bird" - to
describe rain)).

(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?!)

"PIE numerals" may be a myth, obtained by mechanically reverse
engineering apparent "regular sound correspondences" in attested
numerals in several IE languages. Such a reverse engineering makes a
hidden (to linguists) assumption - that the speakers of the parent
language knew how to count. Each numeral in reality may have a
different story - Brahui for example, uses Tamil ("Dravidian" to
pros) for 2 and 3 and IE for >= 4, (I can't relate "asi" = 1 to
anything).

I have already cited the postulated Nostratic "payngo" for
"fist" (semantic) instead of the phonetically derived "penkwe" of
"PIE" that can be the source of "five" in many more languages (Tamil
for example).




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?


There cannot be doubt that words to denote the means of keeping babies
alive would have arisen well before words to denote the notion of a
wild animal. For some reason, each time I bring this up (namely that
the word-inventory of humans grew in tandem with the evolution of
technology, culture, self-awareness etc.) it is rejected with icy
disdain by the ng. pros.





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


The nonsense is your non-sequitur. Surely you must be aware that
humans have gone through historical phases that lasted centuries if
not millenia - "dark ages", "renaissance" etc. and nothing physically
changed about them.

If you are taking the neo-grammarian position that only phonetics
conditions sound changes and that these changes are mechanical and
regular - then I can see your point. But language is only a
reflection of the total culture - and my yet-to-be-published book will
explain why Latin to Romance languages was a success story for
traditional linguistics - but the invention of "PIE" using mechanical
sound-change laws is a fallacy.

.

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