Zompist Bboard Again

I strongly disagree with you here, so I’d be interested to know how you came to this opinion. I've seen several proposals trying to link Basque with either PNC (Proto-North Caucasian) or PIE by way of regular sound correspondences. Unfortunately, most of the purported etymologies were wrong, rendin...

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 1:53 amSeriously, stop deflecting and answer the question: do you agree that, in general, regular and consistent sound correspondences between two languages provide evidence that they are related? Answer ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘I don’t know’.

I'd say NO.

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 1:49 am

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 1:35 amWell, historical linguistics isn't exactly like maths, you know.

…and how exactly is this relevant in any way? This appears to be a non sequitur.

This kind of questions without an actual context are meaningless to me.

Quick question for Talskubilos: The standard argument of, well, all historical linguists is that if two languages have extensive, regular and consistent sound changes throughout their whole lexicon, they must be equivalent [ EDIT: sorry, meant ‘related’]. Are you seriously saying that this argument...

Zju wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 12:29 amIs there a citation for the correspondance itself, or is it made up? Anyway, a singular resemblance is a chance resemblance, or a borrowing at best.

I think this is a loanword from Semitic into IE.

This is where external comparanda fit in. For example, Semitic *gbl 'mountain' corresponds to both IE *ghebhōl 'head' (English gable , Greek kephálē ) and *kapōl-o- 'head, skull' (Old English hafola , Sanskrit kapā́la- ). :) [citation needed] For the IE part, see Mallory & Adams (2006): The Oxf...

My point is whatwever of them is "native", they're related at a deeper level. :) Given the PIE root constraint, I don't think that *per and *bher being related should be a surprise. (Whether they are is another matter.) This is where external comparanda fit in. For example, Semitic *gbl '...

As for the concrete example you're citing - the etymon behind portus etc, is a verbal noun in -tu- noun produced in accordance with well-known rules from the root *per-; that root is also attested in Slavic and Albanian, in those languages, just that specific noun is not attested. But the noun is a...

i think you all are missing the point .... none of these criticisms hold water if you accept that the languages are of different groups in the first place .... youre essntially trying to prove PIE is monogenic by assuming that PIE is monogenic and then listing examples of roots that follow sound ch...

and quite often, a "PIE" root A is related to another B, and in some cases, also to C. *gasp* roots are related? holy shite, who would have suspected that relatives could be related?!!? :) A good example would be *prt-u- 'passage, way' (Latin portus , Germanic *furθ . Celtic *φritu- corre...

Interestingly, some of these protoforms ("roots" in the traditional terminology) have correspondences between them and also with non-IE languages (usually ignored by most IE-ists). Most of these "correspondences" that you have suggested have been refuted as chance resemblances. ...

The thing is the +2000 lexical items commonly reconstructed for PIE can't be from a single language. Saying "they can't be" is just an apodictic claim. What makes it impossible? That doesn't mean that they have to be all formed inside PIE. Some words that have been discussed as loans into...

Richard W wrote: ↑Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:18 pmShould the presence of doublets in PIE be a surprise?

And even triplets!

Otto Kretschmer wrote: ↑Sun Aug 29, 2021 10:41 amStill if you compared Old Occitan and Old French of 1200 AD, the differences would be much smaller than today. Both would barely be considered separate languages.

Nothing of the kind. Catalan was another story though.

The thing is the +2000 lexical items commonly reconstructed for PIE can't be from a single language. No-one seriously claims they are. Even the people who made the reconstruction usually admit that it’s an imperfect process. (And if they don’t, they’re a crackpot.) Interestingly, some of these prot...

So what? No-one is claiming that ‘X is a PIE language’ means that ‘every X word is descended from PIE’, or even that ‘most X words are directly inherited from PIE’ (cf Armenian). Rather, the best definition of language classification I’ve yet seen is that given in the Koch paper linked above: A lan...

keenir wrote: ↑Sat Aug 28, 2021 11:00 pmthis reinforces the question of why would they care about feminine agreement.

But this doesn't explain why the original femenine suffix gave -o or -e instead of the more widespread -a.

Thankfully, even the worst of linguistic crackpots don’t tend to make this mistake. Rather, I suspect he is conflating loaning and stratum influences with ancestry: IE branches have lots of loanwords from substrates, therefore IE cannot exist. But these "substrates" are still a very large...

Ketsuban wrote: ↑Sat Aug 28, 2021 9:39 pmWhy would Basque speakers care about adjective agreement in the source language when borrowing a word? It ends in -o, the language (presumably) has other feminine nouns ending in -o, erriplen goes into the vegetable gender.

The thing is Basque has no grammatical gender at all.

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Sat Aug 28, 2021 9:42 am

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Sat Aug 28, 2021 9:39 am However, we've also got some former femenines in -o, as e.g. oilo 'hen' < Hispano-Romance polla 'young hen'.

Wouldn't it be easier to posit that it was just a borrowing of pollo, with semantic narrowing?

A gender transitioning? I don't think so.