Since this is the first message I’ve posted here, I don’t want to create a major brouhaha by questioning anything that historical linguists and other list-members seem to have taken for granted. Nevertheless, I cringe very often when some Wordsmith posting attributes this or that word to some hypothetical PIE root with a sense of assurance that, in my opinion, is egregiously misplaced.
For instance, the assertion that L. lignify was derived (via lignin ) from the hypothetical PIE root *leg- , which presumably referred to collecting is, in my opinion, highly misleading, at best, and sorely mistaken, at worst, for reasons I discussed at length in an article I wrote for the journal Semiotica (Vol. 171, pp. 265-291, 2008)
Since discussing that article in detail would take up too much space and digress too far from this forum’s scope, suffice it to say that lignify clearly reveals it was derived by differentially vowelizing the same, prehistoric root that yielded Germanic (Gc.) words for legs and logs, deducibly because (1) prehistoric wordsmiths personified logs as the legs of trees, based on the deeply rooted and anciently widespread tendency to personify plants, and (2) a Roman or proto-Roman wordsmith derived lignin from the same root that yielded these Gc words to identify lignin as the material in logs— even though historical linguists hypothesized that lignin was coined to identify wood as something that “people collected.” The Gk. word legein for walking therefore clearly reveals it, too, was derived from the aforementioned root, notwithstanding an alleged linguistics law specifying that neither Gk *g nor L *g can possibly correspond to Germanic *g.
On the contrary, as a physician named Jaques Rosenman argued — correctly, in my opinion — in his two, volume work “The Onomatopoetic Origins of English” and “Primitive Speech and English,” the preceding and all, other, alleged linguistics law were framed by (1) selectively sampling the available words in a ways that superficially supported the supposed laws, (2) egregiously violating Occham’s Razor by needlessly hypothesizing a plethora of words and hypothetical Proto-Indo-European roots in an effort to make the selected words fit those laws, (3) invoking only the associations that were needed to support the laws, and (2) calling forth (a) an airy-fairy form of inductive statistics and (b) cries of "imitative," "echoic," and "onomatopoetic" as bases for explaining away as coincidences any and all words that would have prevented the laws from being framed scientifically.
The so-called PIE lexicon therefore contains a multitude of obvious counterexamples that — in my opinion, as well as Rosenman’s — have prevented linguists and specialists in other fields from recognizing the figurative associations that prehistoric wordsmiths actually used to derive words.
OP
