Hi, Steve--
So, did I understand correctly that you're saying that (some) linguists...well, not exactly changed the data (words, sounds) to fit their theories but rather reconfigured the criteria for putting certain data into certain categories?
Not exactly. But explaining what these linguists did and how they did it is not so simple because it requires de-constructing and reconstructing the so-called PIE lexicon in a way that unites more of the available evidence more logically, parsimoniously and instructively than these linguists did — since these are the criteria that scientists, logicians, and theorists outside of historical linguistics use to determine which of two or more theories should be accepted. However, I’ll try to show you how these linguists framed two of their supposed laws in a way that will show you how the rest of their supposedly inviolable laws were framed.
More specifically, historical linguists have managed to maintain for over a century now essentially that (1) initial Gc. *
p cannot possibly correspond to initial Gk or L.
*p , and (2) Gc.
*d cannot correspond to Gk or L.
*d in words that were derived from the same PIE root. Consequently, these linguists have also managed to maintain for over a century now that the root [
p_vowel_
d] of Gk and L words for the foot (such as L.
peda ‘footstep’, L
pedalis ‘pertaining to the foot’, L.
pedes ‘a walker’, Gk
podion ‘foot’, and Gk
pedilon ‘sandal’) could not possibly have been derived from the same PIE root that yielded the consonantally and semantically identical root of Gc words for the feet or using them (such as OE
paeddan ‘to walk’, Low German
pad ’soul the foot’, and Eng
paddle 'to waddle or splash with the feet’). To frame the foregoing laws, then, these linguists simply decided to orphan these Gk and L words from their transparently cognate Gc relatives by attributing the former to the hypothetical PIE root ped-, which presumably referred narrowly to the foot, and calling the latter “coincidences.”
Needless to say, if empirical scientists had adopted the policy of calling every non-lawful event they observed a coincidence, we’d all be walking around on a flat earth in a geocentric universe. Luckily , however, this isn't the case.
OP
