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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.
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Pooh-Bah
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Thats an interesting post Steve....I'll have to come back to it tomorrow though and read it again after I have had a sleep. Too much for me to take it now.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Very thought provoking as regards PIE.
WELCOME STEVE
----please, draw me a sheep----
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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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?
I must say, I object a bit to Dr. Rosenman's term "airy-fairy": that comes pretty close to sounding like a personal attack.
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In your theory, what is the prehistoric root, and what are the sound changes that yielded leg, log, lignin? What other evidence can you cite to support this theory? Under what circumstances do Greek /g/ and Latin /g/ correspond to Germanic /g/?
Greek legein means "pick up, count, say, speak", doesn't it?
Last edited by goofy; 06/21/11 01:40 PM.
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stranger
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stranger
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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.
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stranger
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In your theory, what is the prehistoric root, and what are the sound changes that yielded leg, log, lignin? What other evidence can you cite to support this theory? Under what circumstances do Greek /g/ and Latin /g/ correspond to Germanic /g/?
Greek legein means "pick up, count, say, speak", doesn't it? The root deducibly consisted simply of an *l followed by a vowel and a velar stop, which wordsmiths in various languages voiced or didn’t voice to nuance the root. The only sound changes that appear in these derivatives were the same, differential vowelizations/vocalizations that (1) historical linguists postulated to explain the existence of the so-called *o-grade, *i-grade, a-grade and *e-grade variants of Proto-Indo-European roots, and (2) wordsmiths in every language used later to nuance the words they derived from that root. Although Greek legein does mean to ‘pick up, count, say, or speak, to understand why it also clearly reveals it is cognate with the foregoing words for legs, logs and lignin, you have to recognize that wordsmiths have traditionally used figurative associations to form words, and prehistoric wordsmiths were deducibly far more figuratively minded than their modern counterparts. Hence, many words for speaking clearly reveal they are cognate with words for the feet or using the feet. For instance, the Gk word logos, which is transparently cognate with legein, referred to a discourse; and discourse was derived from the L. word discurrere for running around — evidently for the same reason we often refer to speaking as “running off at the mouth.” It is deducibly for the same reason that gad(e)rian, the OE ancestor of gather, is synonymous with legein, and clearly reveals it is further cognate with (1) the ON ancestor gata of our word gait for a way of walking and (2) gate for a path. As I explained above, however, historical linguistics could not cognate these words for the same reason they could not cognate Gc words for the foot with the words' L. and Gk relatives; doing so would have prevented them from formally recognizing that Gc *d can correspond to Gc *t, and, thus, that PIE *d or *t can correspond to either or both. It sounds, however, like someone has convinced you that cognating words in different languages requires proving the existence of regular consonant changes, even though the available evidence does not support that conclusion one bit — in my opinion or Rosenman’s opinion based on his 40-year study. To recognize the irregularity that existed in word formation, all one has to do is look at the vast number of irregular verbs that exist in every language. As to how much evidence I can supply to support these assertions, suffice it to say I can supply far more evidence than this forum and time limitations will permit. But before one can recognize the validity of that evidence and the arguments supporting it, he or she has to understand the difference between evidence and coincidences, as well as the difference between coincidences and counter-examples -- especially of the kind that led to the overthrow of other purportedly scientifically derived laws and theories.
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Carpal Tunnel
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such as OE paeddan ‘to walk’
I think you mean pæþþan 'to tread (a path), traverse'.
Anyway, your historical linguistics rebooted certainly is more fun once you've gotten rid of all those stodgy "laws". So, not only are foot and pedal cognate, but so is path and pod and faith and a whole bunch more. Arithmetic is so much more fun if you get rid of laws like you cannot divide by zero. Being able to divide by zero allows you to derive equations like 1 = 0. I can't wait for you to fix biology and physics. I'm sure that'll be fun, too.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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stranger
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such as OE paeddan ‘to walk’
I think you mean pæþþan 'to tread (a path), traverse'. Thanks for the correction. I didn’t realize that I could use OE characters here. So, I took the liberty of using *d instead of thorn and ae instead of ash. However, substituting thorn for *d now doesn’t change the picture one iota, since pae-thorn-thorn-an had a variant pedden ‘to step often ’, and the E. Frisian is padden. Anyway, your historical linguistics rebooted certainly is more fun once you've gotten rid of all those stodgy "laws". Yes, it is. Isn’t it? After all, things are usually a lot more fun when you can make some sense out of them. So, not only are [i]foot and pedal cognate but so is path and pod They undoubtedly are! But to understand why, you have to take a Cartesian approach to the question by divesting yourself of your beliefs that (1) those “stodgy laws” are indeed inviolable because they were framed scientifically; (2) pods could not have had anything whatsoever to do with paths or feet in the minds of the person or people who formed and used the words, and (3) these people viewed the world the same way you do. Since historical linguists either didn’t know or cared to know anything about pods when they orphaned pod from its transparent Gk and L cognates, and you may not know much about pods, I’ll tell you some things about them that can shed a great deal of light on why pod clearly reveals it is cognate with IE words for the foot. A pod happens to be the seed bearing structure of a legume or other plant, and pods are therefore the podia or feet from which the pea’s pedicel emerges. So, the hypothesis that people anciently personified plants can not only explain why Eng pod is transparently cognate with Gk podium, it can also explain why (1)) legume is transparently cognate with Gc words for legs, and (2) the Gk and L ancestors pison and pisa, respectively, of the Eng. words pise and pease for the foot-like legume we call a pea clearly reveal they are i-grade variants of Gk pous and L. pes ‘foot’. If you look at a pea pod hanging from its legume (e.g. using Google Images) you can clearly see why prehistoric wordsmiths considered and called the pea plant a legume consisting of legs ending it feet. It was based on the same deeply rooted tendency to personify plants that caused people to personify logs as legs. Hence pod also came down through history as a verb for collecting or gathering pea pods, just as leg- came into Gk referring to gathering. One can even deduce how IE words for legs and feet became attached to legumes and their pods by, say, imagining a person in a group of people foraging for food. He picks a plant we now call a legume, holds it up, and cries out “Leg!, which causes everyone to laugh. So they go back and pass the joke on to their clans or tribes, which eventually causes the joke and its associations to spread to other clans and tribes. In contrast, historical linguists de-humanized language by attempting to attribute word origins to the action of the allegedly inviolable sound shift laws that the fairytale-ist Jacob Grimm hypothesized in the early 1800's. Because Grimm knew nothing about science, however, he failed to control his thought experiments by, e.g. seeing whether Gk and L p and d could also correspond to Gc p and d, as they demonstrably do. And his followers simply decided to call any evidence that would have prevented them from raising Grimm’s hypotheses to laws scientifically coincidences. The difference between evidence and coincidences is essentially that evidence can be logically and/or causally united in an instructive way, whereas coincidences can’t be, and since the consonantally identical Gk, L and Gc words under discussion here can indeed be so united, they constitute evidence, not coincidences. Arithmetic is so much more fun if you get rid of laws like you cannot divide by zero. Being able to divide by zero allows you to derive equations like 1 = 0. On the contrary, what I’m doing here is exactly the opposite. I’m using the Identity Principle (1=1), which grounds any mathematical proof, to cognate Gk, L and Gc words with consonantally and semantically identical Gc words, and I’m applying the same literal relationships that historical linguists invoked to cognate only the words that seemingly supported their laws judiciously to reveal the words they had to orphan to frame those laws. The practice is called using a control to test whether a theory can unite a limited set of phenomenon or a broader set in a more parsimonious and instructive way then a competing theory. But whether you or anyone else is willing or able to recognize which theory does so depends on his her ability to evaluate evidence and arguments logically and dispassionately -- rather than based on how long a theory has existed or how many supposed experts have accepted it. The history of science is littered with the dead bodies of experts and their theories, and – in my explicit opinion as well as Rosenman’s implicit opinion– historical IE linguistics will have to join those theories sooner or later. I can't wait for you to fix biology and physics. I'm sure thats'll be fun, too. Here we go. So, since what I’ve written evidently differs with everything you and many other people have believed for so long, I suppose you’re next attempt to refute it will contain words like “crank,” “fringe,” “fanciful,” ”“folk etymologies,”“unscientific” (Tee-hee!). Go ahead! Fire away! But it’s not going to change the evidence or arguments in the case one iota!
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So, the hypothesis that people anciently personified plants can not only explain why Eng pod is transparently cognate with Gk podium, it can also explain why (1))legume is transparently cognate with Gc words for legs, and (2) the Gk and L ancestors pison and pisa, respectively, of the Eng. words pise and pease for the foot-like legume we call a pea clearly reveal they are i-grade variants of Gk pous and L. pes ‘foot’.
But this hypothesis is not falsifiable in your theory, because your theory doesn't account for regular sound change. So you can hypothesize that any number of words are related by making up semantic connections. All you've done is presented a list of words from different languages that are similar in sound and meaning, or can be made to seem similar in meaning, and claimed that they are all related. I could do the same for any two languages you care to mention. And since in your theory there is no such thing as regular sound change, you don't have to explain any of the sound correspondences. Why not say that root is related to Greek pous and Latin pes as well? After all, you can easily see how a tree could be personified with the roots as the feet.
Last edited by goofy; 06/25/11 12:08 PM.
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