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!
OP
Lignify