Re: [tied] Re: Ford -furta- fare

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 5726
Date: 2001-01-23

The fact is that if one relaxes the standard constraints on regularity even a little (by ignoring vowels, allowing "doublets" and other n-tuplets, permitting ad hoc consonantal permutations, etc.) the likelihood of finding spurious cognates increases dramatically, since a *vast* number of new sound combinations can be treated as "equivalent".
 
Piotr
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2001 6:51 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Ford -furta- fare

On Tue, 23 Jan 2001 11:54:09 -0000, "Torsten Pedersen"
<tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>But the real reason was something I found in Hermann Møller, back
>from, I think 1906. Trying to find a way to relate IE and AA, he
>came up with something he called alternate forms in IE (which means,
>in a single language there would be pairs like habeo/capio).

In the Vorwort zur Einfuehrung to his 1911 "Vergleichendes
indogermanisches-semitisches Woerterbuch" (too early for "PAA"), he
quotes " ... indogerm. Alternationen (der von E. Zupitza KZ. 37,
378ff. nachgewiesenen 'Doubletten', der Noreenschen 'Spuren
indogermanischer Lautgesetze', s. SI. [= Møller 1907, "Semitisch und
Indogermanisch"] 134 ff.) ... ", and compares them with similar
alternations in Semitic.  According to Møller, these alternations show
that IE and Sem. are related.  There are, in any case, a sufficiently
large number of such alternations (D ~ DH ~ T / D ~ T. ~ T) to explain
why both Illich-Svitych and Bomhard could each come up with a sizeable
number of Nostratic etymologies (involving PIE/PAA), while using
different tables of correspondences (Illich-Svitych: T=T./T, D=T,
DH=D, Bomhard: T=T, D=T., DH=D).  Not to mention Møller's more complex
scheme (approx. T=T/D, D=T, DH=T.).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...