Poets, linguists and countrymen. Lend me your ears...

From: Glen Gordon
Message: 5736
Date: 2001-01-23

Stefan:
>Don't you think that allowances should be made for the dynamic aliveness of
>the human language? Logical rules are the linguists' metalled roads, and
>that's fine for the law-abiding pedestrians but poets, writers and lovers
>of words like to find the own paths and explore other possibilities. Very
>unnerving for the former, but great fun for the latter.

I think I understand beyond his poetic whims what Stefan
is getting at. I think the topic I started up earlier
regarding the reconstructed deity *PerkWnos, the storm god,
and my interest in a possible _original_ form of the name
before mythological poetry by IE speakers led to *PerkWnos
would give him pleasure. I suspect that ultimately the name
of the deity meant "Fire Maker", a thunderbird concept
taken from the asiatic steppes. The original form might have been
*Pexwr-Geno:s with the *-o:s suffix as in *Xuso:s "Dawn".
Do you mean allowing for theories such as these in
linguistics that would otherwise go unnoticed in an obsessive
quest for total regularity?

I still think that hard rules are necessary for the proper
reconstruction of any proto-language, as they have served
well in IE studies and will serve in the budding
Nostratic studies, but if I understand Stefan correctly, I
would agree that _some_ allowances off the beaten road of
regularity should be made in order to explore the poetic or mythological
side of the reconstructed language where
scientific regularity isn't exactly respected...

But then, this list has made such allowances to a degree,
so what then is the basis for Stefan's plaint? In the
end, linguistics _is_ a humanities study afterall and such
allowances are implicitly tolerated, that is, to a tempered
limit, given enough evidence to support a claim that would
otherwise fight against the time-honoured, regular rules of
sound correspondance and the like.

- gLeN

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