--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> First, I deliberately imitated Manansala's sloppy practice and did
> not analyse my own "matches" etymologically. I wouldn't be that
> stupid when offering a serious etymological proposal. I could show
> you that, e.g. <gumi> and <dagana> are not related to each other or
> to *dHg^Hom- (it so happens that their origin is known quite well).
>
> Secondly, the game is easy to play with any language families of
your
> choice. Regrettably, I don't happen to have a Bantu or Algonquin
> dictionary at home, but other people have done the demonstration
for
> me (will Quechua/Semitic suffice?):
>
> http://zompist.com/chance.htm
>
> Piotr
>
>
I think it is a good article, but it has some flaws.
1) He wants all comparisons to be done on languages of similar age.
That would rule out all comparisons of Lithuanian with Old Greek and
Sanskrit. It would have to be done on New Greek and Hindi etc
instead. That would invalidate a good deal of IE research.
2) He does run through a supposed non-valid list of comparisons
between Quechua and Chinese, but he does not provide a counter-
example of running through a supposed valid list of eg. pairs of
words from two IE languages. If he had, his method would be in
trouble, since he does not take the context of phonemes into
consideration. Therefore, if eg. one of the IE languages palatalizes
before front vowels, he would have no option but to register this as
slack, although we know for a fact that the palatalisation is
completely conditioned by the following vowel. Thus, if any context-
sensitive rule has applied in the time the two IE languages have been
separate, the outcome of his theory will tend to lead you to believe
that the similarity between the two languages is a mirage.
The drift of the article (by opposition) is that recognized-as-
related languages will have a low prior probability of similarity (so
that the result, if they are, is significant). Also, there is an
implicit challenge in your posting: come up with a set of rules that
will reduce the slack in comparing Austronesian and IE, so that the
prior probability of them matching is low. But as I have shown, if
those rules are context-sensitive, they can't reduce the slack. The
whole theory would have to revised to take context-sensitive rules
into account.
Torsten