Peter:
> Yes, clearly. I should have said "Bomhard and others who
> advance this theory are attempting to show that they are
> inherited in both PIE and whatever other language they
> happen to claim."
Ah, yes well, then I agree. All good. I'm easily confused
with so many posts. Mea culpa.
>> He includes *septm
> Obviously he shouldn't have.
Yes, and that's what I find unfortunate about Bomhard's
work. If he truly set out to properly discard potential
loanwords, forgetting about something obvious like
*septm seems to undermine that goal no matter how much
he may have reiterated it.
Strangely, you're telling Torsten that finding
correspondences in Bomhard's roots is not proof for
loanwords, which is of course true logically, and
yet when I really think about how many IE-Semitic
correspondences are treated like valid Nostratic
comparanda, one would almost be inclined to say
that more often than not, they are evidence of
loans rather than inherited words. It's not to
say that Torsten has a strong point, but it suggests
that he's not far off here.
I mean, a layman might spend a whole bunch of time
trying to show that English and French both come
from Latin, and what one will likely find to
support this hypothesis would happen to be
a lot of actual, historical loans between the two
languages that an amateur might mistake as
inheritance. The presence of loans between the
two doesn't undermine the fact that English
and French are ultimately related but by
weeding out the loans properly we can come to
a better understanding of how they are actually
related. We might mistake the "chair"="chaise"
connection as demonstrating correct sound
correspondances. Who's to say otherwise if Latin
were still just a nebulous theory.
Such is the same with the attitude towards IE
and Semitic for the past century. Nostraticists
will assume that any common feature or word is
evidence for inheritance. As a result, many of
the items may indeed turn out to be loans, not
Nostratic etyma afterall. Well then, aren't we
talking about Moller and Bomhard afterall?
Oh well, but that's just my two cents on that.
Carry on.
= gLeN