Re: Stacking up on standard works

W dniu 2012-04-01 01:39, Tavi pisze:

> No, no. It's the sound correspondences which should be predictable

Warning: you are not using this word in its normal meaning. Sound
correspondences, once established, may have some predictive power, but
they are not predictable.

> (i.e. "regular" in the traditional IE-ist jargon).

Why IE-ist? Why "jargon"? Other linguists call them "regular" as well.
Regular not in some strictly technical IE-ist sense of the word, but
regular as everybody understands this word: recurrent, systematic and
pervasive.

> You see a pattern here and
> there, then you make a hypothesis and test it, and if it works, voila!

You make it sound very simple, but it *isn't* that simple at all.
Patterns are only too easy to see. Any random process may generate
"patterns". Even the stars in the sky form patterns. How do you know
that the patterns you see "here and there" in two different languages
are evidence of their shared ancestry?

Piotr