From: Bhrihskwobhloukstroy
Message: 71586
Date: 2013-11-13
>*Bhr.: What I meant by "chance" is:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Bhrihskwobhloukstroy
> <bhrihstlobhrouzghdhroy@...> wrote:
>>
>> 2013/11/13, gprosti <gprosti@...>:
>> >
>> >
>> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Bhrihskwobhloukstroy
>> > <bhrihstlobhrouzghdhroy@> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> May I state again that it was an etymology only for the aberrant
>> >> German forms? It would be complete nonsense to replace a phonological
>> >> impasse (OHG tu^sunt < PIE *t-) with a much greater one (OHG #d- < PIE
>> >> *dh-)! I'm just suggesting tu^sunt and thu^sunt represent different
>> >> etyma. Claims that X and Y (in this case, tu^sunt and thu^sunt)
>> >> "cannot be separated" are justified in a regular system of diatopic
>> >> phonological variation, otherwise they're quite arbitrary,
>> >
>> > I'm not sure what you mean by "regular system of diatopic variation",
>> > but if
>> > you have a set of words with a sufficient amount of shared phonetic
>> > material, plus matching semantics, this overrides the criterion of
>> > regular
>> > phonetic correspondence when drawing a connection between two or more
>> > forms.
>> >
>> > E.g., I would say that there is no need to find regular sound rules to
>> > justify a relationship between Finnish kuningas "king" and OHG kuning.
>> > The
>> > two share a sequence of six phonemes, and they match semantically
>> > (compare
>> > thu^sunt/tu^sunt, with at least a five-phoneme match) –
>> > probabilistically,
>> > this is enough to conclude they share a common ancestor.
>> >
>> > None of this implies rejecting the regularity of sound change -- it may
>> > turn
>> > out that the pair of kuningas/kuning perfectly follows a pattern of
>> > Finnish/Germanic sound correspondence from a certain time period. But,
>> > it
>> > does mean that there are other criteria that can be used independently
>> > of
>> > regular sound correspondence to conclude that a set of words can or
>> > can't be
>> > separated from one another.
>> >
>> >
>> *Bhr.: (I've added the dash)
>> This is a different case. With tu^sunt / thu^sunt we have a phonemic
>> difference, i.e. one that can change the meaning of a word. If in this
>> very case the meaning doesn't change, it's pure chance;
>
> By "chance", do you mean random variation within a single language? But if
> so, that's what needs to be proven rather than assumed: i.e., that tausend
> is not a dialectal variant of expected *dausend.
>
> Even if "tausend" is not a dialectal form, couldn't it just reflect
> dissimilation (*d_d > t_d)?
>
>
>