I thought this was a Nostratic list. It is obvious that there is at least
one *kir root. And there
must be at least one *kwel root because IEanists say so.
How does one go about finding roots anyway? It seems when Jones got started
he had
to look at lots of languages and decide that some of them resembled each
other and
then it too another 200 years to come to the point where we have N different
protosounds for *PIE.
It would seem that there could also be M protosounds for Nostratic and to
do that
we have to use the "heuristic", the [in]famous heuristic.
Do do you propose that we look for words like *KVL K=[k,kw,g,q], V=some vowel
and L=[l,r]. That sounds like the kind of heuristic used by linguists.
What do you have against it? Or have you decided to use statistics after
all?
Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "H.M. Hubey" <hubeyh@...>
To: <Nostratica@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 01, 2003 6:33 PM
Subject: Re: [Nostratica] Cardinal and Ordinal Integers
> I see kir, kur, kri and it seems like kur has to be explained as kw-,
and it is pretty easy to see the connection between *kir and *kil, etc. all
meaning "round". The root of all these has to be *kVL where L=liquid. and
V=vowel.
It so happens that *kWir- cannot give <cur-> or <cir-> in Latin.
Similarity does not mean a historical connection. There are many reasons
why two roots may be similar -- including coincidence, of course. You greatly
increase the likelihood of accidental similarity by using wildcard symbols
for "any vowel" and "any liquid". Now if any language has a word like "kil",
"kel", "kal", "kol", "kul", "kir", "ker", "kar", "kor" or "kur" meaning 'round',
'wheel', 'circle', 'crooked', etc., you will "see a connection" (you can
see even more connections if you use "any velar" instead of *k). By contrast,
orthodox linguists will ask you to explain the details of the relation to
rule out chance agreement (which you obviously can't do).
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M. Hubey
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