Re: [tied] Re: IE, AA, Nostratic and Ringo

Piotr
Please give me some credit. I was only listing some samples of connections
that Bernal has made. To give the justifications would have entailed writing
out whole chunks of his books (copyright infringements?). And to give Bernal
his due, he goes to some lengths to justify his derivations. Furthermore,
the two volumes do not deal specifically with language - this was supposed
to be the main theme of volume 3, which has not yet been brought out.
So, again this list was only supposed to be an "appetiser". If it provokes
interest, then the full course is to be found in Black Athena.

Regards
Dennis

----- Original Message -----
From: Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, 02 August, 2000 3:05 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: IE, AA, Nostratic and Ringo


> Dennis,
>
> It's not enough to list a number of connections for anyone to take
> them seriously. An etymological proposal should come with a detailed
> justification -- an account of the phonological correspondences, of
> the cultural and geographical route of the loanword and of its
> semantic trajectory, preferably with some epigraphic and historical
> evidence to support your claim.
>
> If Bernal simply lists lookalikes in two families, such a list has no
> value without a careful analysis of item after item. The burden of
> the proof should be on him in the first place, and it makes no sense
> to calculate 'the rejection rate' until ALL the items have been
> analysed. As I pointed out, the list contains both a number of words
> which are doubtless of Afroasiatic origin (and most of them have been
> recognised as such for many decades) and a number of words which are
> best analysed as IE. The remaining items are in the "grey zone" in
> between. Most of the proper name explanations, for example, are
> arbitrary and fanciful. The words in question remain etymologically
> obscure. But the fact that they have no accepted IE etymologies
> doesn't help Bernal very much, since there are no convincing Semitic
> or Egyptian etymologies either.
>
> "False friends" are really much more common than many people think.
> To a lay person, English day seems to be a perfect match for Latin
> dies (both phonologically and semantically), and most people just
> can't believe that deus and theos are unrelated. Isn't weave a
> borrowing from Swahili (wavu 'net')? Isn't Slavic (j)aje 'egg'
> derived from the same source (yai 'egg'). It's easy to compile a list
> of such "correspondences", but by doing so we wouldn't even have
> begun to prove that the roots of European culture are Bantu.
>
> Piotr
>
>
> --- In cybalist@egroups.com, "Dennis Poulter" <dpoulter@...> wrote:
> ...
> > Nevertheless, so far we have a rejection rate of approx. 20% of the
> words proposed (all culled from Bernal - I don't dare at this stage
> propose any of my own speculations).
>
>
>
>
>
>
>