From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <
gpiotr@...>
Punkt widzenia zalezy od miejsca siedzenie, nieprawdaz? :-)
Yes, you are right that there are many words in all languages
which not only look the same but also have the same meaning
(English/Persian "bad" is another example, I believe)
But having observed that undisputed fact, you then dismiss any
further explorations of the phenomen simply because they do not fit
into your specialized knowledge. Why is the similarity deceptive if
it occurs in a large number of cases?
Because it has no "comparative validity" - to which a layman would
like to add a rider: "in the present state of knowledge in our
relatively very young science".
Further on you again use the term "sheer coincidence". Now, there
are some very interesting views about "sheer coincidences" known
also as synchronicities. Carl G Jung was exploring the subject
towards the end of his life and his pupils continued his work. I
used to belong to a discussion list called "synchronicity" where
physicists, psychologists, engineers and academics from many
disciplines debated this very subject.
The emerging view is today that synchronicities are "states" in the
never-ending "dance" of probabilities. In other words, there is no
such thing as "sheer coincidence".
Please do not regard my observations as a criticism of your views -
far from it. I am merely trying to draw your attention to the
validity of other views which may lie outside your specialized
knowledge and yet have some releavnce to its conclusions.
Pozdrowienia
Stefan
****************
Better still, the Indonesian word for 'lake' (cognate to what you
cite) is danau. This is the kind of deceptive similarity that
catches the eye but has no comparative validity. Whatever the exact
meaning *dHonu- or *dah2nu-, 'river', 'running water' or the like,
the idea of movement was an essential part of it. 'Still-standing
water' it certainly was not. Even better "matches" prove nothing if
they are sporadic. Indonesian mata and Modern Greek mati both mean
'eye'; the Proto-Je word for 'new' is reconstructed as *niw --
examples of sheer coincidence could be multiplied by anybody who has
access to dictionaries of many languages.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
From: Piotr Gasiorowski
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2001 2:59 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: *dan-
...
And since I have read Oppenheimer's "Eden in the East" and found
some of the artifacts depicted therein strangely similar to what I
recalled from school excursions to Danish National Museum (and
checked it out), I leafed through a Javanese Dictionary and found:
danan "still-standing water".