----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2001 12:00 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: House and City
> I see. In the particular instance we are discussing I suggested a
wanderwort originating in Austric, ie.
burunga-
"clan"
Arosi
barangay- "communal unit
usually
smaller than village, ship" Philippines
baronga- "character, disposition,
nature" Arosi
perangai-
"character, nature, disposition" Indonesia, Malay
bal.u- "village,
community, house"
Proto-Austric
(Benedict)
fera-
"village"
Proto-Malaitan
puruwa-
"village"
Faita
peuru-
"village"
Bilua
felakoe- "village,
ship"
Lavukaleve
> and suggested this was reflected in various IE and AA
words. I fail to see where your complaint fits in here and I don't think I need
a licence to posit *-l/r- here.
So it's Austric now, not just Austronesian? It would be nice if
you made your position a bit more specific. The Austric phylum is a somewhat
nebulous hypopthesis, and Proto-Austric reconstructions are extremely tentative
at best. But let's agree for the sake of the argument that Austric is for real.
Then, if you claim that the source of the loan was *bal.u, let it be *bal.u (or
perhaps the corresponding Proto-Austronesian term), not a whole set of modern
cognates with a whole variety of reflexes. The people who, according to you,
carried that word into Eurasia were not Bilua or Lavukaleve speakers. The
confusion of protolanguage *r and *l happens in IE too (in Indo-Iranian, of
course, and to a lesser extent in Albanian, Greek, even Portuguese), but that
doesn't mean that IE *r and *l are freely interchangeable.
> Well,
look at the Austric roots. I can't possibly narrow it down further than *bH/*p
with a clean conscience. I think the problem is that you insist on the IE roots
being internal, thus begging the question of whether they are Austric loan
words. And within the last month in cybalist, similar and worse matches have
been proposed. I don't recall you protesting then.
But an unconstrained search for cognates far and wide ignoring
their quality (a la Greenberg and Ruhlen) will only get you a bagful of
lookalikes. What will you do with them? Beg people to take them seriously? If
you don't narrow the search down, you will find whatever you want to find, but
you'll sacrifice whatever empirical power there is in the comparative
method.
It's good practice to try down-to-earth solutions as long
as they work before resorting to exotic ones. If there is an internal IE
etymology for an IE word, the assumption of Austric influence would require
some extraordinary justification, especially if both the phonology and the
semantics of the comparison ("village, clan, ship, disposition, etc." =
"hill-fort" = "house") are loose. I agree that many strange etymologies
have been offered in Cybalist recently. I have reacted to them as often as
humanly possible, but I hope you can forgive my ignoring some threads -- my
leasure time is limited. >> [Piotr:] ... and ignore all
morphological extensions and productive suffixes (it's the root that counts,
isn't it?). Sporadic manner-of-articulation variability is a fact of life, but
intemperate recourse to it to explain prehistoric forms for which we have no
documentary evidence is unacceptable.
> [Torsten:] Intemperate? Moi?
Should I join a temperance society? I have been trying to make heads and tails
of this turgid peace of prose for some days now. I give up. I think it says that
you can't reconstruct past linguistic forms, but that would put Piotr out of a
job, so that can't be it. What do you mean, Piotr?
What I mean is that there is a place for sporadic
irregularities in historical linguistics, but you can't use their existence as a
regular excuse for equating anything with just about anything else. What I
specifically object to is impressionistic "root equations" like *pel- = *bHur- =
*bal- = ... (and let the devil take derivational morphology).
>> [Piotr:] I am prepared to consider *per- as a Near-Eastern
wanderwort (with one or two question marks), but *bHerg^H- and *polh1- have
their own histories and semantic connections, and there is no ground for dumping
or lumping them together (d- and l- are really the same, huh?).
> This
would be true if they were not Wanderworte. You are just restating your
belief.
Contrariwise, I refuse to believe in things that cannot be
cogently demonstrated.
>> [Piotr:] An etymological proposal is more compelling if
you are able to place the term being analysed within an attested formal
paradigm.
> [Torsten:] "attested formal paradigm"? What on earth do
you mean? As it stands, it would imply you could't recover loan words from
non-inflecting languages?
Please read in the lines before you read between the lines. I
said "is more compelling", not "is only valid". And I mean _derivational_
paradigms in the first place, not inflections. On the other hand, it's
true that isolating languages with little or no word-internal structure provide
far less evidence for borrowing and cognacy than languages with rich morphology.
Luckily, we are talking of languages for which this excuse doesn't apply. For
example, if I regard the Semitic etymology of IE *septm as probable,
it is not because the IE and Semitic numerals sound similar (that could
well be coincidence), but because the structure of *septm doesn't yield itself
to morphological analysis within IE while it makes good sense in terms of
Semitic morphemes.
>> [Piotr:] If you give priority to the cultural implications and
other non-linguistic aspects of your hypothesis, neglecting the underlying
phonological and morphological analysis, or if you try to explain the formal
shortcomings away by arbitrary recourse to putative variation in foreign
sources, you won't construct a convincing case.
> [Torsten:] Note in
the margin of the priest's Sunday sermon: "Bad argument. Raise your
voice".
Or resort to rhetoric if you can't think of a good
argument. Did I sound as if I were flying off the handle? I really
think you put the cart before the horse. You begin by becoming strongly
committed to a highly idiosyncratic version of history, taken from
Oppenheimer, Saxo Grammaticus, or a compilation of miscellaneous sources. You
feel that it must be true, but there are other people out there who might
consider it goofy, so some persuasive support for it would be most
welcome. That sends you on a desperate quest for linguistic evidence, which
ends in the fringe.
Piotr