Torsten:
>I wonder how you discovered my cleverly disguised intention of
>uniting the wet *w-'s. [...] Anyway, the reason was that M�ller posits for
>*u:r- etc a root approx. *w-H-r-, and since he occasionly
>lets H's (laryngeals) wander in and out of roots by means of >metathesis, a
>term I find employed often in the Hamito-Semitic
>Encyclopedic Dictionary by Or�l & Stolbova [...]
The term "metathesis" is employed prolifically in long-range
comparative linguistic materials because it is one of the best tools
for the hopelessly uneducated or for the tragically dyslogical to
link any word with any other word without having to go through the
pain of proper thought or research. Starostin uses it for almost
every one of his "North Caucasian" reconstructions in the hopes that
no one will notice (and many don't because they don't focus enough
to pay attention to detail - must be something in the water nowdays).
All this doesn't get to the heart of the truth at all, but perhaps the
results are interesting to conlangers trying to make new exotic
languages for science-fiction novels and movies. I believe there is another
list for conlangers somewhere.
Torsten, you've been trying to sell your M�ller-based theory on the
Nostratic list but you can't get around the fact that this is just
mass-comparison combined with what I like to call "mathematical
linguistics", a branch of linguistics involving the mathematization
of human language to the point of absurdity to reap whatever strange
satisfaction one can find out of such a fantasy-oriented hobby.
Of course, there's no reason to presume a metathesis in *wed- because
of Uralic *wete and other external links made by other Nostraticists
that don't demonstrate the initial *H1, let alone the lack of evidence
*within* IE for the initial phoneme in this and other *w- words (as
Piotr mentioned). Your theory is very, very weak for many
reasons - unacceptable methodology, unintuitive, and based on outdated
and/or contraversial materials.
- gLeN
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