--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:> The word lists were designed to be
lists of meanings that all > languages have. A few meanings
actually change their words very > frequently - 'road' comes to mind
as one of them. Words of the > sort that you are discussing above
are excluded from the lists by > design. That is not to say that
some words are not vulnerable to > replacement as a group - native
number systems have been swept aside > in much of East Asia, and
we've recently had much discussion about > the plausible Semitic
origin of PIE *septm 'seven'.
>
> > 3. If indeed agriculture spread from Anatolia and if IE language
> > traces intruded into Bharat
>
> Can't find the place in my atlas. The language of this list is
> English, though we don't normally make a fuss about it. (I'm
> speaking purely for myself, in a personal capacity.)
When words are excluded from a list by design, the selection does
not become random and to such a sample, the statistical techniques
cannot be applied.
Bharat, that is India, is named in Indian Constitution. All Survey
of India Maps are called Bha_rata Bhu_racana. I have used 'Bharat'
to distinguish it from the current boundaries of 'India' (excluding
Pakistan and Bangladesh). 'Bharat' is an apter (Rigvedic) term which
provides a broader regional basis for language analysis (including
areas such as S'rilanka (earlier called Ceylon), Nepal and
Ga_ndha_ra, presently called Kandahar, Afghanistan).
I hope this clarifies the two queries raised by Richard.