Richard:
>[...] Miguel argues in [...] that 'thou' and 'you' are themselves cognate);
And if you believe that I have some property to sell you in Moose Jaw.
The words *tu and *yus are different, unrelated words in most, if not
all, published texts concerning IE. Miguel's theory is solely his own.
Anyone can play phonetic games and come up with convenient
"dissimilatory processes" to get rid of the *t that is "supposed" to be
there because of a groundless, preconceived notion. "Supposed" by
whom? Not by me. Nor many others much more qualified than me.
To demonstrate the insanity of the premise, I'll perform a magical
Miguelism of my own and make French /tu/ and /vous/ related. I will
say that the two stems are based on **tu but the former remained
the word /tu/ and the latter was **tu + the plural **-ous. It then
lost initial **t- due to the "t-and-s-just-can't-get-along" rule, making
**tuous > **wous > /vous/. Tada! Easy as pie to connect anything
to anything using Miguel's clever ignorance of proper methodology.
Luckily we know about Latin and IE so we just can't get away with
it. However, Miguel exploits the murkiness of PreIE to get away with
nothing short of murder. In the end however, it's not proper internal
reconstruction as qualified linguists know it, regardless of whether
we're talking pre-IE, pre-French or pre-anything.
How is internal reconstruction supposed to work? Well I could
describe it on my own, since it is plainly intuitive to me, but it
seems that people don't take my word for things for some reason and
then I get attacked for my position, no matter how much common
sense is infused in it. So I want everybody to listen to Larry Trask's
words on it in a post at...
http://www.linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-most-recent/msg06989.html
If you have a problem with the following, attack Larry:
"There are several versions of [internal reconstruction], but the most
straightforward version works like this: we observe a fairly regular pattern
in a language; we note that certain forms are exceptions to that pattern;
we surmise that those exceptional forms once conformed to the pattern
but were disturbed by regular changes; and we identify the changes that
produced the disturbances."
So Miguel's version based on his tall-tale etymology of *tu and *yus works
seemingly like this: "I, but few to no others, imagine in my head a fairly
regular pattern in IE; I, but few to no others, fantasize that certain forms
are
'exceptions' to that invisible pattern; I, and only I, surmise that those
exceptional forms once conformed to some inane pattern but were
conveniently disturbed by very rare linguistic processes that can only
be found in rarely studied African languages; and only I, through my
arrogance, am able to identify the changes that produced these
disturbances while others are blind." Basically, Miguel violates at every
level Occam's Razor.
So I think what must be added to Larry Trask's explanation of internal
reconstruction should be that the "patterns" _must_ be intuitive patterns
that most will not deny existed, rather than patterns that rely on blind
faith and assumption. I don't think anyone with common sense would
simply agree that *tu and *yus are related without a mountainous
degree of skepticism about the "pattern" that Miguel observes.
(PS: I've seen your evidence of it already, Miguel, not interested. It's
still an untame theory that can't be salvaged because of the high
assumption factor.)
= gLeN
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