---- Original Message ----
From: Richard Wordingham
To:
cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2007 9:05 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: swallow vs. nighingale, SWALLOW
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Grzegorz Jagodzinski"
> <grzegorj2000@...> wrote:
>
>> Instead of believing in non-existing rules (prove if I am wrong),
> I'd rather
>> believe in "exceptional" rules - in out example, that -l- can yield
>> -r- WITHOUT a rule. If finding rules had been so simple, nobody would
> not have
>> denied that Greek and Latin words for swallow or leech are cognates.
> But
>> some deny!
>
> <snip>
>
>> I do not believe Pokorny, Beekes and other Neogrammarians at all -
> but I
>> understand that if anybody believe in unexceptional rules, this one
> MUST
>> deny the cognacy because no rules can be found. Instead, I prefer
>> believe that some rules function only partially, and some phonetic
>> changes
> are not
>> caused by any rules at all. And my believe is in high consistency
>> with facts.
>
> But we must remember that admitting 'exceptional' rules reduces the
> quality of an explanation, as does introducing ad hoc rules.
So, you believe that a false explanation can have better quality than a true
one? I am not convinced to this idea. Namely:
1) We are absolutely sure that some phonetic processes are irregular. See my
other posts for examples. In other words, creating any conditions for an
observed change is sometimes impossible. In given conditions a process
sometimes took place and sometimes it did not.
2) Naturally we may ignore such phenomena, and build theories which ignore
facts (existence of irregular processes is a fact, not a hypothesis). But
the question remains: will our expectation be more plausible then?
> Lacking evaluation techniques - and I think the problem is in
> correctly deriving the distributions, as linguistics seems to hold a
> great fascination for mathematicians - we must resort to rules of
> thumb, such as a neogrammarian explanation being significantly better
> when all other things are equal.
All depends on the question. When we are searching for an answer to the
question whether a given word in one language is related to another word in
another language, statistics will not help us much. For example, let the
question be if the Polish "pokrzywa" (nettle) is related to Czech kopr^iva.
There is not such a rule that kop- > pok-. There are also no words with such
a change. Using strict methods based on neogrammarian rules we should state
that the words under question are not related. But if we stated so, we would
be wrong. They are related. We simply know it from different sources than
language analyses (the old form "koprzywa" remained in Polish place names,
and it can even have survived in dialects, I'm not sure; anyway, it has been
recorded many times in the past (in fact, the "spoiled' form "pokrzywa"
appeared only in 17 century, and it is present earlier in dialects).
OK, and what if we have not other sources? Cretan adeuphos, Modern Greek
aderphós, Attic adelphós all mean "brother". We cannot formulate a strict
rule for l > u in Cretan or for l > r in Modern Greek. Should we believe
that all these three forms are similar in form and meaning only by chance?
And, should we reject the hypothesis that Modern Greek alepou "fox" is a
continuation of the Classic aló:pe:ks? In fact, there are no rules for o: >
e and -e:ks > -ou [u]. Should we come to the conviction that both words have
absolutely nothing to do with one another?
And finally: are Greek bdella and Latin hiru:do (both meaning "leech")
related? From Neogrammarian point of view, they cannot be. But both of them
have the same meaning. Yes, they look very different. But the stem "to
suck", their guessed source, has so many different variants in IE that many
various irregularities are possible in related forms. Should we reject the
hypothesis of relationship between the two forms?
My answers to these questions are easily predictable.
Grzegorz J.
___________________________________________________________
All New Yahoo! Mail Tired of Vi@...@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you.
http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html