Re: The meaning of life: PIE. *gWiH3w-

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 52945
Date: 2008-02-13

On 2008-02-13 07:25, Brian M. Scott wrote:

> Quite possibly he did. In any case, if you really aren't
> just indulging in an elaborate joke, you'll have to produce
> much more than a tiny handful of very loose and unsystematic
> lexical resemblances, especially since what I've seen of the
> morphology looks very un-IE. And of course there are the
> obvious geographical and temporal difficulties, which, if
> not linguistic, still cannot be ignored.

Plus the fact that the lexicon in question is very large. With thousands
of words to compare, numerous chance resemblances are sure to pop up
(even a few score of them if one isn't too strict about the degree of
phonetic and semantic resemblance). But no relationship hypothesis can
be formulated without identifying a number of recurring regular
correspondences, especially in well-known conservative lexical fields.

Piotr