At 5:29:14 AM on Tuesday, July 8, 2008, stlatos wrote:
[...]
> I did not say that the existence of the principle PROVED I
> was right, but that I COULD be right.
I know.
> I did this to object to the statements that I MUST be
> wrong because of linguistic principles.
I made no such statement, and I don't recall that David did
so either.
[...]
> As far as I can see, you misinterpreted my remarks to mean
> that the principle showed I MUST be right, instead, I said
> the same principle(s) must be applied to both
> correspondences.
As I suspected, you have not understood what I've been
trying to say. I was never particularly interested in this
particular correspondence: it was merely a convenient
occasion to point out what I consider to be a very serious
flaw in your methodology. I am not objecting strenuously to
any particular reconstruction but rather to your whole
approach, and I thought that I'd made that rather clear.
Evidently I was mistaken, but I'm afraid that I haven't the
time to pursue it further, especially in the face of what
looks like a real blind spot.
(As it happens, I still think that calling the existence of
irregular correspondences a principle is something of a
misuse of the word, but that too is and was always by the
way. The actual principle that you have in mind here is
apparently that types of correspondences that are known to
exist cannot a priori be excluded from consideration.)
Brian