At 5:53:50 PM on Wednesday, November 5, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:
>> At 7:04:04 PM on Monday, November 3, 2008, tgpedersen
>> wrote:
[...]
>> You're substrate-happy and routinely prefer that
>> explanation to others.
> No. I stick to Schrijver (I think it was)'s principles for
> identifying substrate words.
You missed the point completely. Principles can at best
identify *possible* substrate words, which is just the first
step. Unfortunately, you never go beyond that and do any of
the real work, and to make matters worse, you routinely take
'possible = real' as the default assumption. The one is
dilettantism; the other is crap science.
[...]
> Here's the picture:
> 1) If we accept Piotr et al.'s etymology of Goths as
> derived from *gheud- we still have all the loose ends for
> Jute, so we'll have to assume at least one substrate word
> to accomodate that.
There is obviously also the possibility that the 'Jute' word
is an isolated survival in PIE. Neither is by itself more
than an arbitrary assumption. The survival hypothesis
becomes something more only if a possible cognate can be
found; the substrate hypothesis becomes something more only
if a substrate can be genuinely identified. Failing either
of those eventualities, the only legitimate position is that
the etymology is unknown.
One may of course adopt one or the other possibility as a
*working* hypothesis, in the sense that one chooses to look
for evidence favoring it rather than for evidence favoring
the alternative; that's perfectly legitimate. But it's also
quite different from actually assuming that the word comes
from a substrate.
> 2) Since we have now posited one substrate word already,
> it's natural to see if we can join it with other words,
> for reasons of economy of the resulting theory. Gaut- etc
> fits the bill.
This, on the other hand, is complete nonsense. Arbitrarily
assigning the two names to a common source without any
linguistic evidence in favor of that assignment in fact
multiplies your assumptions and makes your theory *less*
economical. So does rejecting a perfectly reasonable
etymology for one of the words.
This is yet another illustration of the difficulty noted
below:
[...]
>> I know. You don't understand science or the evaluation of
>> evidence.
> for i in N {
> Torsten gets an idea.
> Brian calls him names
> }
That was an inference from your posts, not an instance of
name-calling. If you don't want to see such negative
inferences, improve your performance.
Brian