From: tgpedersen
Message: 61446
Date: 2008-11-06
>Poor Brian.
> 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.