Re: *ka/unt- etc, new conquests

> > Gravity-as-caused-by-demons has not been disproven, but that's
> > because it is not disprovable to begin with, not because it would
> > be a theory.
>
> You don't know how close you are to a real problem here. Actually the classical theory of gravity does introduce demons, namely independent agents doing the pulling, as soon as you begin to formulate it in some kind of representational language.

That says more about the suitability of the formulation than of the suitability of the theory. Note how your anecdote needs to talk of "naive" mecanics.

(Now yes, there WAS a period where they tried to come up with all sorts of "naive" explanations for gravity, AFAIK usually of the pushing rather than the pulling sort however; eg. macroscopic material is porous proportional to mass, and two objects close by will shado a "cosmic background ether bombardment" in their midst. Getting much too off topic here however…)

> But apart from that, I want "disprovable, but not yet disproven".

> Simplicity. My second criterion is Occam.

So in theory, we should get along just fine.

How would you propose disproving a word's belonging into one of your substrate loan complexes?

> > Predictiv power really should come into that too (tho it is quite
> > link'd with falsifiability).
>
> Forget predictive power in a historical science. Any prediction a theory makes we already know, unless we discover new material like Hittite, and that's very rare.

Maybe with Indo-European. There are still plenty of understudied languages in the world which may or may not provide us with data that fits our reconstruction of, say, Proto-Uralic.

> > > > Why do you post your thoughts here anyway if you are not
> > > > interested in disseminating them?
> > >
> > > If I post my thoughts here, then I *am* disseminating them.
> > > Doh!
> >
> > Certainly. But you simultaneously have no *interest* in getting
> > others to care?
>
> I know they will, after I'm dead. But then it will be too late
> (*sob*)

Am I staring into a sarchasm again?

> > > > The support is simply the base of a tree. Yes, I'm arguing
> > > > that there is no need to loan a specific word for that,
> > > > given that the meaning "base of tree" is confirm'd the
> > > > original one by the other Uralic languages.
> > >
> > > The other possibility is that the "tree stump" word spread
> > > with the storage hut technology and was later generalized
> > > (those people were not botanists or zoologists; they had
> > > words for what was necessary to stay alive).

> > "tree stump" is the kind of concept even stone-age hunter
> > gatherers can be expected to have in their vocabulary.
>
> But they can't be expected not to replace by a new word from some
> prestigious new technology.

> Torsten

OK… sure not, but I'd then expect those who kept the technology (such as the Sami) to keep their word for it too, not just some generalization of it.

And the newness of this prestigious technology remains assumed.

John Vertical