Re: HORSA vs. EXWA

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> While it has been estimated that *some* very common lexical
> items may have expected "half-lives" of ten thousand years or more,
> usable evidence sooner or later evaporates due to lexical replacement,
> cross-linguistic diffusion, etc.
>
> > This sounds me to lexicostatistical pseudo-science (not that I like to
> > use this word, but as somebody here has hurled it at me, I feel
> > legitimate to use it).
>
> I don't mean lexicostatistics/glottochronology. I mean actual studies of
> rates of lexical replacement like this one:
> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/abs/nature06176.html
>

Interestingly enough, one of the authors is Q.D. Atkinson, co-author with R.D. Gray of the famous glottochronological tree of the IE family first published in 2003.

Unfortunately, language evolution implies SEMANTIC SHIFT, which can't be measured by this kind of studies, because the fixed variables are the meanings themselves, not words.