Re: HORSA vs. EXWA

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

>
> > If I remember well (the article appeared 8 years ago), they claimed
> > these dates actualy support Renfrew's theory, to which I disagree, of
> > course.
>
> I disagree with their dates too. So what? I disagree with a lot of what
> various people write without losing my respect for them as scholars.
> Even if the phylogeny we are talking about were completely wrong, I
> would not make Atkinson less credible as the author or co-author of
> other articles, especially if they are about something else. I
> understand your reluctance to pay for the Nature article, so I'm sending
> you a copy off list.
>

The thing is I don't understand the utility of the concept "lexical replacement" in comparative linguistics, which (if I understood well) treats meanings as if they were ecological niches. That is, what these studies measure is the rate a given meaning is occupied by different words along time.

But IMHO what it really matters are the words themselves, which in the course of time **change** their meaning (i.e. they undergo semantic shift). For example, the IE word for 'dog' hasn't been "replaced" in English, but only has shifted its meaning to 'hound'.