Re: squirrel

At 5:43:19 AM on Monday, March 19, 2012, Torsten wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <bm.brian@...> wrote:

>> At 5:53:35 AM on Saturday, March 17, 2012, Torsten wrote:

[...]

>>> I have a hunch those metatheses occur in loanwords in
>>> Germanic.

>> Which of course doesn't answer the question.

> Let me answer it this way then: A reconstruction model in
> which that type of metatheses occur regularly in loans
> from a substrate language, is more satifactory to Occam
> than one in which it occurs irregularly in one single
> language.

Not necessarily; it depends very much on the data as a
whole. And since there is evidence that this kind of
metathesis is not unlikely on its own, introducing a
substrate on no other evidence is very much a matter of
multiplying entities without necessity.

>>>> Neither is <bridd> ~ <bird>,

>>> AFAIK that word is isolated in English.

>> <bærstlian> ~ <brastlian> 'crackle', <cerse> ~ <cresse>
>> 'cress', <cyrps> ~ <crisp> 'curly', <dærstan> ~ <dræstan>
>> 'dregs', <forsc> ~ <frosc> 'frog', <forst> ~ <frost>
>> 'frost', <gærs> ~ <græs> 'grass', <first> ~ <frist>
>> 'period', <burna> ~ <brunna> (in place-names) 'stream',
>> <þirda> ~ <þridda> 'third', <froht> ~ <forht> 'afraid',
>> <þrop> ~ <þorp> 'farm; village', etc.

> You misunderstand. It doesn't occur outside English (and
> Frisian?) AFAIK, unless it's connected with 'brood', as
> Skeat proposes.

Irrelevant. I wasn't claiming anything about that word in
particular; I was pointing out that the tyhpe of metathesis
in question is hardly unusual.

>>>> not to mention a number of other /rV/ ~ /Vr/ metatheses.

>> And while I'm thinking about it, Cont. Scand. <kors>.

>>> PIE *bhren-, *bhron-, *bhr.n- would regularly give P-Germ.
>>> *brin-, *bran-, *burn-, which is bound to get regularised
>>> one way or the other.

>> For a while, perhaps.

> Yes. History, you know.

That was in fact my point: that a closer look at the actual
history of these words seriously undermines your claim.

[...]

>> In other words, in English it's gone /Vr/ > /rV/ > /Vr/.

> If it had ever gone *bren-, *bran-, *burn-, as I think it
> once did, lexicographers would not have registered it.

Quite beside the point that I was making.

>>> *bhrest-, *bhrost-, *bhr.st- similarly.

[...]

>> In short, this verb has also shown considerable
>> vacillation. Neither verb is a very good advertisement
>> for stable regularization.

> No, they took their sweet time. But it happened
> eventually.

Not clear. They've both changed regularized states more
than once, and it's clearly methodologically inadmissible to
assume that the present regularization is final.

>>>> De Vries s.v. <ars> suggests taboo deformation, which
>>>> could certainly be a(nother) contributing factor.

>>> Faute de mieux, yes.

>> Actually, the combination of factors looks like a pretty
>> good explanation to anyone who isn't (to paraphrase Roger
>> Lass) a substrate romantic.

> Well, I think the substrate solution is more satisfactory
> wrt. Occam. If you think Kuhn's NWB didn't exist, I think
> you can do better than resorting to ad hominems.

There's no ad hominem there: I'm not saying that you're
wrong because you're Danish or on the basis of some other
irrelevant personal characteristic, but rather observing
that you have a tendency to favor substrate 'explanations'
on very flimsy evidence.

And I said nothing at all about Kuhn's NWB. You've offered
no evidence that it's relevant.

Brian