From: Torsten
Message: 69038
Date: 2012-03-20
>Erh, yes, true.
> 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 ofAs I said. You left out this paragraph.
> 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>,No, correcting your misunderstanding of what I said is not irrelevant.
>
> >>> 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 inYes, you misunderstood me and introduced this other point after deleting the paragraph in which I said that such words would render my assumption of a substrate invalid (except it wouldn't if we have to assume the substrate on other grounds), thus reintroducing the point yourself, making it look like this was your own idea.
> 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.You are reasoning circularly here, or rather those who have gone before you, namely in assuming that a metathesis will always take place across the full pardigm. But the paradigmas are never presented by the sources in full (well, they might be in a few cases), so that assumption is unwarranted.
>
> >> 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.
> [...]It invalidates the point you were trying to make.
>
> >> 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.Yes if you assume that liquid metathesis is a randomly occurring event in English it might happen again. And if you're assuming that the present state is the result of regularization, it won't. In other words your assumption is the result of circular reasoning.
>
> [...]
>
> >> 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, whichAha.
> >>>> 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,You're saying I'm wrong because I'm a substrate romantic. That's an ad hominem.
> but rather observing that you have a tendency to favor substrateThat would not have been an ad hominem. So your former calling me something else is now inoperative?
> 'explanations'on very flimsy evidence.
> And I said nothing at all about Kuhn's NWB. You've offeredYou have a tendency to discredit substrate explanations on very flimsy evidence. Kuhn's NWB is the best documented of them. As I said some time back I think it's identical to both of Schrijver's proposed substrate languages, one of which is his bird language, to which I proposed 'ars' etc belonged.
> no evidence that it's relevant.