From: Tavi
Message: 69167
Date: 2012-04-01
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>That's right. I meant lexical correspondences should be (ideally) predictable from sound correspondences.
> > No, no. It's the sound correspondences which should be predictable
>
> Warning: you are not using this word in its normal meaning. Sound
> correspondences, once established, may have some predictive power, but
> they are not predictable.
>
But "regular" means it obeys a rule, i.e. what neogrammarians called a "sound law". So I'd prefer "recurring" or "recurrent" instead.> > (i.e. "regular" in the traditional IE-ist jargon).
>
> Why IE-ist? Why "jargon"? Other linguists call them "regular" as well.
> Regular not in some strictly technical IE-ist sense of the word, but
> regular as everybody understands this word: recurrent, systematic and
> pervasive.
>
> > You see a pattern here and
> > there, then you make a hypothesis and test it, and if it works, voila!
>
> You make it sound very simple, but it *isn't* that simple at all.
> Patterns are only too easy to see. Any random process may generate
> "patterns". Even the stars in the sky form patterns.
I disagree. Randomness is just the opposite of a pattern.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness
IMHO all you can prove (to a reasonable degree of certainity) is a set of words in language A and another set of words in language B have a shared *source*.> How do you know
> that the patterns you see "here and there" in two different languages
> are evidence of their shared ancestry?
>
The problem is that a the lexicon of a given language is typically made up of several strata (multi-layer) due to language replacement and contact processes, and it isn't always easy to tell which is the "inherited" part. This is where morphology usually comes to the rescue.
In the case of the IE family, some of these strata have been digged out in the process of reconstructing "PIE", although they have been inadverted to most IE-ists.