Re: Divergence vs. convergence (was: Witzel and Sautsutras)

From: Tavi
Message: 70267
Date: 2012-10-25

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
>
> Indeed. Tavi likes to speak a lot about "preconceived ideas"
> which to fit others bend the facts, but it is actually *him*
> who does that. Of course, handbook knowledge can be wrong
> and it has been amended several times in the past and will
> continue to be amended in the future, but it is meaningless
> to claim bullshit about it the way Tavi does.
>
I didn't mean anything of that kind.

> Making a bold claim is cheap; buttressing it with evidence is
> costly, and Tavi is not ready to meet that investment, probably
> because he just doesn't have that evidence at hand. (He used
> to spew a lot of nonsense about "Vasco-Caucasian" loanwords in
> just about every language of Europe back when he was on the
> ZBB, and he still does so on his blog.)
>
I'm afraid you're not qualified to make such statement.

> Of course, the original meanings of the names are *unknown*,
> and can only be recovered where a particular name element
> correlates with a salient feature of the objects named thus.
> This is the case with about a dozen central European place
> names which contain the element */hal-/ - and all denote
> places where salt is produced or has been produced in the
> past. This seems to indicate that we are dealing with the
> LBK people's word for 'salt' here. (And it looks quite
> similar to PIE *sh2al-, 
>
Actually, this is *saH2l-, so please don't *cheat* with data.

> > That's an accurate description of your posts. If you don't
> > like it, blame your own incompetence and your insistence on
> > putting that incompetence on display.
> >
> > > Speaking in sporting terms, you're an unworthy opponent.
> >
> > In order to be an opponent, I'd have to take your
> > pronouncements seriously, and I don't: you've never made a
> > case for one of them. I suspect that you honestly believe
> > that you have, which is rather sad but beside the point.
>
> Well put. I for my part cannot take Tavi's challenge of the
> main supporting pillars of Indo-Europeanist handbook knowledge
> seriously. It just makes no sense. 
>
I did't see you actually addressed any of my or Villar's points.

> It is true that, for
> instance, Pokorny reconstructed PIE roots for some words which
> have areally skewed distributions and are thus uncertain to
> actually be of PIE vintage; but I *did* work my way through
> the items limited to "western" IE languages (Italic, Celtic,
> Germanic, Baltic, Slavic), and found no phonological
> peculiarities (such as unexplained */a/-vocalism) that would
> point at substratum loanwords in most of them. They probably
> were dialectal formations in Late PIE.
>
I think you didn't a good work, because there're quite a few of these /a/ words, e.g.  'summer'.