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

From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Message: 70270
Date: 2012-10-25

Hallo Indo-Europeanists!

On Wednesday 24 October 2012 21:47:26 Tavi wrote:

> --- 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.

So if you don't *mean* "anything of that kind", why are you
*doing* that all the time? If you suffer from a compulsion
and do that against your will, you should consult a psychologist.

> > 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.

It is certainly not impossible that Basque, NWC, NEC and an
unknown number of extinct languages of Europe are all related
to each other. But the evidence I have seen so far did not
convince me, and people who are more qualified than me to make
statements about this matter tend to reject the proposal as
well. I have seen your methodology in the ZBB. You start
with a very large phoneme inventory and with forms that are
considerably longer than their "reflexes", which makes it easier
to "make things fit". And if a word does not seem to show the
"right" sound correspondences, you invent yet another "extinct
branch" of "Vasco-Caucasian" that happens to show the "right"
sound correspondences. That way, you can "prove" anything and
nothing.

But Vasco-Caucasian is off-topic in this list, so let's end
this discussion here.

> > 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.

AFAIK, there is evidence for *both* *sah2l- and *sh2al- in PIE.
It seems to be a case of Schwebeablaut.

> [...]
>
> > 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.

I haven't read Villar's latest book yet (none of the libraries
I have access to carries it, and I am quite short on money, so
I don't want to buy it), so I have nothing to say on it. What
regards your points, I have said what I have to say about them
often enough, and there is no use repeating that once again here.
There really is not much to say on them in absence of supporting
evidence.

> > 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'.

Sure. There are quite a few words with */a/-vocalism, but
many of the restrictedly attested items in Pokorny have
"ordinary" */e~o/-vocalism, and some words with */a/-vocalism
have, according to Pokorny, cognates in eastern IE languages,
but many of those eastern cognates are IMHO poorly founded.

Anyway, the dictionary is not worth much because the phonology
Pokorny uses is utterly out of date, and many items have
semantic problems. He evidently tended to hammer things into
place that actually did not belong there, and to contrive PIE
etymologies for items that cannot be ascribed to PIE by any
reasonable method. (Possibly in an reaction on the harsh
criticism he earned earlier with his hypotheses about a Semitic
substratum in Celtic.) It is widely recognized that Pokorny's
dictionary has many problems, and that there indeed is a
pressing need for a more modern PIE etymological dictionary.

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