From: Bhrihskwobhloukstroy
Message: 71582
Date: 2013-11-13
>*Bhr.: (I've added the dash)
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Bhrihskwobhloukstroy
> <bhrihstlobhrouzghdhroy@...> wrote:
>>
>> May I state again that it was an etymology only for the aberrant
>> German forms? It would be complete nonsense to replace a phonological
>> impasse (OHG tu^sunt < PIE *t-) with a much greater one (OHG #d- < PIE
>> *dh-)! I'm just suggesting tu^sunt and thu^sunt represent different
>> etyma. Claims that X and Y (in this case, tu^sunt and thu^sunt)
>> "cannot be separated" are justified in a regular system of diatopic
>> phonological variation, otherwise they're quite arbitrary,
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "regular system of diatopic variation", but if
> you have a set of words with a sufficient amount of shared phonetic
> material, plus matching semantics, this overrides the criterion of regular
> phonetic correspondence when drawing a connection between two or more
> forms.
>
> E.g., I would say that there is no need to find regular sound rules to
> justify a relationship between Finnish kuningas "king" and OHG kuning. The
> two share a sequence of six phonemes, and they match semantically (compare
> thu^sunt/tu^sunt, with at least a five-phoneme match) – probabilistically,
> this is enough to conclude they share a common ancestor.
>
> None of this implies rejecting the regularity of sound change -- it may turn
> out that the pair of kuningas/kuning perfectly follows a pattern of
> Finnish/Germanic sound correspondence from a certain time period. But, it
> does mean that there are other criteria that can be used independently of
> regular sound correspondence to conclude that a set of words can or can't be
> separated from one another.
>
>