From: gprosti
Message: 71584
Date: 2013-11-13
>By "chance", do you mean random variation within a single language? But if so, that's what needs to be proven rather than assumed: i.e., that tausend is not a dialectal variant of expected *dausend.
> 2013/11/13, gprosti <gprosti@...>:
> >
> >
> > --- 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.
> >
> >
> *Bhr.: (I've added the dash)
> This is a different case. With tu^sunt / thu^sunt we have a phonemic
> difference, i.e. one that can change the meaning of a word. If in this
> very case the meaning doesn't change, it's pure chance;