Re: zrak

Dear Pat,

My greatest sin is that I briefly trusted the meaning you gave since it sounded plausible (Czech does, after all, have a number of semantic calques from German). I couldn't verify it at the weekend, but it was the first thing I did on Monday morning, when I could go to the library. Please count it to my credit that I put an end to this comedy of errors. Unlike you, and sooner than anyone else on the list, I realised that there might be something amiss about Pokorny's "Gesicht" and did the necessary checking. Some people never bother to verify their data.

I promise to be more conscientious in the future and NEVER let myself to be fooled by notoriously unreliable sources. What springs to mind in this connection is the Old Japanese Egg Hoax started by Starostin in 1976 and still taking its toll in the Nostratic circles.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: proto-language

To: nostratic@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 12:26 PM

Subject: Re: [nostratic] zrak

[PCR] I admit that "Gesicht", the German word in Pokorny from which I was translating "face", also means "appearance, sight". Since we apparently have no native speakers of Czech on the list to tell us definitely if /zrak/ is understood by Czechs as "face", we all have to rely on our dictionaries. What is also instructive is that Piotr confidently asserted: "the Czech meaning 'face' is simply a loan-translation of German Gesicht" *without any knowledge* supporting that proposition. Had it not finally occurred to him that "Gesicht", Pokorny's gloss for /zrak/, is slightly ambiguous, no doubt we would be listening to a lecture from him on the niceties of "loan-translation". Pat