At 12:04 29.07.03 -0400, H.M. Hubey wrote:

>I do not believe in the anagrams.

Me neither. Of course there's metatheses, but anagrammizing IMSNHO is, to
put it with Matisoff, promiscuity in cognate identification.

>However, there is something do this. It shows what the weaknesses of the
>vaunted "historical method" are.

I have no problems with the historical-comparative method, with some
groupings, like Afrasan or Nilo-Saharan (see Ehret's monographs on both),
it, after all, achieves excellent results, and time-deep ones, too.

>Clusters might arise from vowels being lost. And then clusters lose
>consonants. And so on.

Sure, things happen and all those interesting things I might have craved
for have been eroded...

>Or English slice (slays) vs Turkic sIlI (to slice) sIlIsh (act of slicing).

AFAIK the former etymon can be reconstructed for Germanic only (including a
loan into Old French esclicier "splinter").

>And many consonants still existing in Turkic have been lost in Akkadian
>and it occurs regularly;

There's also many consonants existing still in other Semitic languages that
have been lost in Akkadian ;-)

>e.g. many many examples, and these are much better than the AA-IE alleged
>cognates.

References?

Best,

Heike