The Comparative Method and semantics

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/14/99 5:37:16 PM, Sean Crist wrote:

<<Steven Long objected to the second criterion [semantic matching], stating
that it should be adequate for the phonology to match.>>

This wasn't an objection.  It really is more of an observation.  The way the
sound laws were described in your prior posts, the very idea that they can be
called "exceptionless," creates a strong impression.  That level of
dependability is rather rare in tools used to study the past.

<<He correctly pointed out that there are cases where accepted cognates have
wildly different meanings.  This is true.>>

It's a little more subtle than that.

The simple fact is that you probably would not call a match cognate unless
the sound rules demonstrated they were fundamentally 'identical'.

But you would call a match cognate without finding 'identical' meanings.  In
fact, I bet that most of the cognates that are found in non-modern IE
languages are not identical in documented meaning.  Often far from it.

The tight rigor of the sound laws suddenly gives way to such rather loose and
somewhat subjective standards as "plausible" earlier common meanings.

It seems like it might make sense to avoid these rather arbitrary standards,
if possible.

Sean Crist wrote:
<<What I'm saying, however, is that if we don't have a plausible account for
the semantic development, we shouldn't judge the words to be cognate....
Until you have a reasonable account by which 'river' and 'leather' could both
rise from some earlier meaning, you have to hold that the words have not been
demonstrated to be cognate.>>

And of course my question is how "reasonable" and "plausible" pan out in
execution.  When we deal with real, documented meaning changes in historical
words, the only thing that often makes them plausible is that they happened.

After all we are dealing with "meaning" here, which includes as referents
everything humans perceived in the world as it is and as its changed in the
course of @5000 years.  Plausibility is a tall order because you are taking
it upon yourself to judge the associations that ancient people made in order
to communicate both old and new ideas.

And I really don't think that most historians would raise much of an eyebrow
if they were told that some people somewhere found some association between a
trade good like leather and a trade route like a river.  But we DO have a
usage of "river" that could explain such a synonym - "rivered" is documented
in 15th C English as referring to a type of wool (ie, washed in a river.)
The same process could have applied to a kind of cleaned or water-softened
leather.  Implausibility can be nothing more than a lack or an ignorance of
historical information.  Hardly something to base decisive final decisions
on.  Not unless you've exhausted text and historical context.  The fact that
a glossary doesn't have it is no reason to jump to any important conclusions.

Conversely and just as importantly, a standard like plausibility also creates
the possibility that you are accepting ancestral meanings that seem to make
sense only because they are general and basic enough to include a wide range
of meanings.

<<Bear in mind, tho, that it's better to miss a real cognate than to include
a false one,...>>

"Plausibility" doesn't necessary eliminate false cognates.  It may actually
create them.  I suspect 'plausible' proto-meanings may tend to be unnatural
ones, reducing those meanings to implausible proto-abstractions.

In early Greek, "kentron" referred to a bee sting, to getting pricked, to a
sharp stick.   The journey that word traveled to get to "shopping center"
brought it from a very concrete meaning to a very abstract one and back
again.  And the invention of Geometry was a stop along the way.  If we look
for "center" as something more abstract than a bug bite in PIE, we may help
create a false cognate.

Abstractions are 'plausible' ways of finding a common meaning, but they may
yield implausible proto-languages.  That's what "plausible semantics"
possibly has done in terms of some *PIE reconstruction - not on the sound
side, but in terms of meaning.  I can't think of a more telling example than
from this recent post on the list (from <<petegray>>):

<<I can only speak for PIE amongst the reconstructed languages.  Its
reconstructed vocabulary is certainly odd.   Not including obvious root
extensions:

   (i) There are 18 roots for glisten/glitter, and 12 for shine (total 30)
   (ii) There are 8 for goat
   (iii) there are 8 or 9 for grow
   (iv) There are 23 for hit
   (v) There are 10 for jump
   (vi) There are 11 for weave/plait
   (vii) There are 12 for pull
   (viii) There are 11 for press
   (ix) There are 24 for turn
   (x) There 17 for swell>>

18 roots for "glisten/glitter"!  Can you imagine what the Xmas songs must
have been like back then!

The language desribed above of course is implausible.  Not one word at a
time.  But overall.  Plausibility as a standard seems to have allowed
"cognacy" in many words simply because they could be reduced to meanings like
'glisten/glitter.'

The fact is that we are always on thin ice whenever we think that we can
reconstruct meanings thousands of years before the written word.  Sounds seem
to have staying power.  Meanings do not.

<<If you suspect that two words are cognate, but the meanings are
substantially different, you have to come up with some meaning for the word
in the proto-language which could have given rise to the attested meanings.>>

If you are looking to limit the number of cognates the sound laws produce,
'plausible semantics' may not be the best way to do that.  You may end up
with 18 different reconstructed plausible proto-words that mean
'glitter/glisten'.

I am not saying that probable or possible meanings should not be included.
Just that they really can't reasonably settle the issue of cognancy.  We just
know too little about proto-meanings.

If however you can accept a certain amount of probablistic uncertainty in
just designating phonetic 'cognates,' then that problem becomes manageable.
Why let something as arbitrary and imprecise as proto-semantics settle issues
that arise from what you feel is the precise application of the sound laws?

Regards,
Steve Long