Back on Topic [was Excluding data].

[Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>]

On 27 Sep 99 at 9:12, Larry Trask wrote:

> On Sun, 26 Sep 1999, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote:

> [LT]

>>> Take any decent dictionary of English published around 1900.  How many
>>> of the words entered in it existed in Old English, only about 1000 years
>>> ago?  Not many.  Why should Basque be different?  (And the Pre-Basque
>>> I'm interested in dates back to about 2000 years ago.)

>> But take any dictionary of Icelandic and ask how many of its words
>> existed in Old Norse. The answer is, practically all! And it is
>> probably a fair statement that, adding proper sound changes, you may
>> even push that back to Proto-Germanic. I guess English and Icelandic
>> are both relatively extreme cases. Where Basque stands between the
>> two poles must be looked into with an open mind, as I suppose you
>> have already done.

> Indeed, though not just me.

> Icelandic is beyond question a special case.  English is arguably
> another, though not so clearly as Icelandic.

[whacking the comparison of these two cases to that of Basque]

It would be nice if someone took these observations and brought them
back on topic to the IE list.

So. How well does Modern Iceland/Classical Norse compare to, say,
Ufilias' Gothic? And how does this illuminate the reconstructed
proto-Germanic?

I'm just an amateur here, but I read you all. Howabout something at
the _Scientific American level_ on this topic?

Yeah. Egil's Saga and the Odyssey are the two best Ur-novels ever
written. I just re-read the Odyssey in the Rouse. Telemachos could
just as well have been visiting Eirik Bloodaxe at York as Menelaos at
Mycaenae.
--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net