Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/27/2001 4:35:07 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< According to your rhetoric, all words are susceptible to frequent, random,
unknowable change. Therefore, words cannot be used to argue anything
whatsoever about linguistic or ethnographic prehistory. You have objected to
other list-members "queering the game", and your response is to throw the
whole game-board into the trash. >>

That's not true.  You can "argue anything" you like about linguistic history
that is strictly linguistic .  But the problem that's obvious is the
non-linguistic elements.  There's a lot more to historic and prehistoric
people, things and processes than an anachronistic dictionary-style
definition of a tree.

And this is not an all or nothing proposition.  The "whole game-board" does
not have to be thrown "into the trash."

What I've tried to show - and I think that I have shown - is that assumptions
about the early "meaning" of many of these words may easily be doubted on
closer examination.  And the focal point, in that case, becomes not simple
word-matching, but rather the historical processes themselves.  And the
actual textual context.

After your initial post, in which you mentioned the ""Greek has (s)mi:lax"
for yew, I looked at L-S and about ten different Greek texts that contained
the word.  I found that it referred to at least four totally different trees
or bushes and quite possibly to just wood that was carved or carveable.  I
just don't find that the words that came down to us in writing reflect modern
style tree taxonomies at all.  I think that, even with the Greeks, different
linguistic communities had different names for what we would consider the
same object.  This is totally consistent with everything we know about naming
flora and fauna in preliterate cultures.  And I think these names were based
much less on species definition than on practical usage, which varied among
speakers of the same language.  So the same word was used for different trees
or wood products.  This is true in Greek and I assume therefore all early IE
languages.

Just starting there, I'd be negligent in not having doubts about your claims
about unrecorded proto-Celtic and German.  And there's a lot more that
follows that first step.  It seems particularly dubious to assume that all
these languages did not influence each other in use of names of things that
were demonstrably an important part of on-going commerce and trade - where
names that crossed language barriers would have to be economically more
important than traditional local names.

It seems I'm always being reminded on this list that linguistics is not
simple.  But I have to say that historical processes and relationships and
historical meaning itself can't be any simpler.  In fact, everything we know
says they are far more irregular.  Just the opposite of assuming that a
reconstructed word stood for a modern taxonomic species of tree for 2000+
years of preliteracy.

I may have overstated what you "need to prove," but I was reacting to what
you were telling me I needed to prove.  In fact, all I was proving was that
there is a high degree of uncertainty in all this.  And I think that is
somewhat obvious.

If you are saying that your interpretation is possible, I'd have to agree.
If you are saying its probable, there's just too many other equally plausible
possibilities for that to be true.

Regards,
Steve Long