another correspondence: Haida q'- : Proto-Miwok *t.-

[De Reuse, Willem]

Hi Geoffrey:

Thanks for your response.  I have recently become more and more skeptical about significance.  People find all sorts of supposedly significant correspondences between linguistic features and all sorts of things.

An article just came out about this, it is worth reading. It is attached.

Are we really sure that the consonant correspondences we find across languages are not of the same kind?

Best,

Willem

________________________________
From: Geoffrey Caveney [geoffreycaveney at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, August 12, 2013 9:10 PM
To: De Reuse, Willem
Cc: List for the discussion of the Athabaskan language family and related languages
Subject: Re: another correspondence: Haida q'- : Proto-Miwok *t.-

Hi Willem:

Thank you for the reply and the feedback.

As for the significant number of correspondences, please keep in mind that I am restricting my comparisons to reconstructed proto-levels of Miwok. Examining the entire comparative Miwok lexicon in Broadbent & Callaghan 1960, one finds only 6 forms with initial *t.- at any proto-level of Miwok: Proto-Miwok *t/t.yy... 'to rest', Proto-Eastern Miwok *t/t.is<http://t.is>í:nay- 'ant', Proto-Sierra Miwok *t.oʔ-nge- 'to sit down', Proto-Sierra Miwok *t.o:/lkoš- 'ear', Proto-Sierra Miwok *t/t.uya:ng- 'to jump', and Proto-Sierra Miwok *t/t.ay... 'blue jay'. So I think that to find 3 of these 6 forms corresponding to Haida forms with initial q'- is significant.

I do understand the importance of morphological comparisons, but I also think each proposal must be assessed on its own merits. Sometimes there will be more morphological comparisons and fewer lexical comparisons, but sometimes the reverse will be true. For example, which morphological comparisons could be the basis for demonstrating the genetic relationship of the Chinese languages to the Tibeto-Burman languages? It is hard to find any, because the morphology of the Chinese languages was so thoroughly restructured and hardly resembles Tibeto-Burman morphology at all. But there are very few historical linguists who reject the genetic relationship of Chinese and Tibeto-Burman in the Sino-Tibetan family, because the lexical comparisons are so convincing.

Geoffrey Caveney

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