rhotacism from Ray Hickey

[H.M.Hubey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Larry Trask wrote:
>
> As Benji points out, human beings are woefully bad at estimating
> probabilities.  Mostly, I think, we tend to interpret `random
 
Most people are quite bad at estimating numbers.
 
> distribution' as `disperse distribution', meaning that we tend to assume
> that independent events have a tendency to avoid one another.  They
> don't, or they wouldn't be random.
 
Tendency to avoid one another, in the limit is called "mutual
exclusivity",
and such events are highly dependent.
 
> The linguistic consequences of this failing are all too obvious.
> Ancient Greek for `honey' was <meli>, and Hawaiian for `honey' is
> <meli>.  Wow!  I can hear Arthur Koestler telling us that Something
> Deeply Significant is going on here.  But, of course, neither the Greeks
> nor the Hawaiians had any interest in ensuring that their words for
> `honey' were different, nor any means of doing so.
 
 
Here you unfortunately are falling for the proof by example. Even
induction
is not valid in logic in the physical sciences and the social sciences.
It is also not impossible for this food which is savored even by bears
let alone humans to be from a very old word that belongs to protoworld.
What is often forgotten is that diffusion processes which give rise to
the GAussian density also have the property that if we divided up the
density into discrete intervals and tested the number at various
levels, the highest is always at 0 which would correspond in the
linguistics
case to "no change", in the same way that a drunkard who takes steps at
random into any direction will most often be found where he started.
There's
no law that says that (1) linguistic change is 100% regular and (2) that
if
a sound X changes to Y it cannot change back to X again. If we are
arguing by
example, then add this; Turkic for honey is "bal" and also means "mud"
and
it probably does belong to protoworld.
 
 
> Collect enough languages, and enough words, and you're going to be
> drowning in such coincidences.  Standard Italian <due> `two' is a lot
> more similar to Malay <dua> `two' than it is to Neapolitan Italian
> <ruj@> `two'.  In fact, looking at that list of number names on the Web
> ( http://www.tezcat.com/~markrose/numbers.shtml ) can be quite an
 
Mark Rosenfelder, nice guy that he is, produced it to reproduce some of
my results. He got his p=0.001 to do that. But he forgot that what he
has done is (1) for independent processes and (2) the 25 matches he got
for English uses 100,000 or more words from English, not the Swadesh
list. I posted before that there is a list in which quantitative
reasoning
is not off-limits in linguistics. It is called "language" and you can
join
it by sending email to majordomo at csam.montclair.edu.
 
I am sure many people on that list will be more than happy to be
illuminated
by more of your examples. See ya' there.
 
> illuminating experience.  English /tu:/ and German /tsvai/ do not look
> to be closely related, nor do the Kashmiri dialect variants /zi/ and
> /do:/, nor do the Pashto variants /bu/, /lu/ and /do:v/, nor does
> Armenian /erku/ look like anything else IE -- yet all are cognate.
 
Don't forget that Armenia sat in an area inundated with Turkic speakers
and it is "eki" or "iki" in that language, and unless that word can be
found in Armenian circa 1,000 BC or earlier, there cannot be any proof
that
it was not due to borrowing. There is report of Kashogs (Kazak?) north
of
the Caucasus many centuries before the common era. Let us not also
forget
that Sumerian for two is "imma" which is one of the 165 cognates between
Sumerian and Turkic, which is "ikki". The next edition of Dr. Tuna's
book
promises to have even more words. In fact, it is too easy.
 
Besides, perhaps someone should compute the probability that if N
alleged cognages are found that they will all display a different sound
change. After all, if N presumed cognates are found, and it is highly
probable that at least N/2 are repeated, then where does the hallowed
"regular sound change" of intuitive historical linguistics go? How about
if 300 "matches" can be found by "accident"? What is the probability
that
none of them are repeated? What if 150 are repeated? Is this "regular
sound change" or not?  This is what happens if badly made calculations
run against other calculations. someone should try calculating these
probabilities.
 
 
--
Best Regards,
Mark
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