rhotacism from Ray Hickey

[Sarah G. Thomason]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
H.M. Hubey's claim that "there cannot be any proof" that Armenian
/erku/ is not a loanword from a Turkic language is mistaken: there
are at least two, and perhaps more than two, other cognate sets
between Armenian and other IE languages (e.g. Ancient Greek) with
initial correspondences Armenian erk- : other IE dw-.  One is a
word for "long", the other a word for "fear/terrible" -- sorry, I
don't have the actual forms in my head or by my desk.  So this is
a genuine recurring correspondence, reflecting PIE *dw- > Armenian (e)rk-,
the end result of a series of regular sound changes in Armenian. It's
well known; in fact, it's just about everybody's favorite example
of a phonetically odd regular correspondence -- the example we
tend to trot out to demonstrate that genuine correspondences need
not be phonetically similar at all.  (There are lots of other such
examples; this is just the most familiar one, the one that probably
everyone who has taken an introductory historical linguistics course
has heard about.)
 
   Of course, Sumerian "imma" doesn't look very similar to Turkic
"ikki", either; but in the absence of other pairs of words showing
-mm- in Sumerian and -kk- in Turkic, no historical linguist would
accept it as a promising cognate set, especially in the absence
of  *systematic* evidence of cognacy elsewhere in the
lexicon (systematic, i.e. with recurring correspondences, as opposed
to scattered similarities of the sort Trask was warning against).
 
   I must have missed part of this thread: has Hubey given a
definition of "intuitive historical linguistics"?  Is it his view
that all historical linguistics that isn't supported by statistics
is "intuitive"?
 
   -- Sally