rhotacism from Ray Hickey

[Ross Clark]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> ----------------------------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.
 
Who can say what is impossible? What is very unlikely is that the
Hawaiians had a word for honey 200 years ago, since there were no
honey-bees in Polynesia. The Hawaiian word is in fact a 19th-century
loanword from Greek, thanks to classically-educated missionaries who
needed it to translate the Bible.
 
Ross Clark