Doing historical linguistics (part 1)

[H. M. Hubey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
 
>
> >em (to suck), am (cunt in Turkish), amma (mother), amcik (pussy),
> >emesal (female speech in Sumerian), emcek (breasts, udder), meme
> >(breast), emzirik, etc etc.
>
> This illustrates the fact that a little knowledge of the languages
> involved is never a bad thing.  Larry should have been slightly more
> precise by indicating that Basque <eme> was not borrowed from vanilla
> Occitan, but from Gascon/Bearnais.  Then it immediately becomes clear
> that the word is simply Latin FEMINA, which regularly becomes hemna
> (hemm@ ~ hemno) in Gascon (f > h).  The ultimate root is IE *dheH1-
> "to suck" (*dheH1-mHn-oH2 > femina).  The coincidence with PTurkic
> *eme "woman" is entirely coincidental.  And so is, with even more
 
I don't know that PT 'eme' is 'women'. I only pointed out that
'em' is an old word in Turkic, and might well be one of those
that belongs in PW (protoworld) for those who believe in it.
 
 
>
> reason, Sumerian <eme.sal> where the element <eme> doesn't mean
> "woman" at all, but "language, tongue".  The word <sal> means "thin,
> refined" (it used to be thought that <sal> was "woman", and one can
> still find that in older books, but in fact the Sumerian word was
> <munus>).
 
Related words again. This is one of the reasons why the creation of
a standard "semantic" space is so important for historical linguistics.
 
All the powerful tools of math are unavailable to linguists because of
that, and probably because of this, articles like those Times, etc will
keep appearing despite the fact that some hate it. If there is no
standard and no impartial referee, that is the way it will always be.
 
If sociologists and psychologists are now fighting over correlation
coefficients it is time for linguists to bite the bullet.
 
 
>
> >Do you understand the probabilistic implication of such patterns?
>
> Yes.  In short: "Coincidences happen" and "Garbage in, garbage out".
 
That is another one of those things linguists say. I will refrain
from further comments. There are not really too many things to do
in the face of uncertainty. Everyone from rocket scientists, engineers,
economists, biologists, to computer scientists, workers in speech
recognition, synthesis, phonetics and psychologists does the same thing.
Except of course linguists.
 
But then again, nobody writes articles in Times that the moon is full
of green cheese, or that the world is supported on the back of turtles.
 
>
>
> =======================
> Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
> mcv at wxs.nl
> Amsterdam
 
--
M. Hubey
Email:          hubeyh at Montclair.edu    Backup:hubeyh at alpha.montclair.edu
WWW Page:       http://www.csam.montclair.edu/Faculty/Hubey.html