Loaded "HOW LIKELY" questions

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/25/2000 12:55:59 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>Are you objecting to the existance of historical linguistics again?

Definitely not.  But I sure have problems with YOUR version of historical
linguistics.

>-- the general rule is that if there are cognates in more than three
>otherwise unrelated and geographically widely separated branches of IE., it's
>a PIE word.

I don't know how three IE languages can be "otherwise unrelated."  Is this
another one of the special concepts in your version of historical linguistics?

With regard to "geographically widely separated" - I have no idea how those
languages could always be "widely separated" and still have been once the
same language.  There must have been an interim time.  What I wrote was:

<<Does the HOW LIKELY question apply when someone assumes that two different
IE languages could have once been the same language in the same place and then
separate and MAGICALLY become "quite distant from each other" without the
intermediate step (required of most phenomenon in this physical universe) of
first being close-by - and at that point very amenable to contact and
linguistic exchange?>>

<<Or is this a selective memory slip, as when you stated there was no reflex of
*ekwos in Anatolian?>>

I think the memory slip is yours.  No known word in Hittite.  As has been
pointed out many, many, many times on this list, the Luwian 'asuwa' looks to
be a IIr or Mitanni-Aryan borrowing, unless you assume some kind of special
Luwian satemization that could yield *-kw > sw.  (I don't know how Miguel
explains the a-.)

In any case, there is NO clear evidence that Anatolian had *ekwos as the
native word for horse.  Except in your version of historical linguistics, of
course.

<<*Kwekwlos:  reflexes in Germanic, Phrygian, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Tocharian,
Celtic, Baltic.>>

*Telephone: reflexes in all IE languages.  Give me a break.

Steve Long