open letter to the Google company, on the value of the scientific groups
Franz Gnaedinger
thank you very much for archiving the discussions
in the scientific groups. Let me say a word on
their value.
Solving problems, I find, is a matter of matching
complexities. If you can get an idea of the
complexity of a problem you can look out for
a matching pattern among potential solutions.
Now the scientific groups were a fantastic means
of getting an idea of the complexity of a problem
- as long as all messages were retrievable.
Alas, more and more messages can't be found
any longer.
The value of your archives will increase with new
ideas published in the scientific groups. But will
people publish their new ideas if their messages
disappear? No, they will held back their ideas,
while ever more trivia and idle chatter will flood
your archives.
Am I right in assuming that you are installing
rating filters? and if so, do you think that such
filters could weed out nonsense and keep the
valuable messages?
Consider the case of two posters A and Z.
Poster A uses a scientific group for publishing
and discussing and further developing new ideas,.
Nobody can prove them wrong, and so he feels
entitled to go on with his work online. Yet poster Z
hates the presence of poster A, envies his wealth
in ideas, attacks him out of the blue, in the hope
to make himself a name by driving him away,
and starts a killrating campaign he leads with a
multitude of aliases, each one with an own Google
account, which allows him multiple rating and
killrating, also toprating own messages. He does
that for years, until the messages of poster A
are filtered out of the system. Would you consider
this the proper way of leading a scientific discussion?
All that counts are scientific arguments, better
arguments, neither ad hominems, nor verdicts
dropped from above, nor a killrating campaign.
Sincereley, Franz Gnaedinger
PaulJK
> Dear Google company,
[...]
> Sincereley, Franz Gnaedinger
Gooood boooy, have a cookie.
pjk
Dušan Vukotić
I wouldn't say that anyone is filtering your messages, Franz. You can
retrieve them all through your Profile search in case that the Google
group search doesn't work.
DV
Dušan Vukotić
Actually, the truth is that the Group serch doesn't work properly, but
you can use the regular Google search engine instead, or the Profile
search as I suggested above.
DV
DV
bulkington63
This has nothing to do with sci.lang. Quit posting your trash here.
Peter T. Daniels
> Consider the case of two posters A and Z.
> Poster A uses a scientific group for publishing
> and discussing and further developing new ideas,.
> Nobody can prove them wrong,
Finally! You admit you are not "doing science"! Therefore you should
stop posting your stuff in a "sci.*" group.
(Oh, and "publish" is another word whose meaning you do not
understand.)
Harlan Messinger
> Dear Google company,
>
> thank you very much for archiving the discussions
> in the scientific groups. Let me say a word on
> their value.
>
> Solving problems, I find, is a matter of matching
> complexities. If you can get an idea of the
> complexity of a problem you can look out for
> a matching pattern among potential solutions.
> Now the scientific groups were a fantastic means
> of getting an idea of the complexity of a problem
> - as long as all messages were retrievable.
> Alas, more and more messages can't be found
> any longer.
>
> The value of your archives will increase with new
> ideas published in the scientific groups. But will
> people publish their new ideas if their messages
> disappear? No, they will held back their ideas,
> while ever more trivia and idle chatter will flood
> your archives.
Posting to Usenet is not "publishing", and Google doesn't give a damn
what you post to Usenet or why you post it there. What in the WORLD
makes you think otherwise?
>
> Am I right in assuming that you are installing
> rating filters?
What kind of a question is that? What do you mean, "you are installing"?
We've been hearing from you for years on the filters that they do have.
> and if so, do you think that such
> filters could weed out nonsense and keep the
> valuable messages?
>
> Consider the case of two posters A and Z.
> Poster A uses a scientific group for publishing
> and discussing and further developing new ideas,.
> Nobody can prove them wrong, and so he feels
> entitled to go on with his work online.
You are extremely dishonest. Once again you pretend that the inability
of anyone to prove you wrong gives weight to anything you assert, yet
you have not once embraced my similarly undisprovable claims about what
Marie Antoinette ate at certain meals during her life.
> Yet poster Z
> hates the presence of poster A, envies his wealth
> in ideas, attacks him out of the blue, in the hope
> to make himself a name by driving him away,
> and starts a killrating campaign he leads with a
> multitude of aliases, each one with an own Google
> account, which allows him multiple rating and
> killrating, also toprating own messages. He does
> that for years, until the messages of poster A
> are filtered out of the system. Would you consider
> this the proper way of leading a scientific discussion?
Google Groups is not in the business of "leading a scientific
discussion" or caring about it. And if they did, they would come right
out and tell you that nothing about your "work" is scientific anyway, so
considerations of a fit environment for scientific discussion would be
irrelevant.
Franz Gnaedinger
Okay. I looked up your profile, you posted 167
messages in June 207, I clicked on them and
got 6 results, means that 161 of your messages
you wrote in June 2007 can't be retrieved.
The first point of my open letter has not been
commented upon by anyone, and the second
point is that nobody will publish new ideas
in here if the messages can't be retrieved
anymore. The Harlan Messingers and
Peter T. Danielses etc. won't complain,
they don't publish any new ideas in here,
they wouldn't even publish one if they
had one, the Usenet not being prestigious
enough for them. But why does Google
maintain the expensive labor of maintaining
the archives if there are only trivia and idle
chatting and tera-bytes of nothing to be
found in the nets they cast?
Franz Gnaedinger
<hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> You are extremely dishonest. Once again you pretend that the inability
> of anyone to prove you wrong gives weight to anything you assert, yet
> you have not once embraced my similarly undisprovable claims about what
> Marie Antoinette ate at certain meals during her life.
I told you that my sweeping reconstruction
of the Ice Age mind, coherent all over, rich in
surprising detail, based on my new approach
to early language, embedded in my studies
of visual language, can't be compared to
one single pseudo-historical mini-factoid
of absolutely no interest (Marie Antoinette
eating quail on the third evening before her
seventeenth birthday - the first unprovable
and in-disprovable 'theorem' you presented).
Panu
Why couldn't the two things be comparable? An elaborate lie is no less
a lie than a trivial fib. An elaborate figment of imagination is still
just a fantasy, when it has no evidence to back it. A murder is still
a murder even though you'd arrange the victim's bowels in an
aesthetically pleasing way afterwards.
António Marques
> I told you that my sweeping reconstruction of the Ice Age mind,
Yeah, what's so sweeping about it?
> coherent all over,
In what way is it 'coherent'? Put otherwise, what's there in it that,
were it different, would make the whole any more incoherent?
> rich in surprising detail,
What's rich or surprising about it?
> based on my new approach to early language, embedded in my studies of
> visual language, can't be compared to one single pseudo-historical
> mini-factoid of absolutely no interest (Marie Antoinette eating quail
> on the third evening before her seventeenth birthday - the first
> unprovable and in-disprovable 'theorem' you presented).
Ok, so yours is a multitude of pseudo-historical mini-factoids of
absolutely no interest (every single language you come across being the
outcome of people in the 'Ice Age' mumbling permutations of
monosyllables). What's so great about it?
Peter T. Daniels
> On Sep 9, 2:47 pm, Harlan Messinger
>
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > You are extremely dishonest. Once again you pretend that the inability
> > of anyone to prove you wrong gives weight to anything you assert, yet
> > you have not once embraced my similarly undisprovable claims about what
> > Marie Antoinette ate at certain meals during her life.
>
> I told you that my sweeping reconstruction
It is not a "reconstruction." It is a construction -- an imagination.
> of the Ice Age mind, coherent all over, rich in
> surprising detail, based on my new approach
> to early language, embedded in my studies
> of visual language, can't be compared to
> one single pseudo-historical mini-factoid
> of absolutely no interest (Marie Antoinette
> eating quail on the third evening before her
> seventeenth birthday - the first unprovable
> and in-disprovable 'theorem' you presented).
If Harlan had as much imagination, and time, as you do, he could weave
an elaborate imaginary universe around the teenage Marie Antoinette.
Indeed, there are people who do that all the time, and make money at
it -- they are called historical novelists.
Harlan Messinger
> On Sep 9, 2:47 pm, Harlan Messinger
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> You are extremely dishonest. Once again you pretend that the inability
>> of anyone to prove you wrong gives weight to anything you assert, yet
>> you have not once embraced my similarly undisprovable claims about what
>> Marie Antoinette ate at certain meals during her life.
>
> I told you that my sweeping reconstruction
> of the Ice Age mind, coherent all over, rich in
> surprising detail,
"The Lord of the Rings" is "rich in surprising detail". Does that make
it real? (How can it be "surprising" detail given that you are perfectly
capable of making up fantasies that are as detailed as you want them to be?)
> based on my new approach
> to early language, embedded in my studies
> of visual language, can't be compared to
> one single pseudo-historical mini-factoid
> of absolutely no interest (Marie Antoinette
> eating quail on the third evening before her
> seventeenth birthday - the first unprovable
> and in-disprovable 'theorem' you presented).
A richly interwoven, "surprisingly detailed" web of stuff you made up
for the very purpose of meshing with other stuff you made up is still
just a bunch of unverifiable mini-factoids that you made up.
Trond Engen
And, ironically, his rant at "the Google company" has the right
addressee but a diametrically wrong problem description. Franz's problem
is that Google readers can't easily block his posts, like the rest of us
do when fascination with madness gives way to boredom from repetition,
and in frustration some click the rating button. He should be begging
for a better filter. Or rather, as the only safe way to avoid rating, he
should be begging Google for a filter that he himself could apply to
block his posts from being read by anyone.
--
Trond Engen
Dušan Vukotić
But that 6 results are 6 themes where all of my 167 messages are
posted. Of course, I have no intention to count them one by one, but,
at first sight, you can see that nothing is missing there.
DV
Franz Gnaedinger
Are mathematical laws discovered, or are they constructed,
made up? My personal answer: the brain consists of matter,
the human mind follows the inner principles of nature,
so that making up in the deepest, truest and most honest
manner is the same as discovering, and constructing the
equivalent of reconstructing. A less philosophical answer:
a true reconstruction has an elegance about it, is at the
same time simple and complex, and, most important,
leads further. My Magdalenian experiment embraces
ever more archaeological evidence and bridges ever wider
gaps. As long as my ledge bears ore I go on digging.
Another confirming aspect is the ease of my work. If I made
it all up in the pejorative sense of the term I'd have to invest
ever more energy in keeping it all together and my mine
from collapsing, but the casing of my lead is stable rock,
not much expensive timber needed, I can use my pluck
for exploring the ramifications. Bob Dylan says in his
memoir Chronicles that a good song takes care of itself.
I can proudly claim the same for Magdalenian.
Franz Gnaedinger
If you counted them one by one you would see that not
all of those posts are included, many are missing.
Why do you think I wrote my open letter if what I say
were objectively wrong?
As for Trond Engen, who deserves no direct reply:
the madness of an arrogant edu consists in believing
that textbook wisdom is the truth, and a theory he
believes in is the same as fact and evidence. Also
Trond Engen failed in my Magdalenian test, bear
as the furry one vs. bear as the brown one. My
evidence for the furry one is ample and far better
than all he and the entire arrogant bunch can say
in favor of the brown one.
Peter T. Daniels
> On Sep 9, 5:25 pm, Harlan Messinger
>
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > A richly interwoven, "surprisingly detailed" web of stuff you made up
> > for the very purpose of meshing with other stuff you made up is still
> > just a bunch of unverifiable mini-factoids that you made up.
>
> Are mathematical laws discovered, or are they constructed,
> made up? My personal answer: the brain consists of matter,
> the human mind follows the inner principles of nature,
> so that making up in the deepest, truest and most honest
> manner is the same as discovering, and constructing the
> equivalent of reconstructing. A less philosophical answer:
> a true reconstruction has an elegance about it, is at the
> same time simple and complex, and, most important,
> leads further. My Magdalenian experiment embraces
> ever more archaeological evidence
There is absolutely no way whatsoever of determining the phonological
shapes of morphemes from "archeological evidence." And since your
phonological shapes follow patterns that are entirely unattested and
unknown in any language on earth, they are ipso facto incredible
(unless, of course, you are claiming that your "language" was spoken
by members of some, perhaps extraterrestrial, species with no
connection at all with Homo sapiens).
> and bridges ever wider
> gaps. As long as my ledge bears ore I go on digging.
> Another confirming aspect is the ease of my work. If I made
> it all up in the pejorative sense of the term I'd have to invest
> ever more energy in keeping it all together and my mine
> from collapsing, but the casing of my lead is stable rock,
> not much expensive timber needed, I can use my pluck
> for exploring the ramifications. Bob Dylan says in his
> memoir Chronicles that a good song takes care of itself.
> I can proudly claim the same for Magdalenian.
Since no one is bothering to keep track of the details, there's no way
of knowing whether it's internally consistent, or riddled with
contradictions.
bulkington63
> On Sep 9, 5:25 pm, Harlan Messinger
>
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > A richly interwoven, "surprisingly detailed" web of stuff you made up
> > for the very purpose of meshing with other stuff you made up is still
> > just a bunch of unverifiable mini-factoids that you made up.
>
> Are mathematical laws discovered, or are they constructed,
> made up? My personal answer: the brain consists of matter,
> the human mind follows the inner principles of nature,
> so that making up in the deepest, truest and most honest
> manner is the same as discovering, and constructing the
> equivalent of reconstructing. A less philosophical answer:
> a true reconstruction has an elegance about it, is at the
> same time simple and complex, and, most important,
> leads further. My Magdalenian experiment embraces
> ever more archaeological evidence and bridges ever wider
> gaps.
And since you are totally unaware of even the simplest linguistic
principles, you don't realize that archaeological evidence cannot
support a linguistic reconstruction.
>As long as my ledge bears ore I go on digging.
> Another confirming aspect is the ease of my work. If I made
> it all up in the pejorative sense of the term I'd have to invest
> ever more energy in keeping it all together and my mine
> from collapsing, but the casing of my lead is stable rock,
> not much expensive timber needed, I can use my pluck
> for exploring the ramifications. Bob Dylan says in his
> memoir Chronicles that a good song takes care of itself.
> I can proudly claim the same for Magdalenian.
So you admit that your madgelenian is more akin to a song than to an
actual scientific enterprise. Thank you.
António Marques
> On Sep 9, 5:25 pm, Harlan Messinger
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> A richly interwoven, "surprisingly detailed" web of stuff you made up
>> for the very purpose of meshing with other stuff you made up is still
>> just a bunch of unverifiable mini-factoids that you made up.
>
> Are mathematical laws discovered, or are they constructed,
> made up? My personal answer: the brain consists of matter,
> the human mind follows the inner principles of nature,
> so that making up in the deepest, truest and most honest
> manner is the same as discovering, and constructing the
> equivalent of reconstructing.
You're perfectly right that the method of discovery is irrelevant to the
validity of the discovery itself. But that's not the issue. What matters
are the results, and when people remind you that your stuff is entirely
made up, they'r not saying it is bogus because it's made up; they're
saying it's no wonder that it's bogus, since it was made up. The crucial
idea in Harlan's paragraph above is 'unverifiable'.
(Of course, much of the stuff you come up with is false or extremely
unlikely rather than simply unverifiable, but that's another matter.)
Panu
>
> Since no one is bothering to keep track of the details, there's no way
> of knowing whether it's internally consistent, or riddled with
> contradictions.
It might be interesting in a Tolkienesque way, if it indeed were
internally consistent. Personally, it very much seems to me that it is
basically ad hoc and internally inconsistent. I have several times
told Franz to compile his Magdalenian vision into a coherent narrative
of language and myths, because people would be interested in such
things. He has always answered in his usual impertinent, insulting and
evasive way.
Harlan Messinger
> On Sep 9, 5:25 pm, Harlan Messinger
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> A richly interwoven, "surprisingly detailed" web of stuff you made up
>> for the very purpose of meshing with other stuff you made up is still
>> just a bunch of unverifiable mini-factoids that you made up.
>
> Are mathematical laws discovered, or are they constructed,
> made up?
Discovered, derived, proved. I'm sorry that you are unable to tell the
difference between that and what you do.
> My personal answer: the brain consists of matter,
> the human mind follows the inner principles of nature,
> so that making up in the deepest, truest and most honest
> manner is the same as discovering, and constructing the
> equivalent of reconstructing. A less philosophical answer:
> a true reconstruction has an elegance about it, is at the
> same time simple and complex, and, most important,
> leads further. My Magdalenian experiment embraces
> ever more archaeological evidence and bridges ever wider
> gaps.
Historical fiction does this. That doesn't make it real.
> As long as my ledge bears ore I go on digging.
As long as a fiction writer feels inspired, he goes on writing.
> Another confirming aspect is the ease of my work.
You haven't given any "confirming aspects" to begin with.
> If I made
> it all up in the pejorative sense of the term I'd have to invest
> ever more energy in keeping it all together
That *is* what you do.
> and my mine
> from collapsing, but the casing of my lead is stable rock,
> not much expensive timber needed,
Since, as you yourself keep reminding us, your ideas can't be tested, it
follows that there is no way in the world for you to assess their
stability and no basis for your remark.
> I can use my pluck
> for exploring the ramifications. Bob Dylan says in his
> memoir Chronicles that a good song takes care of itself.
> I can proudly claim the same for Magdalenian.
Your pluck is irrelevant.
Franz Gnaedinger
<hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Discovered, derived, proved.
Discovered, you say? If you could prove that,
you'd be the star of the mathematical community.
The opinions among mathematicians are divided.
Some believe that mathematical laws are being
discovered, while others have sound reasons for
assuming that they are constructed. Nobody
solved the problem so far.
Derived, you say? Mathematical laws can be
derived to some extent, but beyond they require
intuition and invention. Gödel proved that.
Proved, you say? Okay, give the proof for your
above opinion that mathematical laws are being
discovered.
> Since, as you yourself keep reminding us, your ideas can't be tested, it
> follows that there is no way in the world for you to assess their
> stability and no basis for your remark.
On the contrary, I offered a Magdalenian test case
one year ago, bear as the furry one vs. bear as the
brown one. Everyone failed this test. I have ample
and much better evidence for the furry one than you
all can say in favor of the brown one.
Why can I take it up with everybody, and if you all
come at me at once? Because my work is so good.
Richard Herring
<bf694b9e-f25a-4620...@z24g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>,
Franz Gnaedinger <fr...@bluemail.ch> writes
>
>Proved, you say? Okay, give the proof for your
>above opinion that mathematical laws are being
>discovered.
Does this inability to distinguish between opinions and laws extend to
all facets of your work?
--
Richard Herring
Harlan Messinger
> On Sep 10, 6:47 pm, Harlan Messinger
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> Discovered, derived, proved.
>
> Discovered, you say? If you could prove that,
> you'd be the star of the mathematical community.
> The opinions among mathematicians are divided.
Are you of the belief that mathematicians are divided as to whether the
sum of the squares of the legs of a triangle has been proved to be equal
to the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle in Euclidean plane
geometry? You are confusing the true proposition that mathematicians
don't always agree with the false proposition that there is nothing on
which mathematicians agree.
> Some believe that mathematical laws are being
> discovered, while others have sound reasons for
> assuming that they are constructed. Nobody
> solved the problem so far.
>
> Derived, you say? Mathematical laws can be
> derived to some extent, but beyond they require
> intuition and invention. G�del proved that.
Uh, no. Godel showed that, given any set of axioms, there will be at
least one underivable truth, not that no truth will be derivable.
> Proved, you say? Okay, give the proof for your
> above opinion that mathematical laws are being
> discovered.
I'm not seeing how you expect that by making the case that *even*
mathematics is worthless, you add any value whatsoever to your fantasies.
>> Since, as you yourself keep reminding us, your ideas can't be tested, it
>> follows that there is no way in the world for you to assess their
>> stability and no basis for your remark.
>
> On the contrary, I offered a Magdalenian test case
> one year ago, bear as the furry one vs. bear as the
> brown one.
It wasn't any kind of a test.
> Everyone failed this test. I have ample
> and much better evidence for the furry one than you
> all can say in favor of the brown one.
No you don't.
> Why can I take it up with everybody, and if you all
> come at me at once? Because my work is so good.
No, it's very bad.
bulkington63
>
> On the contrary, I offered a Magdalenian test case
> one year ago, bear as the furry one vs. bear as the
> brown one. Everyone failed this test. I have ample
> and much better evidence for the furry one than you
> all can say in favor of the brown one.
No you didn't and it's been explained to you enough times. Quit
repeating your lies.
>
> Why can I take it up with everybody, and if you all
> come at me at once? Because my work is so good.
You are insane.
Franz Gnaedinger
<hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Are you of the belief that mathematicians are divided as to whether the
> sum of the squares of the legs of a triangle has been proved to be equal
> to the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle in Euclidean plane
> geometry? You are confusing the true proposition that mathematicians
> don't always agree with the false proposition that there is nothing on
> which mathematicians agree.
The mathematicians are divided as to whether this and
other mathematical laws were discovered or constructed.
Proves come later. You seem to ignore the concept of
construction that runs very deep. For example seeing
is constructing: you are constructing the images of the
people and houses and landscape before your eyes,
what you really see is just a chaos of ever shifting
colors and lights and shadows. Out of this chaos
your mind constructs the world as we believe to
see it just like that when we open our eyes. Leonardo
da Vinci knew this five hundred years ago. I found out
in 1974/75. Others prefer to still ignore it, despite all
the recent neurological insights. Read for example
Oliver Sacks and his report of a man who was born
blind and received his eye-sight owing to an operation
in his forties: walking on the streets of New York was
the sheer horror for him, everything moved and blurred
into each other, just as we see when the construction
work of the mind stands still, or does not yet work,
haven't being conditioned by visual experiences
we all acquire as babies and children.
> Uh, no. Godel showed that, given any set of axioms, there will be at
> least one underivable truth, not that no truth will be derivable.
And the consequence is that you can't derive all
mathematical laws from a set of axioms, you need
ever new and fresh imagination and intuition and
invention.
> I'm not seeing how you expect that by making the case that *even*
> mathematics is worthless, you add any value whatsoever to your fantasies.
Worthless? Idiot. Mathematics is the logic of building
and maintaining, all our civilization depends on it.
But you can't handle mathematics in an automatic way:
there is a set of axioms, and some computer will churn
out all mathematical laws we need. Doesn't work that
way. Intuition and invention are needed.
> It wasn't any kind of a test.
Of course it is a test. When my allegedly strange
laws, working together, produce a much better
etymology than 200 years of PIE studies, we have
a test case. I say bear is the furry one, and have
ample and far better evidence than you all have
for the bear as the brown one.
> No you don't.
>
> No, it's very bad.
Just because you say so? (to quote your favorite
verbal slap). You have to disprove bear as the
furry one, and prove bear as the brown one, and
if you can't you have to provide at least better
evidence for the brown one than I provide for
the furry one.
Harlan Messinger
None of this has anything to do with mathematical proof. Sorry.
>
>> Uh, no. Godel showed that, given any set of axioms, there will be at
>> least one underivable truth, not that no truth will be derivable.
>
> And the consequence is that you can't derive all
> mathematical laws from a set of axioms, you need
> ever new and fresh imagination and intuition and
> invention.
The consequence is not, "Oh, good, I get to make things up and then
pretend that those are the things Godel was referring to."
>
>> I'm not seeing how you expect that by making the case that *even*
>> mathematics is worthless, you add any value whatsoever to your fantasies.
>
> Worthless? Idiot. Mathematics is the logic of building
> and maintaining, all our civilization depends on it.
> But you can't handle mathematics in an automatic way:
> there is a set of axioms, and some computer will churn
> out all mathematical laws we need. Doesn't work that
> way. Intuition and invention are needed.
>
>> It wasn't any kind of a test.
>
> Of course it is a test. When my allegedly strange
> laws, working together, produce a much better
> etymology
Your opinion of "a much better etymology" is not a test.
> than 200 years of PIE studies, we have
> a test case. I say bear is the furry one, and have
> ample and far better evidence than you all have
> for the bear as the brown one.
>
>> No you don't.
>>
>> No, it's very bad.
>
> Just because you say so? (to quote your favorite
> verbal slap).
Good, so now you understand why no one believes YOU. Have a good day.
Franz Gnaedinger
<hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> The consequence is not, "Oh, good, I get to make things up and then
> pretend that those are the things Godel was referring to."
I am a big fan of experimental archaeology where
things are being made up, yet on the basis of an
ample and sound and profound knowledge of
archaeological evidence and human life in former
times. I expanded the concept of experimental
archaeology to experimental history of very early
mathematics, I chose elements from cave art like
grids and played with them, looking for what I can
construct out of them, and by and by found a series
of mathematical techniques I could then identify in
early mathematics, for example in pyramid building
and in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. My proceeding
was playing, constructing, discovering, identifying,
whereupon construction revealed to be reconstruction.
And since five years I apply my experiences in
experimental techniques to paleo-linguistics,
and no less successful than in the case of early
mathematics.
> Your opinion of "a much better etymology" is not a test.
It is a test for PIE, actually. The PIE adepts, among
them PIE hardliner Trond Engen, failed the test. You
wish to prove me wrong, but you can't. My evidence
for bear as the furry one is ample and far better than
what you all can summon in favor of bear as the
brown one.
bulkington63
.
>
> It is a test for PIE, actually. The PIE adepts, among
> them PIE hardliner Trond Engen, failed the test. You
> wish to prove me wrong, but you can't. My evidence
> for bear as the furry one is ample and far better than
> what you all can summon in favor of bear as the
> brown one.
Wow, it boggles my mind how ignorant you are. Do you actually believe
that sci.lang is the nexus of all current scientific thought. Do you
think that the 'experts' in the field are the people who post to
sci.lang (no slight intended for Trond)?
Your 'evidence' for 'bear' coming from some made up magdelanian word
for 'the brown one' is pure fantasy. At least the PIEists had enough
honesty and understanding of scientific evidence that they admitted
that they could not come up with a definitive etymology of 'bear'.
You seized upon this to claim that your fantasy was correct and that
no one could disprove you. Duh! Of course, your claim can be
'disproven' on so many other grounds that it isn't even worth
considering, in fact none of the possible etymologies for 'bear' had
anything to do with 'the brown one.'
And what kind of mentally deficient people were these magdelanians
that they couldn't come up with a word for an animal and instead
referred to bears as 'the brown one.' You fail as a linguist and
scientist on so many levels. People keep telling you to turn this
into some kind of historical fiction but, for me, what you have to say
is not even interesting enough or clever enough to make publication
worthwhile. (Oh, I forgot, google groups IS publication!)
John
bulkington63
>
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > The consequence is not, "Oh, good, I get to make things up and then
> > pretend that those are the things Godel was referring to."
>
> I am a big fan of experimental archaeology where
> things are being made up,
No, they are not making things up.
>yet on the basis of an
> ample and sound and profound knowledge of
> archaeological evidence and human life in former
> times.
And as you have absolutely none of these characteristics with regards
to linguistics, your fantasies are worthless.
John
Mok-Kong Shen
[snip]
> .... He does
> that for years, until the messages of poster A
> are filtered out of the system.
A may also get fed up by his unsatisfactory experiences
in a group and leave voluntarily. Note also that recently
one sci. group got such voluminous amount of junk posts (and
cross-posted to several groups too) that I am sure quite a
number of readers stopped checking new posts arriving there.
M. K. Shen
Trond Engen
> On Sep 12, 8:30 am, Franz Gnaedinger <f...@bluemail.ch> wrote:
> .
>> It is a test for PIE, actually. The PIE adepts, among
>> them PIE hardliner Trond Engen, failed the test. You
>> wish to prove me wrong, but you can't. My evidence
>> for bear as the furry one is ample and far better than
>> what you all can summon in favor of bear as the
>> brown one.
>
> Wow, it boggles my mind how ignorant you are. Do you actually
> believe that sci.lang is the nexus of all current scientific thought.
> Do you think that the 'experts' in the field are the people who post
> to sci.lang (no slight intended for Trond)?
None taken (although some slight would be well overdue). His ideas of my
knowledge and credentials seem about as far out as the rest of them.
But if you be in need a structural engineer ...
> Your 'evidence' for 'bear' coming from some made up magdelanian word
> for 'the brown one' is pure fantasy. At least the PIEists had enough
> honesty and understanding of scientific evidence that they admitted
> that they could not come up with a definitive etymology of 'bear'.
> You seized upon this to claim that your fantasy was correct and that
> no one could disprove you. Duh! Of course, your claim can be
> 'disproven' on so many other grounds that it isn't even worth
> considering, in fact none of the possible etymologies for 'bear' had
> anything to do with 'the brown one.'
Why just one? Surely, when coming up with one word where the comparative
method can't makes his method superior, coming upp with two, or three,
or four, would make it even more superior. And why just 'bear'? In any
dictionary of any living language he will find hundreds, thousands, of
words whose meaning can't be assigned to a PIE etymology. For every
single one of those Franz can come up with as many Magdalenian words as
he wants. Fall down in awe! There's no limit to his superiority!
> And what kind of mentally deficient people were these magdelanians
> that they couldn't come up with a word for an animal and instead
> referred to bears as 'the brown one.'
Franz, before you go off on this one: Having the 'bear' named after its
colour isn't the stupidest part of it. As it happens, and I think you'll
remember since it (surely) was part of the discussion that triggered
your ursinal ravings months ago, the Germanic "bear" word is often seen
as related to the "brown" word, probably coming about as a taboo
replacement of the "ursus" word. The "ursus" word itself is likely to be
another taboo replacement. Other branches did similar things. These
taboo replacements are what makes an original PIE word invisible to
science. John's point is that to claim superiority in finding original
etymologies you should have more to show than just another taboo
replacement.
--
Trond Engen
Harlan Messinger
> On Sep 12, 12:58 pm, Harlan Messinger
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> The consequence is not, "Oh, good, I get to make things up and then
>> pretend that those are the things Godel was referring to."
>
> I am a big fan of experimental archaeology where
> things are being made up, yet on the basis of an
> ample and sound and profound knowledge of
> archaeological evidence and human life in former
> times. I expanded the concept of experimental
> archaeology to experimental history of very early
> mathematics, I chose elements from cave art like
> grids and played with them, looking for what I can
> construct out of them, and by and by found a series
> of mathematical techniques I could then identify in
> early mathematics, for example in pyramid building
> and in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. My proceeding
> was playing, constructing, discovering, identifying,
> whereupon construction revealed to be reconstruction.
> And since five years I apply my experiences in
> experimental techniques to paleo-linguistics,
> and no less successful than in the case of early
> mathematics.
Since it can't be tested, there is no way to judge it to be
"successful". Your "success" is in your own mind and reflects nothing
than how pleased you are with yourself. But no one else is going to be
convinced of anything by the degree to which you are pleased with
yourself for having come up with it.
>> Your opinion of "a much better etymology" is not a test.
>
> It is a test for PIE, actually. The PIE adepts, among
> them PIE hardliner Trond Engen, failed the test. You
> wish to prove me wrong, but you can't.
For perhaps the 5,000th time, I have never given you any indication that
I wish to prove you wrong, so stop deluding yourself as to what this is
all about.
> My evidence
> for bear as the furry one is ample and far better than
ONLY IN YOUR OWN FRIGGIN' MIND.
Harlan Messinger
>> Your opinion of "a much better etymology" is not a test.
>
> It is a test for PIE, actually. The PIE adepts, among
> them PIE hardliner Trond Engen, failed the test. You
> wish to prove me wrong, but you can't.
You can't prove that I've been wrong about what Marie Antoinette had for
dinner on particular nights of her youth. How many hundreds of times do
wish to go through this exercise before it finally sinks into your head
that the inability of others to disprove something you've claimed DOES
NOT IN ANY WAY GIVE ANY CREDIBILITY OR VALUE TO YOUR CLAIM.
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> Franz, before you go off on this one: Having the 'bear' named after its
> colour isn't the stupidest part of it. As it happens, and I think you'll
> remember since it (surely) was part of the discussion that triggered
> your ursinal ravings months ago, the Germanic "bear" word is often seen
> as related to the "brown" word, probably coming about as a taboo
> replacement of the "ursus" word. The "ursus" word itself is likely to be
> another taboo replacement. Other branches did similar things. These
> taboo replacements are what makes an original PIE word invisible to
> science. John's point is that to claim superiority in finding original
> etymologies you should have more to show than just another taboo
> replacement.
We had all that before. You are instructing me
as if I were a kindergarten boy. I quoted the great
Hemp on bear, also he proposes the brown one
in lieu of a better etymology, but his lines, which
I quoted one year ago, drip of irony, and he says
the taboo is too easily invoked. Brown one is
a taboo replacement, whereas furry one is not
but names the quality of the bear as provider
of the best fur, thick, long, and soft, a meaning
reflected in German Zottelbär 'shaggy bear'.
A Red Indian language calls the bear Fur Man,
and there is a similar name somewhere in Siberia.
I derive bear from the permutation group of BRI
meaning fertile. BIR means fur, ancient Greek byros
English fur, but has a more specific meaning in
being the fur on which a newborn was laid. This
very specific meaning results from the permutation
group and the second Magdalenian law that says
permutations yield words around the same meme,
and found a wonderful correspondence in archaeology,
newborns having been laid on bear furs in Greece,
and in eastern parts of the Slavic world until the
twentieth century. Then there is the bear mother
and nurse of the Balkans, 6,000 years old, and her
pouch for carrying the baby. You are doing a very
poor job, Trond Engen, you are not able to provide
new and better evidence for bear as the furry one,
and so you begin where we started off one year
ago, pretending all the long discussions in between
and all the evidence I presented did not happen
and are non-existent.
Franz Gnaedinger
Instead of throwing hollow nuts at me a year long
you could have gathered evidence for bear as
the brown one in order to eclipse mine for the
furry one. But no, you won't do that, you can't do
that. Know that your scientific inability and failure,
Harlan Messinger, is a pillar of my confidence.
And that strange dog by the name of Panu Petteri
Höglund can wag all his tails - to viz.: the John
Bulkington tail, the Patrick Karl tail, the craoibhin66
tail, the Sean Connor tail, the John Hobart Kyle tail,
the Annina Kaartinen tail -, he or she or it won't
shake my confidence.
bulkington63
> A Red Indian language calls the bear Fur Man,
> and there is a similar name somewhere in Siberia.
> I derive bear from the permutation group of BRI
Is this the standard Swiss way to refer to Native Americans?
Peter T. Daniels
> On Sep 14, 5:55 am, Harlan Messinger
>
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > ONLY IN YOUR OWN FRIGGIN' MIND.
>
> Instead of throwing hollow nuts at me a year long
> you could have gathered evidence for bear as
> the brown one in order to eclipse mine for the
> furry one. But no, you won't do that, you can't do
> that. Know that your scientific inability and failure,
> Harlan Messinger, is a pillar of my confidence.
The data supporting the usual reconstructions are the cognate forms in
many IE languages, together with the rigorous sound changes that lead
to the various attested forms..
Harlan Messinger
> On Sep 14, 5:55 am, Harlan Messinger
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> ONLY IN YOUR OWN FRIGGIN' MIND.
>
> Instead of throwing hollow nuts at me a year long
> you could have gathered evidence for bear as
> the brown one
The point is that I don't have to waste my time doing that because your
speculation has no value in the first place.
> in order to eclipse mine for the
> furry one.
You can't eclipse something that doesn't shine.
> But no, you won't do that, you can't do
> that. Know that your scientific inability and failure,
> Harlan Messinger, is a pillar of my confidence.
You have failed royally and painfully to prove that Marie Antoinette
didn't have such and such for dinner on such and such night. You MUST DO
SO or you will have proved me right.
Peter T. Daniels
> On Sep 12, 7:55 pm, Trond Engen <trond...@engen.priv.no> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Franz, before you go off on this one: Having the 'bear' named after its
> > colour isn't the stupidest part of it. As it happens, and I think you'll
> > remember since it (surely) was part of the discussion that triggered
> > your ursinal ravings months ago, the Germanic "bear" word is often seen
> > as related to the "brown" word, probably coming about as a taboo
> > replacement of the "ursus" word. The "ursus" word itself is likely to be
> > another taboo replacement. Other branches did similar things. These
> > taboo replacements are what makes an original PIE word invisible to
> > science. John's point is that to claim superiority in finding original
> > etymologies you should have more to show than just another taboo
> > replacement.
>
> We had all that before. You are instructing me
> as if I were a kindergarten boy. I quoted the great
> Hemp on bear, also he proposes the brown one
What is "the great Hemp"? Is it like "the Great Pumpkin, Charlie
Brown" but hallucinogenic?
> in lieu of a better etymology, but his lines, which
> I quoted one year ago, drip of irony, and he says
> the taboo is too easily invoked. Brown one is
> a taboo replacement, whereas furry one is not
> but names the quality of the bear as provider
> of the best fur, thick, long, and soft, a meaning
> reflected in German Zottelbär 'shaggy bear'.
> A Red Indian language calls the bear Fur Man,
> and there is a similar name somewhere in Siberia.
> I derive bear from the permutation group of BRI
> meaning fertile. BIR means fur, ancient Greek byros
> English fur, but has a more specific meaning in
> being the fur on which a newborn was laid. This
Why would you imagine that your people lay newborns?
> very specific meaning results from the permutation
> group and the second Magdalenian law that says
> permutations yield words around the same meme,
> and found a wonderful correspondence in archaeology,
> newborns having been laid on bear furs in Greece,
> and in eastern parts of the Slavic world until the
> twentieth century. Then there is the bear mother
> and nurse of the Balkans, 6,000 years old, and her
> pouch for carrying the baby. You are doing a very
> poor job, Trond Engen, you are not able to provide
> new and better evidence for bear as the furry one,
> and so you begin where we started off one year
> ago, pretending all the long discussions in between
> and all the evidence I presented did not happen
> and are non-existent.
The discussions happened. The evidence is nonexistent.
Panu
> On Sep 12, 7:55 pm, Trond Engen <trond...@engen.priv.no> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Franz, before you go off on this one: Having the 'bear' named after its
> > colour isn't the stupidest part of it. As it happens, and I think you'll
> > remember since it (surely) was part of the discussion that triggered
> > your ursinal ravings months ago, the Germanic "bear" word is often seen
> > as related to the "brown" word, probably coming about as a taboo
> > replacement of the "ursus" word. The "ursus" word itself is likely to be
> > another taboo replacement. Other branches did similar things. These
> > taboo replacements are what makes an original PIE word invisible to
> > science. John's point is that to claim superiority in finding original
> > etymologies you should have more to show than just another taboo
> > replacement.
>
> We had all that before. You are instructing me
> as if I were a kindergarten boy. I quoted the great
> Hemp on bear, also he proposes the brown one
> in lieu of a better etymology, but his lines, which
> I quoted one year ago, drip of irony, and he says
> the taboo is too easily invoked. Brown one is
> a taboo replacement, whereas furry one is not
Well, in fact, the Finnish word for "bear" is "karhu", which indeed
means something like "the furry (karhea) one". And it is always and
invariably mentioned as a taboo replacement of the earlier word
"oksi", cognates of which have survived in related languages.
Panu
I know that Franz pretends not to read my postings, but I wonder if
someone else - someone with whom his highness still deigns to
communicate - could ask him up front, if he sees the learning of early
IE languages as pointless exercise.
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> What is "the great Hemp"? Is it like "the Great Pumpkin, Charlie
> Brown" but hallucinogenic?
Or is it Hamp, Erich Hamp? the great PIE scholar.
> Why would you imagine that your people lay newborns?
Must I say: newborns were _placed_ on a bear fur?
What is the correct word for laying something down?
in this case a baby?
> The discussions happened. The evidence is nonexistent.
It is present near the begin of my long thread
"Magdalenian experiment (continuation)"
and near the end of my page
www.seshat.ch/home/lascaux2.htm
By the way, Ross Clark asked one year ago
for my evidence, being to lazy to read through
the long bear thread, so I posted my evidence
in four long messages, especially for him,
and since then he doesn't molest me anymore,
apparently he saw that my approach is serious.
And very recently he accused you of weaseling
in a discussion with me (note well, he accused
you and not me).
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> The data supporting the usual reconstructions are the cognate forms in
> many IE languages, together with the rigorous sound changes that lead
> to the various attested forms..
But PIE doesn't reach deep enough in time, only
some 6,000 years instead of 18,000 years where
reconstructions make sense. Consider PIE *bher-
and *bher- and *bher- and *bher- and *bher- and
*bher-, the same word with different meanings.
Their common origin is Magdalenian BIR, from
which I can derive each of the six *bher- words.
How many times did I tell you the same? All
in vain, in vainer, in vainestly.
Harlan Messinger
How many times do I have to tell you what Marie Antoinette had for
dinner? If I tell you 1,000 times, does that make it the truth?
Peter T. Daniels
> On Sep 14, 1:33 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> > What is "the great Hemp"? Is it like "the Great Pumpkin, Charlie
> > Brown" but hallucinogenic?
>
> Or is it Hamp, Erich Hamp? the great PIE scholar.
Closer, but still not accurate. He is Welsh, not German.
> > Why would you imagine that your people lay newborns?
>
> Must I say: newborns were _placed_ on a bear fur?
> What is the correct word for laying something down?
> in this case a baby?
The conjugations of "lay" and "lie" can be quite confusing. They were
treated in a chapter of your high school English textbook.
> > The discussions happened. The evidence is nonexistent.
>
> It is present near the begin of my long thread
> "Magdalenian experiment (continuation)"
> and near the end of my pagewww.seshat.ch/home/lascaux2.htm
> By the way, Ross Clark asked one year ago
> for my evidence, being to lazy to read through
> the long bear thread, so I posted my evidence
> in four long messages, especially for him,
> and since then he doesn't molest me anymore,
> apparently he saw that my approach is serious.
> And very recently he accused you of weaseling
> in a discussion with me (note well, he accused
> you and not me).
No matter how many times you type them, your imaginings are not
evidence.
Peter T. Daniels
On what evidence do you reconstruct BIR? What are the cognates outside
PIE that yield such a reconstruction?
In which of the competing and irreconcilable Nostratic dictionaries
will I find it?
Ruud Harmsen
in sci.lang:
Good question.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.eu
Ruud Harmsen
<gram...@verizon.net>: in sci.lang:
>The conjugations of "lay" and "lie" can be quite confusing. They were
>treated in a chapter of your high school English textbook.
In a Dutch book I recently read (Adriaan van Dis; 2004 Onder het zink.
Un ab�c�daire de Paris) there was something like "waar ik mijn fiets
stal", where "stal" was meant as the present tense of "stallen"
(meaning "to park", not of cars but of bicycles), but could also be
interpreted as the past tense of "stelen" (to steal), which is strange
because stealing one's own bike (mijn fiets = my bicycle) is unusual.
Ruud Harmsen
<fr...@bluemail.ch>: in sci.lang:
>On Sep 14, 1:31�pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>> The data supporting the usual reconstructions are the cognate forms in
>> many IE languages, together with the rigorous sound changes that lead
>> to the various attested forms..
>
>But PIE doesn't reach deep enough in time, only
>some 6,000 years instead of 18,000 years where
>reconstructions make sense.
So long ago so there isn't enough evidence, and reliable
reconstructions are simply no longer possible.
>Consider PIE *bher-
>and *bher- and *bher- and *bher- and *bher- and
>*bher-, the same word with different meanings.
>Their common origin is Magdalenian BIR, from
>which I can derive each of the six *bher- words.
>How many times did I tell you the same? All
>in vain, in vainer, in vainestly.
You replace missing evidence by fantasies. Acceptable for
science-fiction, which is what you do, but not science.
Panu
I think it is simply another typical characteristic of Franz's
linguistic ignorance. He probably simply doesn't know that "Red
Indian" languages have been studied and classified by linguists.
Peter T. Daniels
> Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:27:06 -0700 (PDT): "Peter T. Daniels"
>
> >The conjugations of "lay" and "lie" can be quite confusing. They were
> >treated in a chapter of your high school English textbook.
>
> In a Dutch book I recently read (Adriaan van Dis; 2004 Onder het zink.
> stal", where "stal" was meant as the present tense of "stallen"
> (meaning "to park", not of cars but of bicycles), but could also be
> interpreted as the past tense of "stelen" (to steal), which is strange
> because stealing one's own bike (mijn fiets = my bicycle) is unusual.
Stallen and stelen are somewhat less close in meaning than lay and
lie. The latter ultimately go back to some sort of morphological
causative relationship.
John Atkinson
> On Sep 14, 2:49 pm, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.eu> wrote:
>> Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:27:06 -0700 (PDT): "Peter T. Daniels"
>> <gramma...@verizon.net>: in sci.lang:
>>
>>> The conjugations of "lay" and "lie" can be quite confusing. They were
>>> treated in a chapter of your high school English textbook.
>> In a Dutch book I recently read (Adriaan van Dis; 2004 Onder het zink.
>> Un ab�c�daire de Paris) there was something like "waar ik mijn fiets
>> stal", where "stal" was meant as the present tense of "stallen"
>> (meaning "to park", not of cars but of bicycles), but could also be
>> interpreted as the past tense of "stelen" (to steal), which is strange
>> because stealing one's own bike (mijn fiets = my bicycle) is unusual.
>
> Stallen and stelen are somewhat less close in meaning than lay and
> lie. The latter ultimately go back to some sort of morphological
> causative relationship.
Of course. Just like lots of other pairs do: fall/fell, sit/set,
drink/drench, rise/raise, drive/drove,.... The "causative" is a weak
verb, identical (modulo post-OE changes) with the the (strong) past of
the non-causative. Originally ablaut caused by a PIE suffix I believe,
but extended by analogy in PG and its descendants to more verbs.
Since the same phenomenon occurs in German (liegen/lag/gelegen vs
legen/legte/gelegt), why would it be "quite confusing", and require a
whole chapter in a Swiss high-school English text?
"To lay" is "to cause to lie", still. As in "The midwife laid the
newborn on the bearskin." Could you elucidate your objection to Franz's
"... the fur on which a newborn was laid"? Which dialect is this
ungrammatical in? (I'm not talking about the situation in Irish and
other non-standard Englishes where "to lay" can be used intransitively
in place of "to lie".)
J.
Peter T. Daniels
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > On Sep 14, 2:49 pm, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.eu> wrote:
> >> Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:27:06 -0700 (PDT): "Peter T. Daniels"
> >> <gramma...@verizon.net>: in sci.lang:
>
> >>> The conjugations of "lay" and "lie" can be quite confusing. They were
> >>> treated in a chapter of your high school English textbook.
> >> In a Dutch book I recently read (Adriaan van Dis; 2004 Onder het zink.
> >> stal", where "stal" was meant as the present tense of "stallen"
> >> (meaning "to park", not of cars but of bicycles), but could also be
> >> interpreted as the past tense of "stelen" (to steal), which is strange
> >> because stealing one's own bike (mijn fiets = my bicycle) is unusual.
>
> > Stallen and stelen are somewhat less close in meaning than lay and
> > lie. The latter ultimately go back to some sort of morphological
> > causative relationship.
>
> Of course. Just like lots of other pairs do: fall/fell, sit/set,
> drink/drench, rise/raise, drive/drove,.... The "causative" is a weak
> verb, identical (modulo post-OE changes) with the the (strong) past of
> the non-causative. Originally ablaut caused by a PIE suffix I believe,
> but extended by analogy in PG and its descendants to more verbs.
>
> Since the same phenomenon occurs in German (liegen/lag/gelegen vs
> legen/legte/gelegt), why would it be "quite confusing", and require a
> whole chapter in a Swiss high-school English text?
>
> "To lay" is "to cause to lie", still. As in "The midwife laid the
> newborn on the bearskin." Could you elucidate your objection to Franz's
> "... the fur on which a newborn was laid"? Which dialect is this
> ungrammatical in? (I'm not talking about the situation in Irish and
> other non-standard Englishes where "to lay" can be used intransitively
> in place of "to lie".)
Lie and lay are confusing because the forms overlap.
lie lay lain
lay laid laid
That's not the case for any of the other pairs. In stallen/stelen the
forms seem to overlap but the meanings don't.
Your quasi-Franz example appears to use the transitive "lay" as in
'had sex with'.
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> On what evidence do you reconstruct BIR? What are the cognates outside
> PIE that yield such a reconstruction?
>
> In which of the competing and irreconcilable Nostratic dictionaries
> will I find it?
Nostratic is a stretcher of the comparative method.
Magdalenian is different, a completely new approach
based on word groups and fields. I reconstructed
most permutation groups in 2006, when the killrating
frenzy reached its peak and a message of mine was
usually killrated six times. The summary of that work
is found on www.seshat.ch/home/lascaux2.htm
where you will also find the permutation group of
BRI meaning fertile that includes BIR, a word with
a plethora of direct and secondary and tertiary
derivatives. You ask for cognates outside PIE ?
Look up the bear chapter near the end of that page,
there are many, manier, most manily. Let me choose
two examples. English has bearn for child, and in
a Scottish dialect we have bir meaning son. Then
there is Latin pera English pear German Birne.
The etymology of pera is not known, says my
Latin dictionary. It is a meta-derivative of BIR.
First meaning: fur, especially the fur on which
a newborn was laid (placed). Second level:
the bear as provider of the best fur, soft, thick,
longhaired, warm. Third level: pera pear Birne,
the fruit that resembles the head of a bear, round,
thick at the base, then long like the snout of the
beast. For more examples look up the above
page.
Panu
> On Sep 14, 8:28 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On what evidence do you reconstruct BIR? What are the cognates outside
> > PIE that yield such a reconstruction?
>
> > In which of the competing and irreconcilable Nostratic dictionaries
> > will I find it?
>
> Nostratic is a stretcher of the comparative method.
> Magdalenian is different, a completely new approach
> based on word groups and fields. I reconstructed
> most permutation groups in 2006,
This permutation thing is not a completely new approach, it is quite
widespread among cranks and lunatics.
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@verizon.net> wrote in
<news:bc9e1ec3-0c6d-4654...@o21g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
> On Sep 14, 11:49�pm, John Atkinson <johna...@bigpond.com> wrote:
[...]
>> Of course. �Just like lots of other pairs do: fall/fell,
>> sit/set, drink/drench, rise/raise, drive/drove,.... The
>> "causative" is a weak verb, identical (modulo post-OE
>> changes) with the the (strong) past of the
>> non-causative. �Originally ablaut caused by a PIE suffix
>> I believe,
Causative *-�ye/o-.
>> but extended by analogy in PG and its descendants to more
>> verbs.
[...]
> Lie and lay are confusing because the forms overlap.
> lie lay lain
> lay laid laid
> That's not the case for any of the other pairs.
I fell trees for fun. The tree fell.
[...]
Brian
Ruud Harmsen
<gram...@verizon.net>: in sci.lang:
>On Sep 14, 2:49�pm, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.eu> wrote:
>> Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:27:06 -0700 (PDT): "Peter T. Daniels"
>> <gramma...@verizon.net>: in sci.lang:
>>
>> >The conjugations of "lay" and "lie" can be quite confusing. They were
>> >treated in a chapter of your high school English textbook.
>>
>> In a Dutch book I recently read (Adriaan van Dis; 2004 Onder het zink.
>> Un ab�c�daire de Paris) there was something like "waar ik mijn fiets
>> stal", where "stal" was meant as the present tense of "stallen"
>> (meaning "to park", not of cars but of bicycles), but could also be
>> interpreted as the past tense of "stelen" (to steal), which is strange
>> because stealing one's own bike (mijn fiets = my bicycle) is unusual.
>
>Stallen and stelen are somewhat less close in meaning than lay and
>lie. The latter ultimately go back to some sort of morphological
>causative relationship.
True. In Dutch we have 'liggen' and 'leggen' for that, which are
sometimes confused (i.e. merged into 'leggen') by dialect speakers.
Ruud Harmsen
<fr...@bluemail.ch>: in sci.lang:
>Nostratic is a stretcher of the comparative method.
>Magdalenian is different, a completely new approach
>based on word groups and fields. I reconstructed
>most permutation groups in 2006, when the killrating
>frenzy reached its peak and a message of mine was
>usually killrated six times. The summary of that work
>is found on www.seshat.ch/home/lascaux2.htm /
One nice thing about websites is they cannot be killrated, no matter
how much sense it makes what you put on them.
Ruud Harmsen
<fr...@bluemail.ch>: in sci.lang:
>derivatives. You ask for cognates outside PIE ?
>Look up the bear chapter near the end of that page,
>there are many, manier, most manily. Let me choose
>two examples. English has bearn for child, and in
>a Scottish dialect we have bir meaning son. Then
>there is Latin pera English pear German Birne.
That immediately proves these words cannot all be related. A b in
Germanic languages doesn't correspond to a b in IE, let alone in
something thousands of years before that.
>The etymology of pera is not known, says my
>Latin dictionary. It is a meta-derivative of BIR.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.eu
Franz Gnaedinger
> Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:49:23 -0700 (PDT): Franz Gnaedinger
>
> Germanic languages doesn't correspond to a b in IE, let alone in
> something thousands of years before that.
Are you really telling me that Latin pera
French poire English pear German Birne
Swiss Bire, sometimes pronounced with
a rather hard B close to P, are not the
same word?
Dušan Vukotić
Bear, born and birth/fruit are the words which indicate a certain kind
of the 'turn back' or "orbital" motion and it hardly can be applied to
bear (animal). Nevertheless, maybe bear is related to boar (OHG ebur;
Slav. vepar) as an animal who "bores the surrounding" (land, trees or
whatever). In that case, if my above assumption is right, the name of
bear may be connected to boar and the "rotating movement" of its
snout.
DV
John Atkinson
Just as in English. Do German dialect speakers similarly replace
"liegen/lag" by "legen/legte"?
John.
>
John Atkinson
Drovers drove cattle for a living. He drove to town.
J.
Franz Gnaedinger
My assumption is that Magdalenian B and P
became *bh- and *ph- in the era of the Göbekli
Tepe and early agriculture in the warm south,
which also initiated laryngealization, so that
AAR RAA NOS became Harran with an initial H,
a requirement in hot and dusty regions. But then
the *bh- could become b- again. Words are
oscillating within the verbal morphospace,
more or less keeping their place over long
periods of time. From the study of words
over a couple of millennia you can't make
reliable statements that concern language
development and sound shiftings over several
ten thousands of years. Mallory and Adams
2006 say that they can only reconstruct a small
part of PIE, actually a very small part, and only
follow back regular sound changes, irregular
ones they can't trace back, but these also exist,
and are responsible for the multitute of words
that can't be reconstructed by means of the
comparative method. It is one of the biggest
and yet ever repeated errors of the sciences
to consider the successful insights the only
valid ones, nothing else existing next to them.
Dušan Vukotić
They are most probably related but it is hard to see where these words
are coming from. Latin perna 'ham' (a pear-like form of the ham) is
obviously derived from pirus. Maybe pear is related to hill (OE byrgen
'tumulus'; Serb. breg 'hill; a "hilly" look of the pear).
DV
Ruud Harmsen
<fr...@bluemail.ch>: in sci.lang:
>On Sep 15, 9:28�am, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.eu> wrote:
I don't know, I'd have to consult etymological dictionary. Wouldn't a
Latin normally correspond to a <v> = /f/ in German? Cf. pater/Vater.
I suspect English pear (and Dutch peer) might be loans from Latin or
Old French.
According to http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Birne, the German word is a
loan too. So is the English word:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pear
So yes, they are the same word, but not in the normal line of language
inheretance. That means it ways nothing about anything
pre-Vulgar-Latin.
Ruud Harmsen
<fr...@bluemail.ch>: in sci.lang:
>My assumption is that Magdalenian B and P
>Tepe and early agriculture in the warm south,
>which also initiated laryngealization, so that
>AAR RAA NOS became Harran with an initial H,
>a requirement in hot and dusty regions.
Yeah right. That's why in all of the languages in Spain, with lots of
hot and dusty regions, /h/ became mute.
>But then
>the *bh- could become b- again. Words are
>oscillating within the verbal morphospace,
No they are not.
>more or less keeping their place over long
>periods of time.
No they don't.
>From the study of words
>over a couple of millennia you can't make
>reliable statements that concern language
>development and sound shiftings over several
>ten thousands of years.
Yes they can. That is, up to 6000 years, which is not several ten
thousands of years. So OK, they can't. And neither can you. What's
left is fantasy, and that is what you do.
>Mallory and Adams
>2006 say that they can only reconstruct a small
>part of PIE, actually a very small part, and only
>follow back regular sound changes, irregular
>ones they can't trace back, but these also exist,
>and are responsible for the multitute of words
>that can't be reconstructed by means of the
>comparative method. It is one of the biggest
>and yet ever repeated errors of the sciences
>to consider the successful insights the only
>valid ones, nothing else existing next to them.
So that's why you keep considering unsuccessful insights, to no avail
as was to be expected.
John Atkinson
> Ruud Harmsen wrote:
[...]
>> True. In Dutch we have 'liggen' and 'leggen' for that, which are
>> sometimes confused (i.e. merged into 'leggen') by dialect speakers.
>
> Just as in English. Do German dialect speakers similarly replace
> "liegen/lag" by "legen/legte"?
And what about Norwegian? Do some dialect speakers replace
ligge/l�/ligget by legge/la/lagt?
Interesting that the "lay" verb has become strong in Norwegian, unlike
elsewhere. It seems this wasn't the case in ON -- I think it was
liggja/lagg, lie/lay, but leggja/lag�i, lay/laid -- have I got that
right? Swedish has <lade> for "laid", so it's still weak, at least in
the standard language -- although apparently it's usually pronounced
[la:] as in Norwegian. (Same with <sade>, said.)
John.
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> Yeah right. That's why in all of the languages in Spain, with lots of
> hot and dusty regions, /h/ became mute.
I said the laryngelization set in in the region
of the Göbekli Tepe, some 12,000 or 10,000
years ago, where agriculture was founded.
Took a long time till it came to Spain. People
laboring with earth in the early times needed
laryngeals, to clear their throat. In the time
agriculture came to Spain, better methods
of working the ground had evolved and
been developed. Only Arabs, for example
Egyptians who are used to sandstorms
are still pronouncing those strange sounds
that always gave me the impression of
someone blowing sand out of the mouth.
But who knows when the rapid desertification
of Southern Spain goes on the Spaniards
may return to the Arabic pronounciations?
But then again no, we have a lot of modern
tools and machines, our way of working
is completely different from that of the
earliest farmers in Southeast Anatolia.
As for pear, topic of your other reply:
German Birne was in the first attested
form byron, seventeenth century. Grimm
assumed a Swedish or perhaps even
Finnish origin. I say it is an old word
that survived somewhere in a northern
glen, as did the word dog, from DhAG
meaning able, good in the sense of able.
In our Swiss mountain valleys we have
many special words that survive in just
very secluded small places, and there
is no way to trace back each and every
happenstance of linguistic development.
> No they are not.
How do you know? Can you overlook
40,000 years of language development?
> No they don't.
How do you know etcetera.
> Yes they can. That is, up to 6000 years, which is not several ten
> thousands of years. So OK, they can't. And neither can you. What's
> left is fantasy, and that is what you do.
Halfways reliable retro-dictions for
6,000 years, but on this time horizon
the words collapse, as in the case of
*bher- and *bher- and *bher- and
*bher- and *bher- and *bher-.
And how can you exclude the possibility
of new approaches?
> So that's why you keep considering unsuccessful insights, to no avail
> as was to be expected.
Unregular sound shiftings in the light
of the comparative method, regular
or potentially regular and therefore
successful ones in the light of alternative
approaches, one of them being my
Magdalenian approach to the fully
developed language of Ice Age Eurasia.
Trond Engen
> John Atkinson wrote:
>
>> Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>>
>>> True. In Dutch we have 'liggen' and 'leggen' for that, which are
>>> sometimes confused (i.e. merged into 'leggen') by dialect speakers.
>>
>> Just as in English. Do German dialect speakers similarly replace
>> "liegen/lag" by "legen/legte"?
>
> And what about Norwegian? Do some dialect speakers replace
> ligge/l�/ligget by legge/la/lagt?
The Bergen dialect is known for the opposite:
Viss du ligger i ommen s� sitter eg p� kaffien.
These two verbs are so common that they seem to be stable elsewhere, but
the general tendency is to merge the weak and strong verbs in something
close to the weak paradigm, e.g.
� brinne - brinn - brann - har brunne "to burn (intr.)"
� brenne - brenner - brente - har brent "to make (something) burn"
Now we have
� brenne - brenn(er) - brant/brente - har brent
where some speakers still use the weak preterite as a causative. Others
merge them in either of the forms, and for some of those the retaining
of the strong preterite is a class marker. I think the sentiment belongs
to a hypercorrection preserved from before the merger.
> Interesting that the "lay" verb has become strong in Norwegian,
> unlike elsewhere. It seems this wasn't the case in ON -- I think it
> was liggja/lagg, lie/lay, but leggja/lag�i, lay/laid -- have I got
> that right? Swedish has <lade> for "laid", so it's still weak, at
> least in the standard language -- although apparently it's usually
> pronounced [la:] as in Norwegian. (Same with <sade>, said.)
As you more or less imply, the "lay" and "say" verbs becoming strong or,
rather, irregular is a phonological development. The relationship to
Danish (as percieved and performed by Norwegians) may be part of the
equation, though.
--
Trond Engen
Ruud Harmsen
<fr...@bluemail.ch>: in sci.lang:
>> No they are not.
>
>How do you know? Can you overlook
>40,000 years of language development?
I can't. Can you? Why?
>And how can you exclude the possibility
>of new approaches?
They must be scientific, and yours are not.
Franz Gnaedinger
> Tue, 15 Sep 2009 03:41:45 -0700 (PDT): Franz Gnaedinger
Franz Gnaedinger
If you can't overlook forty thousand years
of language development, you can't know
how sounds shifted and whether words
have been oscillating in the last forty
thousand years. Why, then, do you issue
all your absolute statements? Bang bang
Harmsen's No No hammer goes down
on me head ... Your very first reply to me,
Ruud Harmsen, set the tone. That reply
was ruud, meant to harmsen me.
> They must be scientific, and yours are not.
Here goes the hammer again. Not scientific
means: not the same as what you learned.
And what goes beyond a Ruud Harmsen
does either not exist or is not relevant or
at least not scientific. And of course you
can't bring by evidence for bear as the brown
one that could eclipse my ample and far better
evidence for bear as the furry one. A Ruud
Harmsen, as so many others in sci.lang,
can just swing his No No hammer and his
Not Not axe.
Peter T. Daniels
> Brian M. Scott wrote:
> > On Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:13:48 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
> >> Lie and lay are confusing because the forms overlap.
>
> >> lie lay lain
> >> lay laid laid
>
> >> That's not the case for any of the other pairs.
>
> > I fell trees for fun. The tree fell.
>
> Drovers drove cattle for a living. He drove to town.
Show us how fall/fell or drive/drove are commonly _confused_ in
ordinary discourse.
Tolkien, BTW, way overuses the adjecive "fell."
Peter T. Daniels
> Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:52:36 -0700 (PDT): "Peter T. Daniels"
>
>
>
>
>
> >On Sep 14, 2:49 pm, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.eu> wrote:
> >> Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:27:06 -0700 (PDT): "Peter T. Daniels"
> >> <gramma...@verizon.net>: in sci.lang:
>
> >> >The conjugations of "lay" and "lie" can be quite confusing. They were
> >> >treated in a chapter of your high school English textbook.
>
> >> In a Dutch book I recently read (Adriaan van Dis; 2004 Onder het zink.
> >> stal", where "stal" was meant as the present tense of "stallen"
> >> (meaning "to park", not of cars but of bicycles), but could also be
> >> interpreted as the past tense of "stelen" (to steal), which is strange
> >> because stealing one's own bike (mijn fiets = my bicycle) is unusual.
>
> >Stallen and stelen are somewhat less close in meaning than lay and
> >lie. The latter ultimately go back to some sort of morphological
> >causative relationship.
>
> True. In Dutch we have 'liggen' and 'leggen' for that, which are
> sometimes confused (i.e. merged into 'leggen') by dialect speakers.
If they are _merged_, then they are not _confused_ in such dialects.
In English, words like "rent" and "lease" are disambiguated only by
context or prepositions (or particles).
Peter T. Daniels
> On Sep 14, 8:28 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On what evidence do you reconstruct BIR? What are the cognates outside
> > PIE that yield such a reconstruction?
>
> > In which of the competing and irreconcilable Nostratic dictionaries
> > will I find it?
>
> Nostratic is a stretcher of the comparative method.
> Magdalenian is different, a completely new approach
> based on word groups and fields. I reconstructed
No, you did not. You invented them.
> most permutation groups in 2006, when the killrating
> frenzy reached its peak and a message of mine was
> usually killrated six times. The summary of that work
> is found onwww.seshat.ch/home/lascaux2.htm
> where you will also find the permutation group of
> BRI meaning fertile that includes BIR, a word with
> a plethora of direct and secondary and tertiary
> derivatives. You ask for cognates outside PIE ?
> Look up the bear chapter near the end of that page,
> there are many, manier, most manily. Let me choose
> two examples. English has bearn for child, and in
> a Scottish dialect we have bir meaning son. Then
> there is Latin pera English pear German Birne.
> The etymology of pera is not known, says my
> Latin dictionary. It is a meta-derivative of BIR.
> First meaning: fur, especially the fur on which
> a newborn was laid (placed). Second level:
> the bear as provider of the best fur, soft, thick,
> longhaired, warm. Third level: pera pear Birne,
> the fruit that resembles the head of a bear, round,
> thick at the base, then long like the snout of the
> beast. For more examples look up the above
> page.
If you don't know that those are all Indo-European languages, your
sickness is more far gone than we have imagined.
Peter T. Daniels
You would already know that if you would bother to learn the most
basic facts about reconstructing proto-languages, and the most basic
facts about Indo-European.
Peter T. Daniels
> It is one of the biggest
> and yet ever repeated errors of the sciences
> to consider the successful insights the only
> valid ones, nothing else existing next to them.
What's that? Unsuccessful insights are also valid?
Trond Engen
> On Sep 15, 12:49 am, Franz Gnaedinger <f...@bluemail.ch> wrote:
>
>> On Sep 14, 8:28 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On what evidence do you reconstruct BIR? What are the cognates
>>> outside PIE that yield such a reconstruction? [...]
>>
>> [... See] www.seshat.ch/home/lascaux2.htm
>> where you will also find the permutation group of
>> BRI meaning fertile that includes BIR, a word with
>> a plethora of direct and secondary and tertiary
>> derivatives. You ask for cognates outside PIE ?
>> Look up the bear chapter near the end of that page,
>> there are many, manier, most manily. Let me choose
>> two examples. English has bearn for child, and in
>> a Scottish dialect we have bir meaning son. Then
>> there is Latin pera English pear German Birne.
>> The etymology of pera is not known, says my
>> Latin dictionary. It is a meta-derivative of BIR.
>> First meaning: fur, especially the fur on which
>> a newborn was laid (placed). Second level:
>> the bear as provider of the best fur, soft, thick,
>> longhaired, warm. Third level: pera pear Birne,
>> the fruit that resembles the head of a bear, round,
>> thick at the base, then long like the snout of the
>> beast. For more examples look up the above
>> page.
>
> If you don't know that those are all Indo-European languages, your
> sickness is more far gone than we have imagined.
Hardly.
--
Trond Engen
Harlan Messinger
> On Sep 14, 8:28 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>> On what evidence do you reconstruct BIR? What are the cognates outside
>> PIE that yield such a reconstruction?
>>
>> will I find it?
>
> Nostratic is a stretcher of the comparative method.
> Magdalenian is different, a completely new approach
> based on word groups and fields. I reconstructed
> frenzy reached its peak and a message of mine was
> usually killrated six times. The summary of that work
> where you will also find the permutation group of
> BRI meaning fertile that includes BIR, a word with
> a plethora of direct and secondary and tertiary
> derivatives. You ask for cognates outside PIE ?
> Look up the bear chapter near the end of that page,
> there are many, manier, most manily. Let me choose
> two examples. English has bearn for child, and in
> a Scottish dialect we have bir meaning son. Then
> there is Latin pera English pear German Birne.
> The etymology of pera is not known, says my
> Latin dictionary. It is a meta-derivative of BIR.
My encyclopedia doesn't say what Marie Antoinette ate on Christmas
morning when she was 14. On Christmas morning when she was 14, Marie
Antoinette ate pork tripe and potatoes. If you don't accept this as
fact, you are a raving hypocrite.
> First meaning: fur, especially the fur on which
> a newborn was laid (placed). Second level:
> the bear as provider of the best fur, soft, thick,
> longhaired, warm. Third level: pera pear Birne,
> the fruit that resembles the head of a bear, round,
> thick at the base, then long like the snout of the
> beast.
ROFL! Yeah, right. The first thing anyone thinks of when he sees a pear
is, "Wow, that looks like a bear's head!" Uh huh. Sure. It's SUCH a
strong resemblance.
Harlan Messinger
> Here goes the hammer again. Not scientific
> means: not the same as what you learned.
> And what goes beyond a Ruud Harmsen
> does either not exist or is not relevant or
> at least not scientific. And of course you
> can't bring by evidence for bear as the brown
> one that could eclipse my ample and far better
> evidence for bear as the furry one.
A bunch of suppositions and tenuous stabs at phonetic connections that
you made up are not evidence. Learn what the word "evidence" means
before you dare to use the word again.
Ruud Harmsen
<fr...@bluemail.ch>: in sci.lang:
>On Sep 15, 1:06�pm, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.eu> wrote:
>>
>> I can't. Can you? Why?
>
>If you can't overlook forty thousand years
>of language development, you can't know
>how sounds shifted and whether words
>have been oscillating in the last forty
>thousand years.
Right, we agree on that.
>Why, then, do you issue
>all your absolute statements?
Exactly for that reason.
>Bang bang
>Harmsen's No No hammer goes down
>on me head ... Your very first reply to me,
>Ruud Harmsen, set the tone.
I can't remember that in all detail, but it may well have been true,
and there must have been a reason for that.
>That reply was ruud, meant to harmsen me.
I can't help it that words can be a name in one language and an
offensive word in another.
Apart from that, I never meant you any harm. My opinion is that what
you write is worthwile (for those you like the genre; I don't, not any
more) and should have a place. There are many books and other
utterances in this genre. The Dutch publisher Ankh-Hermes specialises
in it. http://www.ankh-hermes.nl/
They have existed for at least 30 years, so apparently there is an
interest in this sort of material, otherwise they couldn't have
survived that long.
I have nothing against it, except that I ask anyone not to call it
science. That's all.
>> They must be scientific, and yours are not.
>
>Here goes the hammer again. Not scientific
>means: not the same as what you learned.
I didn't learn science, but I think it is a good approach to finding
out about the world.
And: "not scientific" doesn't mean "worthless". It just means "not
scientific".
>And what goes beyond a Ruud Harmsen
>does either not exist or is not relevant or
>at least not scientific.
That's your misunderstanding, or let's say it is my poor explanation.
>And of course you
>can't bring by evidence for bear as the brown
>one that could eclipse my ample and far better
>evidence for bear as the furry one.
I'm interested in etymology and in Indo-European languages, but I am
no expert. So I have no opinion other than what can be found in books.
>A Ruud
>Harmsen, as so many others in sci.lang,
>can just swing his No No hammer and his
>Not Not axe.
The hammer and axe are only in your mind, not in my intentions.
Ruud Harmsen
<gram...@verizon.net>: in sci.lang:
>> True. In Dutch we have 'liggen' and 'leggen' for that, which are
>> sometimes confused (i.e. merged into 'leggen') by dialect speakers.
>
>If they are _merged_, then they are not _confused_ in such dialects.
You are right. Outsiders (native speakers of Dutch, but not of those
dialects) think such speakers confuse them (or even: interchange them,
which is even less true), but it isn't the case.
Franz Gnaedinger
> On Sep 15, 12:49 am, Franz Gnaedinger <f...@bluemail.ch> wrote:
>
> > On Sep 14, 8:28 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> No, you did not. You invented them.
No, I mined them using my for Magdalenian laws.
> If you don't know that those are all Indo-European languages, your
> sickness is more far gone than we have imagined.
As for sickness, what was that insane weaseling
of yours in a previous thread, where you told me
a twig can't have leaves? And now, in this thread,
you try to tell me laid is not the perfect of lay?
You are a strange person. First Ross Clark had to
correct you, now John Atkinson. As for the successful
insights you mention in another reply: the mechanical
paradigm was most successful, whereupon the universe
was explained as a clockwork, and animals were
degraded to mere automata. My sloppy formulation
meant the inappropriate generalization of successful
insights, one of Goethe's points, by the way. And
the reason for my sloppiness in formulating is
a result of your mobbing technique: you make me
write my fingers bloody and wait for a mistake.
You ask me ten times twenty times fitfy times
the same, forcing me each and every time to
say it all again, in all length, although you told
me that you read only ten lines - how am I supposed
to say it all in ten lines? Just impossible. You ask
me for my evidence, I give you the link, but you don't
look it up, instead you ask me again, and again,
and again. But don't think a minute that I am your
mobbing victim. You, Peter T. Daniels, are a dancing
bear on my leash. You are my perfect illustration
of how mobbing techniques work. You show them,
so others in my position who have not the same
pluck as I do may learn and be warned and evade
your sort and behaving.
John Atkinson
> John Atkinson skreiv:
>
>> John Atkinson wrote:
>>
>>> Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>>>
>>>> True. In Dutch we have 'liggen' and 'leggen' for that, which are
>>>> sometimes confused (i.e. merged into 'leggen') by dialect speakers.
>>>
>>> Just as in English. Do German dialect speakers similarly replace
>>> "liegen/lag" by "legen/legte"?
>>
>> And what about Norwegian? Do some dialect speakers replace
>> ligge/l�/ligget by legge/la/lagt?
>
> The Bergen dialect is known for the opposite:
>
> Viss du ligger i ommen s� sitter eg p� kaffien.
Sorry, I don't get it -- isn't "ligger" intransitive in this sentence
(English lie, not lay)? Would non-bergians really use "legger" here?
> These two verbs are so common that they seem to be stable elsewhere, but
> the general tendency is to merge the weak and strong verbs in something
> close to the weak paradigm, e.g.
>
> � brinne - brinn - brann - har brunne "to burn (intr.)"
> � brenne - brenner - brente - har brent "to make (something) burn"
>
> Now we have
>
> � brenne - brenn(er) - brant/brente - har brent
>
> where some speakers still use the weak preterite as a causative. Others
> merge them in either of the forms, and for some of those the retaining
> of the strong preterite is a class marker. I think the sentiment belongs
> to a hypercorrection preserved from before the merger.
>
>> Interesting that the "lay" verb has become strong in Norwegian, unlike
>> elsewhere. It seems this wasn't the case in ON -- I think it was
>> liggja/lagg, lie/lay, but leggja/lag�i, lay/laid -- have I got that
>> right? Swedish has <lade> for "laid", so it's still weak, at least in
>> the standard language -- although apparently it's usually pronounced
>> [la:] as in Norwegian. (Same with <sade>, said.)
>
> As you more or less imply, the "lay" and "say" verbs becoming strong or,
> rather, irregular is a phonological development. The relationship to
> Danish (as percieved and performed by Norwegians) may be part of the
> equation, though.
Yeah, Danish is generally in the lead when it comes to getting rid of
internal consonants, no? But I see now that in this case at least its
spelling is the most old-fashioned -- it has <lagde> and <sagde>,
pronounced (as in Norwegian) [la:] and [sa:].
In Nynorsk I gather you can take your pick (<la> or <lagde>).
John.
Franz Gnaedinger
<hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> My encyclopedia doesn't say what Marie Antoinette ate on Christmas
> morning when she was 14. On Christmas morning when she was 14, Marie
> Antoinette ate pork tripe and potatoes. If you don't accept this as
> fact, you are a raving hypocrite.
First you told me Maria Antoinette ate quail
on the third evening before her seventeenth
birthday, then you told me she ate tiger (?),
now you tell me she had pork tripe and
potatoes on the Christmas morning when
she was 14. How very fascinating and
utterly important. You sure have eclipsed
my reconstruction of the Ice Age mind
with your breaking news.
> ROFL! Yeah, right. The first thing anyone thinks of when he sees a pear
> is, "Wow, that looks like a bear's head!" Uh huh. Sure. It's SUCH a
> strong resemblance.
How many pears did you eat in your life-time?
And how many free running bears did you
meet in the same time? Do you see the puck,
as we say? If you are an Ice Age man you
have to fear and fight bears all your life,
but when the climate warmed up, and those
fruit trees arrived, they were a novelty, and
one had to find a word for the shape of the
fruit that is somewhat like an apple but also
quite different; one compared the shape
to something well-known, and this was
the particular shape of a bear's head.
I checked many bears for their head form
and must say that I find the parallel convincing.
As for the other reply where you mention
evidence again, denying mine: when I can
derive the six *bher- words, all of them the
very same word, all of them with different
meanings, from a common root, and
easily so, it _is_ evidence. English bear
is the furry one, while the brown one is
a very lame etymology, someone looked
which of the six *bher- words could match
a bear, *bher- 'brown' was the only match,
for PIE requires direct matches, and so it
is the brown one. But no, my new approach
says bear is the furry one, provider of the
best fur, thick, longhaired, soft and warm.
Franz Gnaedinger
>
> I have nothing against it, except that I ask anyone not to call it
> science. That's all.
Very funny, it's what art critics said about
the so-called impressionist paintings:
we have nothing against them, but please
don't call them paintings ...
Harlan Messinger
> On Sep 15, 3:03 pm, Harlan Messinger
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> My encyclopedia doesn't say what Marie Antoinette ate on Christmas
>> morning when she was 14. On Christmas morning when she was 14, Marie
>> Antoinette ate pork tripe and potatoes. If you don't accept this as
>> fact, you are a raving hypocrite.
>
> First you told me Maria Antoinette ate quail
> on the third evening before her seventeenth
> birthday, then you told me she ate tiger (?),
> now you tell me she had pork tripe and
> potatoes on the Christmas morning when
> she was 14. How very fascinating and
> utterly important. You sure have eclipsed
> my reconstruction of the Ice Age mind
> with your breaking news.
Are you now implying that if someone makes stuff up, it becomes the
automatic truth only if the person making it up considers it important
as well? Address the *reasoning*, not the *importance*. If my reasoning
that these things ARE what Marie Antoinette ate on such and such date
simply because I *said* so and you can't disprove it is bad, then so is
your, identical reasoning.
>
>> ROFL! Yeah, right. The first thing anyone thinks of when he sees a pear
>> is, "Wow, that looks like a bear's head!" Uh huh. Sure. It's SUCH a
>> strong resemblance.
>
> How many pears did you eat in your life-time?
> And how many free running bears did you
> meet in the same time?
I've known what a bear looks like since I was an infant, and I've seen
them ever since. Seeing them free-running is irrelevant to whether or
not I know what they look like.
> Do you see the puck,
> as we say? If you are an Ice Age man you
> have to fear and fight bears all your life,
> but when the climate warmed up, and those
> fruit trees arrived, they were a novelty, and
> one had to find a word for the shape of the
> fruit that is somewhat like an apple but also
> quite different; one compared the shape
> to something well-known, and this was
> the particular shape of a bear's head.
> I checked many bears for their head form
> and must say that I find the parallel convincing.
Good for you.
> As for the other reply where you mention
> evidence again, denying mine: when I can
> derive the six *bher- words, all of them the
> very same word, all of them with different
> meanings, from a common root, and
> easily so,
By "easily so" you mean that it is easy to make up confabulations
through great poetic leaps.
> it _is_ evidence.
No, it is not. Thanks, you have given us your demonstration that you
don't understand the concept of "evidence". Kindly refrain from using
the word in any further discussion.
Peter T. Daniels
They may have said don't call them art, but they certainly didn't say
don't call them paintings.
Peter T. Daniels
You overlook the fact that what we know as pears is the result of a
few centuries of orchardmen breeding the fruit for succulence,
appearance, etc. Ancestral pears may not have looked as different from
modern pears as modern corn ("maize") looks from its Mexican wild
ancestor, but that also needs to be taken into consideration with the
claim that pears look like bears.
> > best fur, thick, longhaired, soft and warm.-
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@verizon.net> wrote in
<news:eed45a6d-6e61-4e9e...@e18g2000vbe.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
>> Brian M. Scott wrote:
They're not. Which is precisely the point: overlap of forms
is not sufficient.
[...]
Brian
Trond Engen
> Trond Engen wrote:
>
>> John Atkinson skreiv:
>>
>>> John Atkinson wrote:
>>>
>>>> Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> True. In Dutch we have 'liggen' and 'leggen' for that, which are
>>>>> sometimes confused (i.e. merged into 'leggen') by dialect
>>>>> speakers.
>>>>
>>>> Just as in English. Do German dialect speakers similarly replace
>>>> "liegen/lag" by "legen/legte"?
>>>
>>> And what about Norwegian? Do some dialect speakers replace
>>> ligge/l�/ligget by legge/la/lagt?
>>
>> The Bergen dialect is known for the opposite:
>>
>> Viss du ligger i ommen s� sitter eg p� kaffien.
Actually it's more complicated than that. I believe the Bergen dialect
merged them in the strong paradigm with a weak present, something like
ligge - liggar - l�g - logge
sitte - sittar - satt - sotte
Now the usual external forces has given something like
ligge - liggar - l�(g) - logge
legge - leggar - la - lagt
sitte - sittar - satt - sotte
sette - settar - satt(e) - satt
The strong perfect participles are under siege everywhere (the strong
presents even more so), so what is emerging is
ligge - liggar - l� - lagt
legge - leggar - la - lagt
sitte - sittar - satt - satt
sette - settar - satt - satt
> Sorry, I don't get it -- isn't "ligger" intransitive in this sentence
> (English lie, not lay)? Would non-bergians really use "legger" here?
Here's the same line in central eastern Norwegian:
viss du legger i ommen s� setter j� p� kaffen
Both verbs are transitive/causative -- there's an implied 'ved'
"firewood" after 'legger'. "� legge i ovnen" is a set phrase meaning "to
feed the oven". "� sette p� kaffen" is another set phrase, but this is
grammatically equal to Eng. "to put the kettle on" -- here it's the
indirect object ('ovnen' or 'plata') that's elided.
Note that normally it's "sette p� kaffen" but "sette kaffen p� plata".
The phrasal verb is dissolved when the prepositional phrase is in
operation. In other of these phrasal verbs I have a tendency to prefer
the equivalent of "sette kjelen p�". I think it's a western trait that I
picked up in my youth in Bergen and/or a northern one from my father,
but I'm not entirely sure. It's more of a tendency than an absolute
differences between dialects.
I believe there's something similar in English with both "put on the
kettle" and "put the kettle on" being possible.
>>> Interesting that the "lay" verb has become strong in Norwegian,
>>> unlike elsewhere. It seems this wasn't the case in ON -- I think
>>> it was liggja/lagg, lie/lay, but leggja/lag�i, lay/laid -- have I
>>> got that right? Swedish has <lade> for "laid", so it's still weak,
>>> at least in the standard language -- although apparently it's
>>> usually pronounced [la:] as in Norwegian. (Same with <sade>, said.)
>>
>> As you more or less imply, the "lay" and "say" verbs becoming strong
>> or, rather, irregular is a phonological development. The
>> relationship to Danish (as percieved and performed by Norwegians)
>> may be part of the equation, though.
>
> Yeah, Danish is generally in the lead when it comes to getting rid of
> internal consonants, no?
Yeah, but they often retain a glottal stop that we won't hear or an
approximant that we'll barely hear.
> But I see now that in this case at least its
> spelling is the most old-fashioned -- it has <lagde> and <sagde>,
> pronounced (as in Norwegian) [la:] and [sa:].
It may also be that the elision of internal consonants has been helped
by homonym avoidance.
Written Dano-No. Semi-Coll. No.
sagde said sawed
lagde laid made
[Children have fun rith the psalm "Milde Jesus du som sagde". I haven't
thought of it before but the poet cheated with registers -- he rhymes
the Dano-Norwegian reading pronunciation 'sagde' "said" with the more
colloquial 'lagde' "maid".]
> In Nynorsk I gather you can take your pick (<la> or <lagde>).
Yes.
--
Trond Engen
Franz Gnaedinger
<hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Are you now implying that if someone makes stuff up, it becomes the
> automatic truth only if the person making it up considers it important
> as well? Address the *reasoning*, not the *importance*. If my reasoning
> that these things ARE what Marie Antoinette ate on such and such date
> simply because I *said* so and you can't disprove it is bad, then so is
> your, identical reasoning.
No, I am implying something else and try again
to tell you, changing the viewpoint and hoping
to get through this time. Lying is costly on the
psychological plain, even writing lies is more
difficult than writing the truth, a recent insight,
lying absorbs a lot of mental activities. The
same for making things up. A successful
impostor uses kind of a psychological
economy: making up a few things, presenting
them in a charming way, and relying on the
fact that people automatically fill the gaps
in between. We do that filling out all the time.
If you sit at a table, across a friend of yours,
and look at him, you see him - actually you
just see the upper part of the body, the arms
and hands, and the head, you don't see the
lower part of his body, his belly and legs,
but you automatically fill in what your eyes
don't supply, and you see your friend as
an entire human being - if he stood up
and had no legs you'd be shocked out
of your mind. Filling the gaps is what the
mind does all the time, and an impostor
makes use of that. If an impostor went
for a linguistic work, he would present
just a few single reconstructions or ideas
or whatever he makes up. The trick works.
I use no tricks, I give a wide picture and
full panorama of the Ice Age mind as I
reconstruct it, always and ever relying
on early art (cave art, rock art, Göbekli
Tepe, and so on).
> I've known what a bear looks like since I was an infant, and I've seen
> them ever since. Seeing them free-running is irrelevant to whether or
> not I know what they look like.
Winnie the Pooh, probably, and an occasional
visit to the zoo. The problem is once again
your look backward in time, instead of imagining
a life in the far past, and then moving forward
in time. In proverbs we have a lot of obsolete
situations that survive in language although
the historical reality is long gone, reflecting
the historical process of naming new things
for similarities to old ones.
> By "easily so" you mean that it is easy to make up confabulations
> through great poetic leaps.
What you consider poetic leaps are the guidelines
provided by archaeology and especially cave art,
irrelevant for you, as you told me.
> No, it is not. Thanks, you have given us your demonstration that you
> don't understand the concept of "evidence". Kindly refrain from using
> the word in any further discussion.
What evidence is there for *bher- and *bher-
and *bher- and *bher- and *bher- and *bher- ?
Harlan Messinger
In that case we fill in the missing pieces based on what we know to be
the usual, just as we expect nighttime to follow daytime every day. This
has absolutely nothing to do with anything we've been discussing.
If an impostor went
> for a linguistic work, he would present
> just a few single reconstructions or ideas
> or whatever he makes up. The trick works.
> I use no tricks, I give a wide picture and
> full panorama of the Ice Age mind as I
> reconstruct it,
As you make it up.
> always and ever relying
> on early art (cave art, rock art, G�bekli
> Tepe, and so on).
You make things up based on cave art, rock art, etc.
A basis for speculation or wild leaps of imagination is not evidence.
>
>> I've known what a bear looks like since I was an infant, and I've seen
>> them ever since. Seeing them free-running is irrelevant to whether or
>> not I know what they look like.
>
> Winnie the Pooh, probably, and an occasional
> visit to the zoo.
Why in the world do you imagine that I know any less than you do what
real, live bears look like?
> The problem is once again
> your look backward in time, instead of imagining
> a life in the far past, and then moving forward
> in time.
Just like I used my imagination to reach my conclusions as to the
contents of Marie Antoinette's meals. So you are continuing to make my
point that your claims or neither more nor less well founded than mine.
> In proverbs we have a lot of obsolete
> situations that survive in language although
> the historical reality is long gone, reflecting
> the historical process of naming new things
> for similarities to old ones.
Yes, WE UNDERSTAND THAT THERE ARE REASONS BEHIND MANY THINGS. None of
this makes YOUR FANTASIES as to what those things are CORRECT, or even
reasonable.
>
>> By "easily so" you mean that it is easy to make up confabulations
>> through great poetic leaps.
>
> What you consider poetic leaps are the guidelines
> provided by archaeology and especially cave art,
> irrelevant for you, as you told me.
Archeology and cave art, from which you make absurd poetic leaps.
>
>> No, it is not. Thanks, you have given us your demonstration that you
>> don't understand the concept of "evidence". Kindly refrain from using
>> the word in any further discussion.
>
> What evidence is there for *bher- and *bher-
> and *bher- and *bher- and *bher- and *bher- ?
For the fourth or fifth time, I have neither made nor asserted any
support for any claims about those words, so why in the world do you
keep posing the same question challenging me to defend any claims
related to them over and over and over and over and over and over and
over and over and over again? Do you have ANY IDEA that repetition
doesn't make you correct?
Ruud Harmsen
<b.s...@csuohio.edu>: in sci.lang:
>>>>> Lie and lay are confusing because the forms overlap.
>
>>>>> lie lay lain
>>>>> lay laid laid
>
>>>>> That's not the case for any of the other pairs.
>
>>>> I fell trees for fun. �The tree fell.
>
>>> Drovers drove cattle for a living. �He drove to town.
>
>> Show us how fall/fell or drive/drove are commonly _confused_ in
>> ordinary discourse.
>
>They're not. Which is precisely the point: overlap of forms
>is not sufficient.
The original point was that "lie lay lain / lay laid laid" can be
confusing to _non-native_ speakers of English (it certainly was for
me, when I learned them; as are the conjugations of "ver" and "vir" in
Portuguese). They aren't confusing to native speakers (or so I
suppose).
Peter T. Daniels
> On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:25:30 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
Who said it was? The point at hand was _confusion_ of similar forms.
Peter T. Daniels
> Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:16:21 -0400: "Brian M. Scott"
>
>
>
>
>
> >>>>> Lie and lay are confusing because the forms overlap.
>
> >>>>> lie lay lain
> >>>>> lay laid laid
>
> >>>>> That's not the case for any of the other pairs.
>
> >>>> I fell trees for fun. The tree fell.
>
> >>> Drovers drove cattle for a living. He drove to town.
>
> >> Show us how fall/fell or drive/drove are commonly _confused_ in
> >> ordinary discourse.
>
> >They're not. Which is precisely the point: overlap of forms
> >is not sufficient.
>
> The original point was that "lie lay lain / lay laid laid" can be
> confusing to _non-native_ speakers of English (it certainly was for
> me, when I learned them; as are the conjugations of "ver" and "vir" in
> Portuguese). They aren't confusing to native speakers (or so I
> suppose).
Yeah, they are. And it's complicated by the obscene slang sense I
mentioned. (Bad language drives out good.)
Panu
> On Sep 15, 4:52 pm, Harlan Messinger
>
> <hmessinger.removet...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > Are you now implying that if someone makes stuff up, it becomes the
> > automatic truth only if the person making it up considers it important
> > as well? Address the *reasoning*, not the *importance*. If my reasoning
> > that these things ARE what Marie Antoinette ate on such and such date
> > simply because I *said* so and you can't disprove it is bad, then so is
> > your, identical reasoning.
>
> No, I am implying something else and try again
> to tell you, changing the viewpoint and hoping
> to get through this time. Lying is costly on the
> psychological plain, even writing lies is more
> difficult than writing the truth,
So it seems. You have been writing lies here for years, and it is
obvious that you have suffered a mental collapse.