IEL unreal believers laws
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Those who cling to IEL as a belief system, skid on slippery ground of the ice age (with zero evidence from any European text) ? it is all melting ice and gas, paraded as pseudo-science. IEL 'Laws' (which are merely a few observations) are adumbrated to cover up the non-falsifiable nature of linguists' claims, governed by belief in Biblical creationism and Tower of Babel.
Those who cling to IEL as a belief system, skid on slippery ground of the ice age (with zero evidence from any European text) ? it is all melting ice and gas, paraded as pseudo-science. IEL 'Laws' (which are merely a few observations) are adumbrated to cover up the non-falsifiable nature of linguists' claims, governed by belief in Biblical creationism and Tower of BabelIEL laws as gospel truths
An IEL law is treated as a gospel truth. This is consistent with IEL as a belief system, premised on Biblical creationism and Tower of Babel . The reality is: there is nothing authoritative and unquestionable about any IEL law. Study of the origin of languages is tentative. Anyone who is excited by Grimm's or Verner's elementary observations to declare IEL as science should have some serious problems in comprehension. Evidence? A few quotes from linguists themselves cited below should be adequate.
Hoaxes camouflaged as laws: Grimm's law, Verner's law
Someone rightly noted, "Grimm claims that m and n are spoken with the same part of the mouth! One is pronounced by placing the tongue on the teeth, the other is pronounced with the lips. " So much for Grimm's insights into how articulation occurs ! Grimm's law came about to give an ancient history of Germanic language and to keep IE homeland in Europe . We need not even have to talk about repealing Grimm's law based on alternative glottalic theories like those of Ivanov and Gamkrelidze. ( Barber, E. W. J., "Discussion Session: Sunday Morning," in Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family, Robert Drews (ed.), Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Number 38 . See also a critique at: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Grimm's%20Law%20vs.%20Glottalic%20Theory )
Some believers claim that Grimm's law and Verner's law are the stellar results of IEL. If these are claimed so, surely it is time to write the epitaph for IEL calling it a hoax or to be charitable, simply gibberish. How can IEL claim them to be 'laws' without evidence from ancient texts or epigraphs? Let us review some views of linguists themselves.
What applies to Germanic need not apply to other European languages. If so, how does an observation of change in a particular set of dialects, become a linguistic 'law'? A few of t hese so-called 'selective', 'regional' laws seek to explain sound shifts in proto-Germanic. They are only a set of statements based on a believed assumption.
The assumption is that the stops are inherited from Proto-Indo-European. How is this leap of faith in inheritance warranted? Why can't the stops be indigenous, autochthonous inventions? This is the rub. Linguists have no way to distinguish between inheritance and invention. Also, there is NO evidence, say an ancient text or epigraph in proto-Germanic. Proto-Germanic is as much a mythical invention as Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European.
http://www.finucane.de/grimm.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verner%27s_law
"Grimm's law is nothing at all Indo-European ; it is, together with Verner's important ' Accentgesetz,'(15) only the explanation of a regular change of certain consonants in the Germanic (or Teutonic) primitive speech, which took place during or after its separation from the rest of the family . This movement in the consonant-system coutinued afterwards by what is called in the German grammar ' Zweite Lautversebiebung,' which began, before the oldest documents (as far as they are known to us) were written in the monasteries of South- Germany, but the further development of which can be fairly traced in the Old High German literature . It took its origin in Bavaria and Allemannia (South and Southwest of Germany) and spread slowly to the North, where it subsided, thus creating, generally speaking, the remarkable separation between High and Low German. It changed, amongst others, the tenues into spirantes (t into s or z, p into ph or f, k into ch or h), wherefore we have Gothic tamian, Anglo-Saxon tamian (English ' tame'), Old High German zeman ; G. hiipan, A, S. helpan (E . ' help'), 0. H. G. helphan ; G. ga-leiks, A. S. (ge-) lie (E . ' like'), J. II . G. gi-tilh (New German 'gleich') etc. etc. This is, shortly, the history of the German z, which Dr. Edkins brings together(16) with Hebrew, Greek, Mongol and heaven knows what more." sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/hkjo/view/26/2600216.pdf
"My dissertation, titled Verner's Law in Gothic, deals with questions regarding the outcome of Verner's Law in Gothic which have been unresolved since the formulation of the law in 1875, in particular the frequent absence of Verner's Law in Gothic in comparison with the other Germanic languages." http://www.hi.is/~haraldr/curriculumvitae.html 2001 dissertation. See URL http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol09/vol09056.txt which says Verner's law may apply to Yiddish but not to Danish. So, what is the big deal calling it a law? Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 21:33:17 -0500 (EST) From: Hugh Denman < h.denman@ucl.ac.uk> Subject: Verner's Law with reference to Nina Warnke query [09.053:9], "Verner's Law represents a modification of Grimm's Law concerning the second Germanic sound shift [Lautverschiebung]. The process involved began in the extreme south and rolled northwards over a considerable period until it came to a halt in attenuated form along the so-called Benrath line. It had the effect of distinguishing High German from Low German. But we can be sure that this process had been completed many centuries before the genesis of Yiddish. Yiddish originated in the south (probably in the upper Danube valley) and so in common with southern German dialects and standard German is 'high' not 'low', so Verner's Law definitely applies to Yiddish, but not to Dutch (here Jammie is confusing the first or Germanic Lautverschiebung, which took place circa 500 BCE and applies to all Germanic languages including English, with the second or High German Lautverschiebung, which applies only to (standard) German, southern German dialects, Yiddish and long extinct Langobardish). Hugh Denman London, England. Verner's Law would never have been discovered had the neo-grammarians not insisted on the completeness of their theory. It is the push to make the synthesizer sound not just a little bit like an oboe, but like an oboe, that teaches us about the sound of oboes; it is the insistence on eliminating all exceptions that led to the discovery of Verner's Law." http://www.zdv.uni-tuebingen.de/tustep/prot/prot652-sperb.html
IEL Reliance on unstable phonological data
'Sound laws are circular. We first agree that pater and father are related and then formulate the rule, "Latin p || Engl. f." As a result of this inherent flaw, we are faced with hundreds of words that may or may not be related...eighty percent of etymological work consists of looking for respectable cognates.' (Anatoly Liberman, in: in: The future of Grimm's law by Anatoly Liberman and Zacharias P. Thundy, PMLA, Vol. 106, No. 5, Oct. 1991, p. 1179)]
'Though historical linguists like to consider their discipline a science, they should also bear in mind that, however scientific its method is, the field is different from the physical sciences in that Indo-Europeanists often deal with scant, unstable phonological data and with some lexical data that were never observed at the time for which the laws were formulated. Most of the factors that influenced language changes during that prehistoric period are unknown to us. So doubts and challenges will continue to plague the neat formulations of the laws of Indo-European. Consequently, Kant's scientific criteria of universality and necessity cannot be applied to the laws of Indo-European?the defenders of sound laws assume that languages are too systematic and that they even exhibit rule-controlled mechanical changes. Languages are, however, as Dr. Johnson observes, "very often?capriciously conducted." Of course, I would not dismiss summarily the old lawmakers of languages. I still teach my students Grimm's and Verner's laws, but I add that Grimm and Verner are not the final authorities and that linguists and scientists alike are fallible?' (Helen Solheim, ibid, p. 1181).
Olga Petrova's "The role of perceptual contrast in Verner's Law". Here it is the chronology and causality of Verner's Law that is once again under scrutiny. Paying close attention to the relationship between stress, pitch contours and perception, and discussing auditory phonetics in some detail, she proposes that Verner's Law happened as a result of the Germanic change in stress to root-initial position (371). The proposed account is enticing and placed alongside an alternative analysis and an account of certain objections raised by a reviewer. In the end the writer politely leaves it to the reader "to decide which account is more adequate and explanatory" http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-520.html
Theories of meaning may be many. But all are premised on the fact that meaning is assigned as part of a social contract, of a language community. The problem with IELinguists is that the metaphor of 'family' is used, assuming that there is something genetic in the way languages change. A discipline, claiming to be pseudo-science should have some criteria to distinguish between inventions and borrowings; and such discrimination should be based on written records or records of spoken sounds, in real life. Of course, languages change, not because there is a particular gene of a particular language, but because the very nature of language is to change and enlarge the semantic clusters which are founded on cultural clusters of language communities. Languages change through interactions among language-speakers and by simple, autochthonous variations of current languages. Germanic for example has four immediate predecessors ('parents' as linguists call them). "Mr. Macaulay would have been greatly distressed to discover that his pristine Germanic family of languages has a mongrel ancestry. See Fig 12 (p. 22) and section 6 (p. 22) of the link below
<http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/Papers/81.2nakhleh.pdf> and section 7.7 (p. 52) of the following study. http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/CPHL/RWT02.pdf"
Bhashya (language studies)
Let us review the evidence from Samskr.tam. The organization of the varnamaalaa itself is a superb discovery identifying five consonant variants based on the places and forms of articulation of sounds such as sibilant, epiglottal to the basic ka, ca, ta, tha, pa sounds. Add to this the mahes'vara sutra of Panini. As Patanjali noted, Panini saw the reality of a living language. Aha, not a mythical tongue from some mythical Tower of Babel. This makes for a world of difference in the contributions made by Hindu exemplified by Mahabhashya. Note that the work is called bhashya derived from the word bhasha. Coming from the tradition of Tolkaappiyan, Panini, Patanjali, Bhartrhari, Hemacandra, we don't need bible thumpers to teach us language studies -- bhashya.
Sanskrit ? stress and musical tones
'If Sanskrit does not necessarily retain the archaic feature of PIE stress ? there is no evidence that it does ? Verner's application of shifting stress to Germanic raises problems. Stress is not characteristic of spoken Sanskrit and modern Indic languages; the udaatta ('raised') and svarita (a combination of udaatta and anudaatta) discussed by Panini in his grammar are musical tones and not a matter of stress. Verner's comparison of shifting Sanskrit syllabic lengthening to shifting Germanic stress is highly questionable simply because no voicing or unvoicing takes place in the Sanskrit verbs, such as pat, cit, vr.t and vep, unlike in some Germanic verbs. Is it not possible that Verner's law of voicing is due to some other factor ? for example, the influence of another language on Germanic? Commenting on the many exceptions to Verner's law and on the noted exceptions to Kuhn's law, Bruce Mitchell, the distinguished author of Old English Syntax (Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford, UP, 1985), writes: "If caution and aquiescence, rather than enterprise and independence, were the primary attributes for explorers or inventors or scholars, we might still believe that the world is flat and might live in a world without internal combustion engines and television sets" (NM 111, 1990: 290). We must continue this questioning of Grimm's law as well as of Verner's. Then, only then, can we come up with new discoveries.' (Zacharias P. Thundy, ibid., pp. 1180-1181)
Bhashya based on reality
Patanjali notes in Mahabhashya, following the Hindu tradition that truth rests in the real world: One does not go to a linguist asking for valid utterances, the way one goes to a potter asking for pots. A linguist should be concerned with the 'observed, heard, spoken' reality as established in the real world. Any law cannot be above the reality of the spoken language recorded and reproduced with fidelity. Panini is great because he characterizes the language as he perceived in reality, not based on some cock-and-bull Grimm's or variant Verner's 'law' (a misnomer for something which is only indicative for Germanic and certainly not applicable to all other languages, not even to Danish).
To try to find a IE or PIE gene is a ridiculous, bogus exercise, intended to fool people as linguists enjoy the fun and frolic of ** unutterables. Non-falsifiable punditry is no knowledge system, and certainly does NOT contribute to a better understanding of the roots of language. Who knows? Maybe, a million flowers bloomed as they continue to bloom enlivening the landscape even today and making people realise their identities amidst cultural communities.
Let bharatiya language studies (the indo- in IE) disconnect from Eurocentric studies, and proceed as bhashya based on reality. Let Eurocentric believers skid on ice and float in gas. If they produce textual or epigraphical evidence, we will enlarge the bhashya to E in the IE.
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