February 03, 2008 04:03PM
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Registered: 17 years ago
Posts: 4
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DDeden Wrote:
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> Piotr, thanks for checking.
> I can't respond at the moment, I'm mostly not
> disagreeing with what you said.
>
> This might be of interest [...]:
I know Pagel and Atkinson's article; my own research is actually into closely related matters. What they have determined using language corpora and basic vocabulary lists for numerous Indo-European langauges is that words referring to frequently used meanings are particularly likely to survive for millennia before they suffer lexical replacement. Still, to find out related words in distantly related languages you need the standard methods of historical linguistics. Related words don't necessarily look similar, and similar words are not necessarily related. There is for example an indigenous Australian language, called Mbabaram, in which the word for 'dog' is "dog". It has zilch to do with the English word. It's just accidentally similar (actually, it developed from an earlier *gudaga via a series of regular sound changes, involving the loss of the first and last syllables). Such spurious matches are far more common than most people imagine, so if you do comparison in an insufficiently disciplined way, you are almost sure to find some phantom resemblances which may look intriguing but don't prove a thing. On the other hand, genuinely related words may be as different from one another as Latin "duo" is from Armenian "erku", so you are likely to miss REAL cognates if you just scan word-lists looking for similarities.
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DDeden |
February 01, 2008 12:39AM |
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Byrd |
February 01, 2008 11:52AM |
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Lee |
February 01, 2008 11:55AM |
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Warwick L Nixon |
February 01, 2008 02:37PM |
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DDeden |
February 01, 2008 08:21PM |
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cladking |
February 01, 2008 09:05PM |
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DDeden |
February 02, 2008 12:02AM |
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Warwick L Nixon |
February 02, 2008 12:54AM |
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DDeden |
February 02, 2008 03:12AM |
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Warwick L Nixon |
February 02, 2008 01:47PM |
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DDeden |
February 02, 2008 02:49PM |
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Warwick L Nixon |
February 02, 2008 02:55PM |
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DDeden |
February 02, 2008 03:06PM |
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Warwick L Nixon |
February 02, 2008 03:31PM |
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Byrd |
February 02, 2008 01:26AM |
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DDeden |
February 02, 2008 04:40AM |
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Piotr Gasiorowski |
February 02, 2008 01:02PM |
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Hermione |
February 02, 2008 01:16PM |
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DDeden |
February 02, 2008 08:34PM |
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Hermione |
February 03, 2008 04:33AM |
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DDeden |
February 03, 2008 09:19PM |
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DDeden |
February 03, 2008 09:20PM |
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Piotr Gasiorowski |
February 03, 2008 04:03PM |
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DDeden |
February 03, 2008 09:44PM |
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Hermione |
February 04, 2008 04:11AM |
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Piotr Gasiorowski |
February 04, 2008 02:28PM |
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DDeden |
February 04, 2008 08:14PM |
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DDeden |
February 09, 2008 11:55PM |
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Hermione |
February 10, 2008 04:48AM |
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Hermione |
February 10, 2008 04:52AM |
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DDeden |
February 10, 2008 09:48PM |
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Piotr Gasiorowski |
February 11, 2008 07:05PM |
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DDeden |
February 12, 2008 01:52AM |
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DDeden |
February 13, 2008 04:46AM |
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Hermione |
February 14, 2008 04:25AM |
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Byrd |
February 04, 2008 04:18PM |
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DDeden |
February 04, 2008 08:15PM |
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DDeden |
February 02, 2008 04:52AM |
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Byrd |
February 03, 2008 03:35AM |
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DDeden |
February 03, 2008 10:29PM |
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Byrd |
February 03, 2008 11:46PM |
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DDeden |
February 04, 2008 08:17PM |
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Doug Weller |
February 04, 2008 09:47AM |
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Byrd |
February 10, 2008 12:44PM |
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Byrd |
February 12, 2008 02:19AM |
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DDeden |
February 12, 2008 03:12AM |
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Byrd |
February 12, 2008 09:17PM |
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Byrd |
February 04, 2008 09:17AM |
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Doug Weller |
February 05, 2008 03:57AM |
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