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Your semantic connection between lip and mushroom is considerably weaker than that between lip and lick. I disagree. Definitely 'lip' can't be related to 'lick' but to 'kiss', and this is so in some languages (e.g. Basque pot 'to kiss' ~ Occitan pot 'lip', augmentative poton 'kiss'). Another possib...

I hope my point is now clear. :D Your point is clear: phonetic similarity does not imply semantic relation. Which is odd, since your lip/mushroom/arse theory lies purely on phonetic similarity implying semantic relation. By no means. The thing is lips are a soft tissue which grows from the body, mu...

Your original claim was that you "rejected the connection between 'lip' and 'lick' because (unlike the tongue) the lips aren't used for licking (at least primarily)", and yet, here we have two languages (and I can quite likely add some more) where the meaning 'lip' and 'lick' are quite clearly conn...

But fungus <-> lip isn't contamination ? No, because both meanings are actually related (see above). Semantic contamination arises when a word shifts its meaning due to the influence of another similar sounding but semantically different one (e.g. 'lip' > 'lick'). English has this too, BTW, lip/lap...

Jetboy wrote:So, would you say that words like English "have" and Latin "habeo" are cognate?

English have < *kap- and Latin habeo < *g^hab^h-

Although they aren't cognate in the classical PIE theory, IMHO they could be so in what I call a "Micro-Nostratic" framework.

Octavià, does your methodology have any way of identifying coincidences? What would it take for two roots that look similar to be disqualified as cognates? Semantics is paramount. We need first to stablish a link between the meanings of the these two words (e.g. from known semantic parallels). In t...

Octavià, does your methodology have any way of identifying coincidences? What would it take for two roots that look similar to be disqualified as cognates? Semantics is paramount. We need first to stablish a link between the meanings of the these two words (e.g. from known semantic parallels). In t...

Or, gee, I dunno, maybe it's a fucking coincidence ? I'm sure it isn't. But IMHO the 'lick' words like the Sino-Tibetan quoted above or IE *lab-/*lap- (e.g. Latin lambere ) are coincidentally similar to 'lip' (with no traces of a nasal whatsoever). It's also interesting to notice that from the word...

Never mind.

How about as a loan from Proto-Tsezian *lƛ̣ipu "lip" or Proto-Sino-Tibetan *ƛep "tongue, lick" Thank you very much, I didn't notice this data. :D Starostin's reconstructs PNC *tɬ’a:npV 'lip'. This would mean the Semitic word could be a Vasco-Caucasian borrowing and in that case the source(s) of the...

I doubt very much words which designate body parts such as 'lip' could be Wanderwörter. Your problem is that you see connections where there may be none. No, this is something it needs to be studied but it's actually ignored by many linguists, so the "problem" is rather theirs, not mine. :-) Whethe...

AMEN. I see, for instance, no reason why the claim that the Germanic and Latin words for 'lip' were Semitic loanwords should be better grounded than my tentative reconstruction of the Proto-Europic word for 'salt' as *sxal which Octavià so vitriolically inveighs against. No. The capital difference ...

I found a nice quote somewhere on the internet: Questions are a good way to probe and discover truth, but unanswered questions are not proof that a random other theory without supporting evidence is automatically correct. If unanswered questions exist (...), all it means is that more investigation ...

As opposed to baseless speculation, on the very flimsiest of grounds, about supposed Semitic languages in Europe for which no evidence exists whatsoever and which, to exist, would have to predate proto-Semitic itself... I strongly disagree. How would you interpret for example the word 'lip' found i...

On which evidence?

Sicily was the site of something of an early renaissance during the middle ages, prompted by Arabic learning and the guidance of the stupor mundi Frederick II, so I commend you on your interest in the language. Sicily is also where most of the Italian immigrants to the U.S. came from. Yes, and also...

That's a strawman . Hesperic doesn't have an s > h rule. Initial */s/ is usually unchanged ; *hal- is a special case because the /s/ is followed by a /x/, which causes velarization of the /s/ before it disappears. Is that so hard to understand? Sorry, but you can't convice me. Occam's Razor tells u...

But if we had an s > h rule, how could roots such as *sar- *sal- and *saw- exist? Wouldn't they be **har- **hal- and **haw- ? This is just one of the problems of Jörg's (WeepingElf) "Hesperic", namely the impossibility ALL these roots could belong to a single language. Putting aside *hal- , the res...

I disagree. It's you who has posited a cluster *sx with no macro-comparative (i.e. external) evidence. On the contrary, I always use that evidence in my proposals. I posited the cluster *sx chiefly on Indo-European evidence, isn't that good enough? And if that is supported by Hesperic evidence (the...

I propose you a contest: the one who actually convinces people here would retain ownership of the name. The usual rule is that the one who uses the name first retains "ownership" of the name. Using a name coined by someone else for an entity which isn't even the same as the one the name was meant t...

"Your "Hesperic"" is something else than my Hesperic. You should give it another name to avoid confusion. I propose you a contest: the one who actually convinces people here of the validity of his respective proposal would retain ownership of the name. *kar- 'stone' IMHO this is a Vasco-Caucasian l...

*al- 'flow' *sal- 'stream' IMHO these two roots are related, *sal- is from my "Hesperic" and *al- < *H 2 el- is PIE-native. *sar- 'flow' This seems to be of ultimate Vasco-Caucasian origin (e.g. Spanish chorro 'jet' and Basque i-turri 'spring'), possibly related to the above ones with a shift l > r...

I do not posit Hesperic based entirely on this single word. I posit it based on more than 1000 geographical names which contain several dozen roots and about a dozen suffixes, all of which look as if they were from a language that split off PIE before the latter developed the ablaut system. I'd lik...

At least with the 'salt'-word, you have it backwards: PIE had */s/, Hesperic had */h/ (or rather, something that became /h/ in the IE languages through which the names came unto us). The fact some IE languages actually have *s > h makes me think *hal- is a remnant of some IE substrate language, mos...

Or the fact that PIE /p/ isn't reflected as Welsh /b/ normally, since /p/ disappeared in proto-Celtic, and PIE /w/ isnt reflected as Welsh /w/ because it changed to /gw/. Perhaps those are not unconditional changes, though; wydd does seem to mean tree, and if PIE had widu for tree it doesn't seem u...