Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

> You have been shown repeatedly that your argument is invalid and why,
> yet you persist in it. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that
> you are not serious.
>
> Your argument differs only in degree, not in kind, from saying,
> “Because English and German are from the same Germanic root, therefore
> the use of the English “boot” disproves that “Boot” in German refers
> to watercraft.” I’m not going to continue in such a ridiculous
> argument.

Karl, that is really big misrepresentation of my argument! Please 
demonstrate how I have been conducting a cross-language etymological 
study to show that your contention is correct. Else withdraw your 
undefended claim please.

All I've been repeatedly asking is for you to analyse Australian (?) 
English use of "plod" -- not in reference to other dialects of English 
or standard English or some etymological reconstruction. It is a 
language system like any system so can be analysed synchronically which 
is all I'm asking. I've presented synchronic language data, yet you seem 
to think I'm doing something wrong etymologically. You're starting to 
make stuff up now so as to avoid dealing with actual language evidence 
at odds with the position you hold so strongly to.

Back to the other languages I brought to the table -- where's the 
etymological fallacy in them?

> Karl W. Randolph.

Please demonstrate why the following position, which is standard in 
linguistics, but at odds with your own position, is wrong (p.112 of my 
review):

"More significantly, it is simply assumed that 'intrinsic
meaning that never change[s]' is a linguistic reality, and remains
throughout the work as an unsubstantiated assumption. However, the
corollary of admitting to lexical fuzziness within linguistics is
generally that there is not necessarily an attribute or set of
attributes which is applicable across the uses of any given lexical item
(or syntactic construction, etc.) such that non-prototypical uses may
only optionally carry an attribute or set of attributes essential to
more central use(s) (cf. Geeraerts 1988: 654–55).  In other words, 'they 
may show what is often called family resemblances or a radial structure, 
i.e., each meaning is linked by resemblance to some other meaning, but 
the network of meanings may be so large that meanings at different ends 
of it show no traces of similarities' (Haspelmath 1998: 31)."

Geeraerts, Dirk. 1988. “Cognitive Grammar and the History of Lexical 
Semantics.” Pages 647-677 in Topics in Cognitive Linguistics. Edited by 
Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of 
Linguistic Science 50. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Haspelmath, Martin. 1998. “The Semantic Development of Old Presents: New 
Futures and Subjunctives without Grammaticalization,” Diachronica 15: 29-62.

Regards,
David Kummerow.