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Germanic Lexicon Project
Message Board
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Author: Sean Crist (Swarthmore College)
Email: kurisuto at unagi dot cis dot upenn dot edu
Date: 2005-02-19 18:47:21
Subject: much/mucho (Re: How is Gothic 'weihs'...)
> You're the first person to explain the principles involved in
> tying words together. But, are you sure that 'much'
> and 'mucho' are coincidental? This is some coincidence.
If you take any two languages and compare all of their words, you'll occasionally find accidental pairs of that kind, even if the languages are totally unrelated.
A word is a relation between sound and meaning. Every language composes its words from a finite set of consonants and vowels, and every language has restrictions on the way those sounds can be combined.
Suppose you create two languages by randomly generating words (pap, dib, uk, rabu, etc.) and randomly assigning them meanings from some fixed list (eye, mother, much, walk, sun, leg...). Now, if the process is truly random, then the odds of a single meaning being assigned to the same pronunication in both languages is pretty small (which is why it's hard to believe that the resemblance between much/mucho is an accident).
However, since you're generating pronunciations for thousands of meanings, you've got thousands of opportunities for a match to accidentally occur. After so many trials, it becomes statistically highly likely that you'll have some accidental matches.
The thing that distinguishes these accidents from true cognates is that the latter involve systematic correspondences across many words. If more people recognized this, a great deal less nonsense would be written.
> Also why do sound changes happen within a language as whole,
> and not randomly?
Nobody has a very good answer to that. The strong tendency for sound changes to be regular is something that we observe, but we don't know exactly why language change works that way and not some other way.
We do know a good bit about the social dynamics that drive sound change, and what a sound change in progress looks like. The field of sociolinguistics has much to say about these matters, based on a lot of field work over the past 40 years or so.
--Sean