Philosophical Vegan Forum

BrianSoddingBoru4 on AtheistForums thinks that neuralbeans'es objection "Perhaps the nouns in the Croatian language have a significantly lower collision entropy than all the words in the Aspell spell-checking dictionary. Have you checked for that?" is a serious problem with my interpretation of the Croatian names of places. So, I've started a thread about it on two Internet forums to see if anybody is aware of some research on the topic, or at least how I can make an experiment to test that without spending days compiling a list of nouns in the Croatian language:
https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/q/47201/20821
https://www.forum.hr/showthread.php?p=9 ... st99311279
To me, what neuralbeans is saying seems like an obvious ad-hoc hypothesis to defend the mainstream interpretation of the names of places in Croatia: it is inventing the reasons why an experiment wouldn't work. Why would the collision entropy of different word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives...) be different in the Croatian language? I can see why it would be in the Swahili language (because of the noun classes, verbs can start in some consonant pairs that nouns cannot start with), but I fail to see why it would be in the Croatian (or English) language. And why would the collision entropy of nouns be lower, rather than higher? Seems like a baseless ad-hoc hypothesis, right? And it's not a burden of proof on me to do some complicated experiment because of someone's ad-hoc hypothesis.

What do you think @brimstoneSalad, can at least the following thing be stated with reasonable certainty about the names of places in Croatia?

At a rate far higher than chance, the first two consonants of the river names in Croatia tend to be 'k' and 'r', respectively. The p-value of that pattern is somewhere between 1/300 and 1/17, depending on the assumptions you make about the collision entropy of parts of the grammar of the Croatian language. However, mainstream linguistics provides no explanation for that pattern.

Maybe that's the only thing about the names of places in Croatia that can be stated with reasonable certainty. I mean, sure, there are some things that I think all the scientists who have studied Croatian toponyms agree on (Illyrian was an Indo-European language, "Colapis" meant "winding water" in Illyrian, "Serapia" meant "flowing water"...), but those things are without p-values.

A Quora user called Michal Pietrusinski told me that I am suggesting some irregular sound changes when I am proposing that "Karašica" comes from Illyrian *Kurrurrissia, and that that's especially problematic since I am proposing that those irregular sound changes occurred twice (for both rivers named Karašica). He didn't specify which "irregular" sound changes he has in mind, and Quora isn't letting me ask him via a comment. As far as I understand the history of Croatian language, if *Kurrurrissia was borrowed into Croatian around the 7th century, it would turn to *Karaš(-ica) in modern Croatian via regular sound changes.
So, I asked about it on forum.hr.
I seriously doubt that I actually made such a mistake, because why didn't Dubravka Ivšić warn me about that when I sent her an early version of my paper Etimologija Karašica? If my hyothesis is impossible (or at least very unlikely) from the perspective of historical phonology, why not use that as an argument, rather than using much weaker arguments?

A forum.hr user called DarkDivider claims that there was a phonotactic law operating in Proto-Slavic that made it impossible for more than three syllables with yers to be consecutive. That would make my supposed Proto-Slavic name for Karašica, *Kъrъrьsьja (a borrowing from Illyrian *Kurrurrissia), impossible. Of course, DarkDivider cited no source for that claim.
In my opinion, he is doing the same thing I was doing back in 2016, when I was inventing laws of optics which supposedly prove the Moon Landing photographs were fake and inventing the laws of fluid mechanics which supposedly prove rockets cannot exist.

Anyway, I've decided to open a Reddit thread about what the advocates of mainstream onomastics mean when they say "The etymologies from the languages we know a lot about are more probable than the etymologies from languages we know little about.". What is the mathematical basis for that principle? I don't see it. What I do see is that following that principle gives results which are incompatible with information theory. Following that principle gave the result that the k-r pattern in the Croatian river names is coincidental, but basic information theory strongly suggests that the p-value of that pattern is somewhere between 1/300 and 1/17. But maybe somebody can explain that principle mathematically.

OK, I am in a bit of a situation.
One my real-life friend who is also a toponymy enthusiast and who has read my paper "Etimologija Karašica" (in fact, he translated parts of it into Hungarian to publish it in Regionalne Studije) told me he thinks my information theory calculations are probably correct and that he agrees with me that *kurr was the Illyrian word for "to flow" (that Karašica comes from an Illyrian name similar to *Kurr-urr-issia), however, he doesn't agree with me that the simplest explanation for that word is that Illyrian was a centum language and that it comes from the root *kjers. Namely, he is certain that he has read somewhere that there is a dialectal Bulgarian word similar to "kariti" which means "to flow" and that it is hypothesized that that Bulgarian word comes from Thracian. Thracian was, of course, a satem language, and no serious linguist doubts that. That, according to my friend, makes a lot more sense if Illyrian was closely related to Thracian, rather than being some centum language.
When I asked him why he didn't warn me about the problem before making my paper published, rather than 3 years later, he told me that he thought it wasn't important because it wasn't the main topic of my paper. I don't think this is a good way of thinking. Somebody can easily end up citing me for minor points I made in my paper, like that I think the math supports the notion that Illyrian was centum or that the island name Krk comes from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kjeh1weros for northern wind (which only makes sense if Illyrian was centum).
Anyway, can somebody confirm me that's a real problem? That there is indeed a word similar to "kariti" in some dialects of Bulgarian and that it is hypothesized that it's Thracian in origin? I've tried to find it on the Internet, but failed.

Teo, if your paper claimed that then you *should* probably retract or amend it to remove that claim. I did not read the paper, but that's a very drastic leap to be making.

This is more or less what I suggested earlier that was a problem with your reasoning, correlations and causation and reverse causation and coincidence -- you have such a hard time separating them and not getting caught up in one monomaniacal cause.

brimstoneSalad wrote:Teo, if your paper claimed that then you *should* probably retract or amend it to remove that claim.

I think that retracting the whole paper would probably be an overreaction. There are plenty of good things in it. The measurements showing that the collision entropy of the syntax and the perceived complexity of the syntax of a language aren't strongly correlated are certainly true, right? The measurements and numerical calculations showing that the p-value of that k-r pattern in the Croatian river names is between 1/300 and 1/17 are probably right, are they not (regardless of whether I am overhyping how significant that is)? The claim that Karašica comes from Illyrian *Kurr-urr-issia (flow - water - suffix) is... Well, it's at least as plausible as the etymologies usually cited for that river name, right? It's true that I claimed that Illyrian was a centum language, but the editors of Valpovački Godišnjak forced me to excise the lengthy discussion about whether Illyrian was centum or satem, which would be very misleading.

brimstoneSalad wrote:but that's a very drastic leap to be making.

Well, it didn't seem to me like a huge leap, especially considering all the other arguments I had for Illyrian being centum. I thought I knew enough about Croatian toponyms to discern whether Illyrian was centum or satem after having studied them for years. The k-r pattern was, in my mind, the strongest argument for Illyrian being centum, but there are also others. The northernmost big island in our sea being called Curicum is easy to explain if you assume Illyrian was centum: it comes from the word for northern wind *(s)kjeh1weros. The name Cibelae is also easy to explain as meaning "strong house" or "fortress", from *kjey (house) and *bel (strong). The name Incerum is easy to explain as meaning "the heart of the valley", from *h1eyn (valley) and *kjer(d) (heart). So are some words from Illyrian inscriptions with generally accepted meanings easier to explain if you assume Illyrian was centum. But if there is some technical detail from the Bulgarian dialectology that makes what I thought was the strongest argument invalid... Well, that makes me doubt all of that.

brimstoneSalad wrote:not getting caught up in one monomaniacal cause

What does that mean?

Teo, as far as I know Illyrians were colonized so many times it seems pretty silly to make any conjecture about it. I think your time would be better spent attempting to build a time machine.

You get fixated on things. A lot of people do, but you have it particularly bad. I really don't think a field as forensic and subjective (or at least subject to a lot of interpretation) as linguistics is well suited to your particular psychology. I think you should stick to computer science. Anything connected to history is probably a bad fit for you due to your tendency to conspiratorial revisionism.