MalFet
First i would like to thank you for joining in. The atmosphere is a lot nicer and less outright dismissive now. Now we are talking.
"Clustering" is pretty well documented as a phenomenon. The word-initial gl- node is probably the most widely described in English: glisten, glimmer, glint, gleam, etc.
This is not what i mean by clusters. I mean the clusters which arise from similar contexts. Like this:
Sun, blazing, shining, summer, sweating, splashing, swimming, sweltering, sultry, scorched, sizzling, snake, grass, flowers, soil, insects, bees, cicadas, crickets, spiders, chirping, buzzing, birds singing, forest, forest fires, leaves, breezy, rustling, shushing, shimmering...
All describing summer, all have s in them. S the first letter of the word for sun. Which brings summer, and all the above things. But s is also related to closeness which is connected with heat.
Or consider this cluster:
Irish word "gar" meaning close to something or someone. This word also means us, people close together. This word is a root of the word "garadh" which means worm, from people huddling close together for warmth. Also "grian", meaning sun in Irish, gives off heat.
So originally people stayed worm by exposing themselves to the sun or by huddling together. Then later they started using fire. The root gar, gr associated originally with heat by huddling, has been preserved in all the words which are related to heat:
Serbian:
grupa - group, people close together
greje, grije - emits heat.
sunce greje, grije - sun heats us up
sunce sine, sija - sun shines
grejati, grijati - to heat
grijan - heated, warm
ogrev - firewood
gori - burns
g(a)rana - branch, what burns
nagariti - put branches into the fire, feed the fire
gar - hot ashes, soot
garav - covered in soot, black
zgariste - something burned down
ugarci - smoldering branches
zgura - slag, what is left after something is melted with heat. zgura "se gura" is pushed to the side. Serbian expression "nije zgoreg" means it is not for throwing away.
Irish:
gor - warmth
gorach - heat up
goradh - incubation, keeping worm
gorai - place where chicks come out of eggs
gorim - warm
grios - hot ashes, burning coal, branches, but also burning and itching rash
garrail - dirty
griosach - glowing
griosagh - fire
grios(c) - broil, grill
grian - sun
garr - wooden pulp
crann (originally probably gran) meaning tree is made from garr. When crann (tree) is put into griosagh (fire) it gives us gorim (heat) and turns to grios (hot ashes) which you can use to grios(c) (cook).
For Irish grian we find this:
From Old Irish grían, from Proto-Indo-European *ghreinā, from Proto-Indo-European *gher- (“to shine, glow; grey”).
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grianDo you see how cluster of audio - visual - tactile - olfactory contexts develops from the original context meaning close together? This close together contexts also gave us another cluster which contains words like gar - spear, gard - protect, gard - protected place, fortified place...But i will leave this for another day.
If you don't know the above then you come up with this etymology for word group:
From French groupe (“cluster, group”), from Italian gruppo groppo (“a knot, heap, group, bag (of money)”), itself derived from Vulgar Latin *kruppo, from Proto-Germanic *kruppaz (“lump, round mass, body, crop”), from Proto-Indo-European *grewb- (“to crumple, bend, crawl”). Cognate with German Kropf (“crop, craw, bunch”), Old English cropp, croppa (“cluster, bunch, sprout, flower, berry, ear of corn, crop”), Dutch krop (“craw”), Old Norse kroppr (“hump, bunch”). More at crop, croup.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/groupBut that's the rub. These *aren't* initial findings. You haven't done the analysis necessary to call them initial findings. These are an amalgam of correlations you've noticed that may or may not be statistically significant.
The above Serbian Irish cluster for heat is what i mean by clusters of contexts. You get them by analyzing context related data. I did a lot of that.
So when you say i did not do enough analysis, you guys need to understand that i didn't wake up one day with a hangover and decided to come here and start bothering you with my ideas. I have been looking over data for years analyzing it and comparing it. I did tell you where you can find a lot of this data, and i have presented a lot of additional data here as well. I did not use graphs and tables i admit that.
When i say data i mean words, languages, cultures, histories. These are all linked. You can't successfully understand language if you don't understand the reality which it describes. These things are interlinked. This is why i believe that while statistics is a great tool to get rough idea about distribution of something, it can be completely misleading as well. Statistics is as good as the data and the data and the question you asked. Also statistics will not tell you why and how are things distributed the way they are now. To find that out you need to look at history.
Statistics will not tell you the meaning of the language. You need to know the culture, the way of life, the way of thinking.
You need to get the poetry of the language.
Languages describe realities. Words are not random collections of sounds assembled by chance. Human minds don't operate like that. You can not reduce people to numbers and expect to understand people. You can not reduce language to numbers and expect to understand language. You can statistically examine the language all you want, but you will never understand why word stop means stop, or why word go mans go. And because you can not see that from statistics, and if statistics is the only tool you use, you will naturally come to conclusion that it is all random. But it isn't. Even genetics in realizing that genetic evolution is not random, it is governed by the epigenetic changes, which are governed by life experiences. Our life experiences make us who we are, and make our language what it is.
Neo-Darwinism relies on mutation and selection, but selection of what? Epigenetics is confusing the target of selection, raising fears of neo-Lamarckism.
Elizabeth Pennisi in Science Magazine reports that ongoing studies of epigenetic inheritance at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have evolutionists worried. Frank Johannes and his team have apparently shown that methylation marks on the DNA of plants can alter the phenotype in heritable ways that remain stable up to at least eight generations.
For some evolutionary biologists, just hearing the term epigenetics raises hackles. They balk at suggestions that something other than changes in DNAsequences -- such as the chemical addition of methyl groups to DNA or other so-called epigenetic modifications -- has a role in evolution. All of which guaranteesthat a provocative study presented at an evolutionary biology meeting here last month will get close scrutiny. It found that heritable changes in plant flowering time and other traits were the result of epigenetics alone, unaided by any sequence changes. (Emphasis added.)
Her title, "Evolution Heresy? Epigenetics Underlies Heritable Plant Traits," reflects the religious wars these findings threaten to ignite. The concern is that the environment -- not chance mutations -- can cause adaptive epigenetic changes directly. If a plant or animal acquires characteristics during its lifetime that are heritable, the specter of long-dead Lamarckism rises once again to haunt evolutionary biology.
But the experiment doesn't address the most controversial aspect of epigenetics and evolution -- whether an environmental stress can alter an organism's epigenetic markings and lead to a permanent trait change that's acted upon by natural selection -- a notion that, to some, sounds suspiciously like Lamarckism.
So it's not just a matter of displacing natural selection to act on epigenetic marks instead of, or in addition to, genetic mutations. The issue is the possibility of a built-in adaptability that allows organisms to respond to environmental changes. It calls into question whether variation (mutation) is unguided. That's an entrenched paradigm that will be hard to change:
"A lot more hard evidence is necessary before one can claim that epigenetics plays a very important role in evolution," says ecological geneticist Koen Verhoeven at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Wageningen. And, Richards adds, "people are really stubborn about accepting that that's possible."
You'd hope that people who are biologists would not be "stubborn," but rather would seek to follow the evidence where it leads.
What does all this new data mean? It's too early to say. If experiments continue to support epigenetic inheritance, additional research questions will arise. Do the epigenetic marks ever become encoded in the DNA sequence, or are they temporary? Are epigenetic marks subject to natural selection? What directs the methylation activity? It might prove to be a built-in adaptability that provides robustness in a changing world. If so, it would require higher orders of complex specified information than the genetic code, because it suggests foresight to handle contingencies.
However it turns out, the issue about epigenetic inheritance in evolution is sure to be interesting. What's also interesting is watching how the neo-Darwinian old guard, biology's ancien régime, responds to heresy in the ranks.
You would hope that people who are scientists of any kind would "not be "stubborn," but rather would seek to follow the evidence where it leads."
