Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Tommie Powell wrote:
> During their seasonal migrations, Stone Age people needed to know what
> direction they were traveling.  One way to "orient" yourself is to
> face toward the "Orient" -- the direction in which the sun rises --
> when you begin each day of travel, so Indo-Europeans inherited both
> the verb "to orient oneself" and the noun for the Far East, "the
> Orient", from that activity.
>
> Alternative explanations -- that the noun came from the verb, or that
> the verb came from the noun -- do not make sense, for there are far too
> many other ways to orient oneself, and there are far too many ways,
> other than orienting oneself, to define the Far East.
>
> Another example: When Stone Age people gathered food and brought it
> back to their camp, the put it in a pile.  Then whoever had to cook
> the food went to that pile and selected some items to be eaten at the
> next meal.  Because they were generally right-handed, they put each
> selected item to the right as they took it out of that pile, thereby
> making a second pile (of selected food) to the right of that first
> pile.  The unselected food was, of course, "left" in the "left" pile,
> while the selected food -- the "right" food to eat -- was put in the
> "right" pile.
>
> From that activity, we Indo-Europeans inherited our words for the
> "right" and "left" directions, and for "right" (good or correct) and
> "left" (remaining/abandoned or, in variants used by many Indo-European
> languages, "sinister").
>
> The alternative explanations -- that "right=correct/good" and
> "left=abandoned/sinister" came from the words for the "right" and
> "left" directions, or vice versa -- are far too lidicrous to seriously
> discuss (IMO).
"Too ludicrous"?  I don't think so at all.  Think about it, PIE would
have been so far removed from the primordial language(s), that its words
would have been changed so much that the original meanings were lost.
For instance, the English word "left" is not related to the Latin
"sinister".  Old English for left was "winestra", etymologically, it
means "friendlier" (related to Swedish _va"n_, friend), a euphamistic
term applied to the left side, since it was seen as being unlucky, or
evil.  Latin _sinister_ is also a euphemistic origin, from a source
meaning "more useful", and the since of "bad" came in later Latin.  The
ancestor of English "left" is *lyft, meaning "weak" or "foolish", it
didn't come to mean "left" until the 13th century.  "Orient" comes from
Latin _oriri_, "to rise", _oriens_ being the present participle.  The
verb orientate comes from the 19th century, a back-formation from
_orientation_, which was formed in the 18th century from _orient_, so
historically, we *know* that the east meaning of "orient" is older than
the "orient" meaning, and that the negative connotations of "left"
*precede* its use as a direction.  We can have absolutely no idea of how
proto-World dealt with those words, so to say that any theory is "too
ludicrous to seriously discuss", especially when it would *parallel* a
known historical development, is itself ludicrous, IMO.

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was hanged." - Irish proverb
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