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I spent scrolling through some random pages of Stubb's material and was able to discover some interesting connections between his reconstructed forms and Latin. The Uto-Aztecan material is entirely from Stubbs; using that material within that twenty minutes, I was able to derive some rules for how Latin was adapted into Uto-Aztecan. I use his material with little modification (I underline my modification). Obviously, this is the result of language contact at the time when Uto-Aztecan speakers invaded Italy in Book of Mormon times.

Latin m- initial remains Uto-Aztecan m- initially

Latin moveō (mov-) = move

UACV-1009 *miya ‘go’: M67-197 *miya/*mi; I.Num101 *mi’a ‘go, walk’; KH.NUA; M88-mi6 ‘go’; KH/M06-mi6 *miyaC (AMR): Mn miya ‘go’; NP mia ‘go’; Sh mia ‘go’; Kw miya ‘come, go, walk, pl’; SP mia ‘travel, journey, vi pl’; CU miyá-y ‘move away from, be far from’; Cm mia/mi’a; TSh mia/mi’a; Gb mya; Sr mi/miaa; Ktn mi; Tb miyat~iimiy ‘go’; Tb(H) miyyat ‘go, take leave’. Add WMU -mi ‘while going/moving, do s.th. while going, v’; Kw mi ‘move while V-ing’; Kw miya ‘go, walk’. [NUA: Num, Tb, Tak]

Latin mortus (mor-), "dead"

UACV-655a *mukki (with intervocalic -rt becoming -k- or -kk-; see below) ‘die, be sick, smitten’: Sapir; VVH86 *muuki/*muuku die; M67-126a *muk / *muki; BH.Cup *mukii? 'a sore'; B.Tep155 *muuki; L.Son155 *muku/*muk-i; M88-mu2; KH.NUA; KH/M06-mu2: Tb muugït~’umuuk 'die';
Tb mugiinat~’umugiin 'hurt'; Tb muugut 'spirit of a dead person'; Ls múúki-l ‘sore, boil, knot in wood’;
Ls múúki- ‘fester, v’; Ls múú- 'be in eclipse, of sun, moon'; Ca -múk- ‘get sick, weak, die’; Ca múk’ily ‘sore, n’; Ca múki-š ‘sick person, dead person’; Hp mooki 'die, faint, be numb, suffer from or be afflicted by';
Ktn muk ‘be sick, die’; Ktn mukic ‘disease’; Ktn mukim ‘dead people’; Hp mokpï 'corpse'; TO muuki 'die, corpse'; Eu mukún 'morirse [die]’; Wr mugu-ná/mugi-má 'morir, sg'; Wr muguré 'corpse'; Tr mukú-mea; My múúke; Yq múúke; Cr mï’ïči 'dead person, he is dead; etc.'; Cr wamï’ï 'se murió'; Wc mïïki 'dead, adj/n'; CN miki ‘die, suffer from’. PUA *u > CN i, CrC ï. Sapir includes SNum terms SP čaŋwïqqa, čaŋwïkki, čawukki (< *ca-mukki) 'die off, disappear’. It and Tak -k- (vs. -x-) suggest *-kk-, but SP moġoa does not; thus, Ken Hill rightly separates those.
UACV-655b *mukki 'sore': Munro.Cup121 *múúki-l 'sore'; M67-128a; KH.NUA: Ls múúki ‘ to fester, v’; Ls múúki-l 'a boil, knot in wood'; Cp múki-ly 'sore'; Cp múkilya’a-š 'sore, pl’; Ca múk’i-ly; Sr mukţ 'a sore, n'; Sr moki’ 'be getting sore, vi’. Cp muhí’i-š ‘suppurating, sore, adj’ a variant with softened medial consonant? Though the semantics vary—e.g., 'spirit' in Numic—this is one of the few etymons found in all eight branches of United Airlines. Note Tb g < *kk rather than Tb h (< *k) due to the underlying geminated *-kk-. [medial *-kk- > Tb g, Wr g, Tak k, not x] [Num, Hp, Tb, Tak, Tep, TrC, CrC, Azt]

Latin -rt- becomes Uto-Aztecan -kk- between vowels

Latin artus, a, um, adj. v. arma, prop. fitted; hence (according to Lewis and Short) close, strait, narrow, confined, short, brief; the root is from Proto-Indo-European -*h₂er-. The the zero-grade of this root produces Latin rēte (=net), with initial laryngeal loss inducing vowel lengthening in the following syllable.

UACV-1519 *ikkaC / *iCkaC ‘carrying net’: BH.Cup *’íkat ‘carrying net’: M88-’i3 ‘net’; Munro.Cup79 ’ííka-t ‘carrying net’; KH/M06-’i3: Cp íkat ‘carrying net’; Ca ’íka-t ‘carrying net’; Ls ’ííka-t ‘carrying net’. Intervocalic -k- in all Cupan languages suggests a geminated *-kk-, and final -t shows in Tak -t vs. -l. [e1i,e2n,e3q,e4t] [NUA: Tak]

Prove me wrong.

I love it when our dear, wise consul instructs us in this way. Doce, magister!

Obviously, this is the result of language contact at the time when Uto-Aztecan speakers invaded Italy in Book of Mormon times.

Finally some well-deserved support for Darth J’s proposal.
Nicely done, Symmachus!

I have been alerted that Robertson responded to the my little game at the Interpreter, though I’m not who posted it there.

Twenty minutes? What you did was simply unbelievable. So extraordinary as to seem impossible.

I totally agree! You will notice there is actually a typo (since corrected on my post), where I said "Latin Initial G" when it should be "Latin initial M." That's because I started with German gehen, which works just as well, but then I saw Stubbs' entry on "net," scrolling around as I was for inspiration, and the Latin connection clicked as my mind was captured by visions of Caesarian legions and rustic Italian cavalry on tapir-back, trampling down the Sobek-worshiping Lamanites like grapes in a wine press.

(not kidding about the Sobek, which Stubbs has in there; Cyrus Gordon first espied a connection between the Egyptian god Sobek and the Nahuatl word for crocodiles. He was an eccentric and brilliant man, and that is also my impression of the obviously clever Brian Stubbs, but needless to say, the two part ways on just what the Egypto-Semitic speakers were doing there in central America. Now, what I'd like to know from the apologists who defend Stubbs' thesis is: never mind how a couple of Jews picked it up in the first place, but just how the hell did Laman and Lemuel sneak in the worship of Sobek? Were they always and consistently of the Sobekian persuasion, or did they conceal it during the 8 years in Yemen, only to resurrect devotion to the true faith once they'd escaped the fanatical confines of Nephi's kingdom?)

I think Robertson should give it a try, because it only does take 20 minutes: 1) pick a random page of Stubbs, 2) look for any kind of phonic similarity to any word in a language you know, 3) delete Stubbs' rule and put your own in. Explain away any oddities by appealing to any known linguistic phenomena or by making other rules, and for any such new rules, simply repeat 1)-3) until you find a match. The overwhelming bulk of Stubb's book consists of paragraphs in small print that are largely collections of Uto-Aztecan cognates, each headed usually by one word or root from a Semitic language or Egyptian, so you just have to pick something besides Semitic or Egyptian. And there is no limit on the amount of subsequent rules you can create in order to make it consistent.

For example, there is a lot of "with loss of final -r," a rule he also includes alongside other developments of -r (it went to y) in other environments. Not unusual for phonemes to have more than one reflex in subsequent stages of language, of course, but it is convenient. The PDF I have doesn't have printed page numbers, so it is hard to give you reliable references, but check his paragraph 725, where he goes on about the various reflexes of "Semitic R" in several different Uto-Aztecan languages. It developed in so many different ways in United Airlines, apparently, that he will always have an out. Almost all Semitic roots have three consonants, so if, for example, you get to subtract a final -r, then instead of having to find a match for all three columns, you only have to find a match for the first two. It's not unusual for final -r to be dropped (British English does that, a phenomenon known as "non-rhotacism" as opposed to rhotic dialects like American English, which maintains final -r). It's just rather easier now to find cognates if you can ignore. If on one side you are picking from Egyptian, Aramaic at any stage, Arabic, Akkadian, and Hebrew or whichever Semitic language, and on the other you have dozens of Uto-Aztecan languages to choose from in finding connections, 20 minutes might in fact be all you need.

Keep in mind that it's not as if phonemes (meaningfully contrastive sounds) are infinite. There's an old debate about how many possible phonemes exist across all languages, but it's irrelevant really, because there does seem to be an upper limit on how many phonemes a given language can have. English has about 44 or so (depending on dialect, it could be different) and that is on the high end. The highest I've seen is in the 70s for Old Irish argued by a great scholar 90 years ago who just didn't know what a phoneme was, and nobody accepts that today. But Classical Nahuatl has a few more than 20. I don't know what language among the United Airlines family has the highest number of phonemes, but assuming it's less than 30, then certainly someone can do the math on how hard it is to find correspondences between roots. Or how easy, rather. The trick then is to make the semantics match up, and nothing in historical-linguistic reconstruction is easier than fudging semantics, because the only real checks are 1) what you can imagine in your head and 2) what criticism you can tolerate from other people's mouths.

For example, Stubbs uses Aramaic bǝsár with the meaning "flesh, penis." Well, Gadianton is a master logician, and I always hear Bertrand Russell's voice when I read his posts, just as I see his image, so he will appreciate that, while all penises are flesh, not all flesh is penis. You certainly can find that meaning, but when it's not interchangeable, as the context of where it is found makes clear: the fourth-century AD Christian Syriac homilist Aphraates, in his eleventh "demonstration" (as they called) narrates how a daughter of Pharaoh happened upon Moses and recognized "from the sign that is on his flesh" (min sīmā dbǝbasreh) that he was an Israelite. That is the citation from the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, which you can see here. You can also see that it is a euphemism. It is not unusual for euphemisms to be borrowed (cf. toilet from French toilette), but again it is just massively convenient.

The fact is, the usual meaning is "flesh." It is a very common word for meat. It is also a root that has a completely unrelated meaning in a totally different semantic field: bsār means "humility. And still in another semantic field, as a verb, b-s-r means to announce or to gladden with good news. Its Arabic cognate root is b-sh-r, and someone who announces good news (say, about an idiotic decision to withdraw American troops from your country) is a bashīr, and in that form it is not an uncommon name in Arabic. When you watch Arabic news, it might say mubāshir somewhere on the screen: "live." With a root like that, you can go all over the place—especially if you can ignore the -r at the end!

Lemmie, I'll bet you'd have a field day calculating some probabilities.

Just randomly looking at pages:

He ignores double consonants, as convenient. At section 671, for example, to the Semitic root ђmm (bathe, wash), he connects United Airlines huma (wash). Ok, but you've just reduced again one of the columns, making it easier to find your match. And the problem is that in Semitic these are not incidental. For example, if I were to refer to my father-in-law as ђamām rather than ђāma, I'm calling him a bathroom.

I just scrolled to another page (entry 107) and see Hebrew hu and related Semitic forms (="he" and with the definite article = "that"). This is supposed to be evidence of influence on the Uto-Aztecan pronoun system, because the United Airlines form he has reconstructed for "that" is "hu." So what? The Greek article for "the," which was originally the demonstrative "that" (you can see it in Homer) was pronounced "ho." These are all third person pronouns, and come to think of it, the English 3rd relative pronoun is pronounced "hu" though obviously spelled "who." In that entry, he gives us the Southern Paiute form ungwa, presumably part of the evidence for his reconstruction. Now, in Lakota, ung- is part of the pronoun system, though it's first person plural. Lakota is not Uto-Aztecan (it's Siouan), but on the other hand until the 19th century Paiutes in Nevada were much closer to Siouan speakers than they were to Hebrews, Englishmen, or Ancient Greeks...or were they? Anyway, how can I be sure the Paiutes weren't conquered by a roving band of Lakota speakers from whose language they massively borrowed? It's not as if the Lakota didn't get around and slaughter speakers of Uto-Aztecan languages (Red Cloud, according to his dictated autobiography, rose to dominance among the Oglala Lakota in part because of a daring and brutal raid against the Utes and Shoshone, both speakers of United Airlines languages).

One last thought on this. Perhaps this passage in Prof. Robertson's review of the review—classic FARMS!—jumped out at some of you:

To bring Stubbs’s notion of borrowing closer to home, let us consider a hypothetical scenario. Let us suppose that a Martian has accessed thousands of pages of English as well as voluminous pages of French, doing this for the purposes of careful research. His investigation reveals two classes of words. On the one hand he finds words like hand, foot, tooth, child, and sun that he cannot find in French. On the other hand, he finds words like disorganization, numerous, assumption, definition, incorrect, inexact, method, and pedantry that he finds in both languages. [Page 7]With no English words in French and nearly half of English words of French origin, our Martian friend rightly concludes that English borrowed from French, which makes our Martian researcher a splitter, not a lumper — a splitter because he separates French loanwords from what was originally Anglo-Saxon English!

Notice the first set, "Anglo-Saxon" English: hand, foot, tooth, child, sun.

Now the second, borrowed from French at various times: disorganization, numerous, assumption, definition, incorrect, inexact, method, pedantry

(I wonder if that's Roberton's subconscious review of Stubbs: "disorganized pedantry with numerous assumptions, incorrect definitions, and inexact method")

How can we summarize the difference between this list? Which set of words does every three year old English speaker know? Which set do you think is more likely to be borrowed? Why would any group of speakers borrow words for the first set? I would summarize the difference as being that the first is essential for a very young child to know in order to survive, whereas the second is superfluous for that purpose. For example, a child has to be able to learn that they are a child, they have to be able to communicate that their hand is bleeding or their tooth hurts or that the sun is too hot for them today, or that their foot was bitten by a snake. A linguist might just call them core vocabulary, but whatever you call them, they are not the sort of words you borrow without an extremely compelling social reason. Generally, words are borrowed because speakers come into contact with new objects or ideas that had up to that point been unknown to them or were peripheral. There are some exceptions: penis, for example, comes from Latin, which continues to provide high-sounding euphemisms for words and actions held under taboo in polite speech (penis is itself a euphemism, as it means "tail," a semantic link that German also makes with one of its words for penis). But generally you don't borrow words for body parts or things of immediate and daily experience. English speakers still use "Anglo-Saxon" words (to use Robertson's term) for most features of quotidian life. But I'm struck in reading Stubbs by how much core vocabulary of Uto-Aztecan supposedly was borrowed from Semitic or Egyptian: lightning, house, daughter, cry, eye, believe, pregnant, hip, grass, neck, basket, wife, stick, rock, and on and on—almost all of these words, by the way, are pure English (pregnant comes from Latin because it is a medical term, and basket ultimately comes from a dead Celtic language), so even a language as hybrid as English hasn't changed these. But apparently, in Uto-Aztecan, they hadn't thought enough about wives, rocks, daughters, hips, grasses, necks, sticks, or houses to have words for them, and it seems they never thought to give a name to lightning—if they ever saw it, because they also had to borrow the word for eye.

These are icebergs they can steer clear of if they argue for a genetic relationship and might be one reason to forgive Chris Rogers for interpreting Stubbs’ argument as a genetic one. Despite the ambiguity of the book, Stubbs and supporters eschew that and insist on a mixed language arising from borrowing. Well, that doesn’t makes even less sense.

Of course, we readers of the Book of Mormon will remember that Nephite society was rather religious, and theirs would have been a new religion to the Uto-Aztecans, who, at best, had been blinded by post-Jaredite godlessness (perhaps that blindness explains why they couldn't see lightning and needed to borrow the word for eye). But even Jaredites weren't Jews, and they certainly did not have any brass plates. Nephite religion would have been not only new but the religion of the ruling literate class of invaders. So since the Uto-Aztecan speakers borrowed so much of their invader's language, shouldn't we expect even a little bit of cultural contact? And if we get cultural contact, shouldn't we wonder where the evidence of the central feature of Nephite culture is? Where are the borrowings for baptism? Repentance? Atonement? Church? Law? Temple? How about Christ? We should expect at least some theological word to show up, but I find it more than a little strange that the only theological term borrowed from the Christian Nephites was the word Sobek, the name of an Egyptian crocodile god.

So, Prof. Robertson, is it really worth more than 20 minutes? It's a gorgeous boat, sir, but it's not fit to withstand all these icebergs.

Like Rose's heart in Titanic, we certainly could go on, but ultimately like Jack, we may have to let go.



"Any room on that door for Sobek, baby?

This stuff from Stubbs is indeed reminiscent for me as well of Carmack's Early Modern English work. I'd still defer to the considered judgement of an actual subject expert on that, but Carmack's reactions to my questions as a skeptical non-expert were not encouraging. It was to his credit that he did reply to me, but his replies weren't what I've come to expect from real experts.

I'm not a linguist but I have family connections to the field. I've hung out in the little cafeteria of the Max Planck Institute where Royal Skousen once spent a sabbatical and for several years I chatted regularly with institute directors at parties. I asked questions and generally got answers that made sense to me.

So I feel I have at least a primitive BS-detector for this kind of thing. In my experience real experts have good basic answers to good basic questions. They don't insist that anything which goes through the proper motions has to be accepted until disproven, because they know there's a difference between solid and flimsy.

I'm just not getting great vibes from these guys. Maybe their work is better than I realize but the way they present it just doesn't fit with what I expect for good work.

Symmachus wrote:I have been alerted...{snip}...we may have to let go.

Well done, Sir.

Game on.

Jeff Lindsay wrote:Unfortunately, Brad, the 20-minute exercise seems to miss the strength of Stubbs’ work and his appropriate and detailed data from the comparative method. It’s not about conjuring up a random change to make any two words seem related, but in demonstrating the existence of plausible rules that each apply to multiple examples in a meaningful way with predictive power.

So for the section you copied from p. 77, Stubbs was illustrating a sound change of “intervocalic -r- became -y-/-i- in non-initial positions” with examples from the proposed Semitic-kw infusion. Changing -r- to -y- or -i- is not a random rule to try to force a Semitic word into Uto-Aztecan, but a very plausible sound change that occurs in other language families. Stubbs gives the helpful example of “Proto-Mayan *r > y in most of Q’anjobalan, Tzeltalan, Cholan, and Yucatecan (Campbell 1977,
97-100).” He shows several examples of this sound change for the Semitic-kw infusion and notes that many other examples of -r- > -y- “abound throughout” the volume. A related issue is the sound change discussed first on p. 4 of “Clusters with -r- as 2nd consonant show -Cr- > -Cy-, especially -gr-, -qr- > -ky-, or -gra / -qra > Hopi -kya.” These are reasonable sound changes, reflecting the kind of things that can happen naturally in speech, and are supported with multiple examples.

I don’t think your satire offers anything that can be taken as a serious proposal to evaluate in the first place under the comparative method. While it may be impossible to prove that United Airlines mukki did not have some influence from Latin’s mortus, when it comes to the comparative method, there’s nothing to evaluate. Adding “artus” = narrow, close, confined to compare with *ikkaC for “carrying net” doesn’t help much, in my opinion.

Stubbs, on the other hand, gives us far more than what it took to establish newly recognized connections between other languages. There is significant meat that demands consideration, not simple satire that misses the point of what the comparative method is all about.

From Gad’s quote:

Jeff Lindsay wrote:.....Stubbs, on the other hand, gives us far more than what it took to establish newly recognized connections between other languages. There is significant meat that demands consideration, not simple satire that misses the point of what the comparative method is all about.

The part bolded by me is what gave me pause, as it doesn’t seem to fit Symmachus’ point:

Symmachus wrote:... But the comparative method does not establish relationships between seemingly disparate languages; it accounts for differences between languages whose relationship one already has good reason to suspect. Done properly, it is a post hoc kind of reasoning, like any empirical exercise. Indo-European linguistics was born when Sir William Jones learned Persian and Sanskrit and began to suspect that they were similar to Latin and Greek, despite surface differences, wide geographical spread, and little history of the sort of contact that would induce large-scale borrowing. Stubbs reverses it, and that is why the reviewer's question that Robertson dismisses—why does pick this group of languages and not some other?—is methodologically devastating to Stubbs's kind of comparative linguistics. What he is doing is not what an Indo-Europeanist or a Semiticist does. He is forcing a theologically derived sense that some ancient Near Eastern languages should have had some influence in the Americas upon the comparative method and then trying to uncover similarities between these languages that no one would otherwise consider related(beyond the reductive fact that all human languages are ultimately related on some level).

That mopologist problem of inserting the conclusion into the starting assumptions strikes again.

Jeff Lindsay has written a response to the various responses to Robertson's response re: Hansen's response to Stubbs, which Robertson responded to in the context of responding to those responding to his response to Roger's review of Stubbs.

On a side note, if you want to comment there, the rules state:

enter your civil, intelligent comments here. Insults are discouraged.

From the body of his blog entry, however:

One critic guffawed at the idea...

Civil and intelligent....?

Jeff Lindsay wrote:Unfortunately, Brad, the 20-minute exercise seems to miss the strength of Stubbs’ work and his appropriate and detailed data from the comparative method. It’s not about conjuring up a random change to make any two words seem related, but in demonstrating the existence of plausible rules that each apply to multiple examples in a meaningful way with predictive power.

So for the section you copied from p. 77, Stubbs was illustrating a sound change of “intervocalic -r- became -y-/-i- in non-initial positions” with examples from the proposed Semitic-kw infusion. Changing -r- to -y- or -i- is not a random rule to try to force a Semitic word into Uto-Aztecan, but a very plausible sound change that occurs in other language families. Stubbs gives the helpful example of “Proto-Mayan *r > y in most of Q’anjobalan, Tzeltalan, Cholan, and Yucatecan (Campbell 1977,
97-100).” He shows several examples of this sound change for the Semitic-kw infusion and notes that many other examples of -r- > -y- “abound throughout” the volume. A related issue is the sound change discussed first on p. 4 of “Clusters with -r- as 2nd consonant show -Cr- > -Cy-, especially -gr-, -qr- > -ky-, or -gra / -qra > Hopi -kya.” These are reasonable sound changes, reflecting the kind of things that can happen naturally in speech, and are supported with multiple examples.

I don’t think your satire offers anything that can be taken as a serious proposal to evaluate in the first place under the comparative method. While it may be impossible to prove that United Airlines mukki did not have some influence from Latin’s mortus, when it comes to the comparative method, there’s nothing to evaluate. Adding “artus” = narrow, close, confined to compare with *ikkaC for “carrying net” doesn’t help much, in my opinion.

Stubbs, on the other hand, gives us far more than what it took to establish newly recognized connections between other languages. There is significant meat that demands consideration, not simple satire that misses the point of what the comparative method is all about.

First, I have to assume he was tired when he wrote the underlined sentence, because I am sure he does not drink. I would have thought it self-evident that the idea that Latin influenced Uto-Aztecan is not serious, or at least not a serious proposal. The point was to illustrate one problem (in addition to some others I have described on this thread and the other) with Stubbs' method.

Second, I think Lindsay missed the part of my entry that had Latin rete (= "net") from that root. As he does not drink, I'm puzzled that Lindsay thinks that " adding artus” = narrow, close, confined to compare with *ikkaC for “carrying net” doesn’t help much, in my opinion." I agree, except I don't see how it's more outlandish than some of the semantic elasticity that Stubbs relies on in his correspondences.

For example, there is Aramaic pagrā (=body) and Hopi pïïkya (=skin, fur). There is a Semitic word for "flea" that he connects with an Uto-Aztecan root for "jackrabbit" (entry 724). At 617 he pairs an Aramaic word for "chin, beard" with a Uto-Aztecan root for "mouth." The Hebrew adverb for "downward" he connects to a verb "to fall" ; the Syriac word for "ditch" he pairs with some United Airlines word for "valley." Nevermind how Syriac got to Costa Rica in the 7th century BC when it had yet to develop as a dialect of Aramaic—are ditches and valleys really that related? Is a chin a mouth? Is skin the body? Is a flea a jackrabbit (I guess if a horse can be a tapir...)? They are in the same semantic field in a vague way, but it's hard to imagine how they could be borrowed with such drastic shifts of meaning. It would be one thing if these were abstract terms, but few people, I suspect, would look at a jackrabbit and say, "kind of reminds me of a flea" or the other way around. And there are a lot like these in the book. It's fine to be persuaded by them, but it's another thing to pose as if you are hard to persuade in such things.

Third, despite his attempt to establish expertise in "what the comparative method is all about," he is muddying the waters here. I assume it is ignorance because I am certain that he does not drink. But are we talking about sound change or borrowing (his word for that is "infusion" here, I suppose)? If it is borrowing, then sound change is an irrelevant category. Since another Stubbs supporter (Robertson) keeps using the example of French and English, I will stick to that: in any of the several waves in which English borrowed significantly from French, it did not induce sound changes in English. Robertson's repeated point (which I think he uses in misleading way to support Stubbs' thesis, but let's humor him) is that English speakers accommodated French words to the English phonological system then current. Pronouncing a borrowed word according to the sound system of your own language is not sound change over a period of time because by definition nothing is changing and it's not over a period of time. Sound change is when sounds change over a period of time. For example, English used to have a fricative -ch- sound (as you sometimes here in pretentious pronunciation of "BaCH"), but it developed in different ways into other sounds or disappeared but affected neighboring sounds. That is sound change through time. It is traceable. The comparative method, is a technique for tracing sound change, among other things. It's relevance for borrowing is largely to help determine whether something is borrowed.

Fourth, this is a bad series of sentences:

He shows several examples of this sound change for the Semitic-kw infusion and notes that many other examples of -r- > -y- “abound throughout” the volume. A related issue is the sound change discussed first on p. 4 of “Clusters with -r- as 2nd consonant show -Cr- > -Cy-, especially -gr-, -qr- > -ky-, or -gra / -qra > Hopi -kya.” These are reasonable sound changes, reflecting the kind of things that can happen naturally in speech, and are supported with multiple examples.

I will let slide that reasonableness is not a feature in determining sound changes, but assuming we are talking about sound change, then, it doesn't matter that they "abound." Nor is does it matter that they are "multiple." What matters is that exceptions should not exist. Since Robertson mentioned Grimm's Law, I'll use that: the change whereby what had been P in proto-Indo-European became F in Germanic languages, T became TH, and K (or C if you like) become that fricative KH (or CH) sound was total. It didn't just "abound" and that weren't just "multiple examples." In the same way, the fricative "ch" sound that used to exist in English doesn't still exist except perhaps in some wild and barbarous parts of the Hebrides where unfortunately, I hear, some people drink. It's completely gone otherwise. Exceptions to Grimm's Law are few but are themselves explainable by a conditioning factor that is itself TOTAL across the language family and had to do with the accent—but this second law (Verner's Law) wasn't simply invented to explain the exceptions (which is what Stubbs often appears to do). Doing that might yield consistency, perhaps, but it wouldn't be based on evidence. No, Verner's Law is based on evidence using the comparative method: what Karl Verner figured out was that the apparent exceptions to Grimm's Law happened in parts of words whose cognates in a related language received an accent in the distant past. He compared languages.

Now, Stubb's laws (or is it rules? Is it sound change or a phonological system that he is describing?) are not total. For instance, 527 connects Hebrew bārāq (="lightning") with a reconstructed Uto-Aztecan form *pïrok in order to provide evidence for the change of Semitic b > United Airlines p. Ok. But look at what law Lindsay just quoted at my Latin satire: "Stubbs was illustrating a sound change of “intervocalic -r- became -y-/-i- in non-initial positions” with examples from the proposed Semitic-kw infusion. Changing -r- to -y- or -i- is not a random rule to try to force a Semitic word into Uto-Aztecan, but a very plausible sound change that occurs in other language families. Stubbs gives the helpful example of “Proto-Mayan *r > y in most of Q’anjobalan, Tzeltalan, Cholan, and Yucatecan (Campbell 1977,
97-100).”

Why didn't the *r in *pïrok turn into a *y, as his rule (or is it law?) would predict? Ah, see, that's a problem. How to solve it? How to apply a "Verner's Law"-type answer to explain the exception? Stubbs' solution is to invent two dialects, which he calls Semitic-p and Semitic-kw, and put the supposed exception to his rule in a different dialect. What evidence is there for these dialects? None, so it's not like Verner's Law, which had external comparative evidence. Stubbs relies on consistency instead, but consistency can be misleading. If you invent a set of rules (or laws), and there are exceptions, by definitions the exceptions are already consistent in one fact: they don't meet your set. If you propose or invent a second rule to explain the exceptions, it should at least explain all of them (as Verner's Law does), and it really should have external evidence (again, as Verner's Law does). But when you have to invent multiples layers of rules that have no evidentiary support, you can't then go and claim that consistency simply because you've solved them all—they have to be solved all in the same way.

Here's Stubbs attempt at a rule for this invented dialect to explain the exceptions to the first rule:

In United Airlines’s Sem-p, Semitic intervocalic -r- usually remains -r- in TaraCahitan (TrC) and Numic and NUA, though often represented as PUA *-t- which is pronounced -r- intervocalically:

Usually? Often? And whether -t- is pronounced -r- intervocalically is irrelevant if you are trying to explain a phoneme, and in this case he is admitting that the underlying phoneme is a -t- (the pronunciation is an allophone; think of American English butter: the underlying phoneme represented by the -tt- is -t-, but in American English it is pronounced as a -d-. But even Americans pronounce it as -t- when speaking slowly, which tells you that the underlying phoneme in their minds is a -t-).

He has made a rule about -r- between vowels that doesn't hold up, so invents a new dialect where the rule doesn't apply, but even then there are exceptions that aren't explained. That's not much of a rule.

Speaking of twerking Rs, he has the following correspondence (rule? law?):

Loss of Semitic final -r, without effect on the preceding vowel:

Then follow a few examples.

But note entry 1484:

Syriac dwr ‘to go round’; Syriac duur ‘a circle’; Aramaic(J) ‘to form a circle or enclosure’; Hebrew dwr ‘to stack in a circle’; Arabic dwr ‘turn, revolve, move in a circle, walk or go about, roam, wander about’ United Airlines *tur ‘whirl, roll, twist’: SP turu’ ‘whirl’; CU turú-kwi ‘roll, roll over, vt’; CU turú-’ni ‘be a whirlwind, dust-devil’; WMU turú-’ni ‘be a whirlwind, dust-devil’; Hopi tori(k-) ‘get twisted’; Hopi tori-k-na ‘twist, vt’.

Well, note that -r in the reconstructed United Airlines form looks present to me. So what context is the final -r not lost? Stare at all of those words long enough and you will find a pattern. I can see one. But does that mean that I have discovered an operative rule?

Fifth, my example was from a single language. If I were to expand this to Indo-European + one more language (as Stubbs take Semitic + Egyptian), I am sure I could easily find many more correspondences, especially if I can be very loose in semantics, if I can invent rules to suit my reconstructions without external confirmation, and if I can ignore the rules from time to time. They just "usually" and "often" have to work.