Kalyanaraman:
>Why not? Did IE start from a vacuum? What was the state of language >prior
>to the last glaciation?
Let's not be crazy. Languages don't start in a vacuum. However,
IE is certainly dated to around 4000 BCE north of the Black Sea
because of things like the interaction of IE and later languages
with FinnoUgric and Kartvelian. Agricultural/pastoral terms also
show that IE could *never* have existed during or right after the
Ice Age.
My view, derived from thoughts by Bomhard, is that the ancestor
to IE was in Central Asia around 9000 BCE (which I refer to as
ProtoSteppe and Bomhard refers to as Eurasiatic). If we're talking
15,000 BCE, only Nostratic existed - the ancestor of not only IE
but also Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic, Gilyak, EskimoAleut,
ChukchiKamchatkan, Dravidian, Sumerian, Kartvelian and AfroAsiatic
as well.
Hope that helps.
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>
>Meaning when? You can't do IE linguistics with reference to
>pre-proto-proto-IE times.
>
> > What is the starting set of IE words? Did they have 'farming' words?
>
>Plenty of them, which shows the IEs to have been a Neolithic culture.
>
> > Or, 'glacier' words?
>
>None, as far as I know.
>
>Piotr
>
>
>
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