--- Piotr Gasiorowski <
gpiotr@...> wrote:
> As the old dictum goes, "Sanskrit consonants + Greek
> vowels = PIE", which of course mostly reflects the
> traditional bias of IE scholars.
*****GK: Is this traditional bias justified?*****
(PG)All the IE
> languages directly attested in the second millennium
> look more archaic than most of the younger
> languages, which is hardly a surprise, but on the
> other hand all of them had undergone deep
> transformations between reconstructable PIE and the
> attested stages. As usual in such cases, there are
> too many factors involved for objective criteria of
> similarity to be definable or worth defining,
*****GK: This is not a satisfactory position. After
all people should know on what basis they have
"reconstructed" PIE, and what factors are involved in
the "deep transformations" you mention. If
arbitrariness rules over objectivity in one direction,
why should we assume it did/does not also operate in
the other direction? And if one cannot adequately
judge how far a particular language has diverged from
PIE how is it possible to feel confident that one has
actually "reconstructed" PIE?******
(PG)and
> the intuitive assessment of "closeness" differs from
> linguist to linguist.
*****GK: Surely one is not condemned here to endlessly
wallow in the "everyone is entitled to their own
opinion" morass? Surely there must be a way to move
beyond "intuitive opinion". Are there not some
positions which can be clearly demonstrated to be
right or wrong? Or is the situation in the scientific
community of linguists that hopeless? *****
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