--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "S.Kalyanaraman" <kalyan97@...>
wrote:
>
> Samskr.tam was a reconstruction based on a rule framed by the
> predecessors of Pa_n.ini. The base was Prakrit (what linguists
> may call proto-indic).
Sanskrit is NOT based on the prakrits, and nobody who knows
what they're talking about calls the prakrits "proto-indic".
Neither was Sanskrit a reconstruction of any sort. Panini
himself spoke a form of Old Indo-Aryan.
> I am trying to understand the Indo- in Indo-European.
It's not difficult to understand. The Indo-European family
includes most of the languages spoken in Eurasia in a span
beginning in India at one end, and ending in Europe at the
other. That's all there is to it. I'd rather it had been
named something like "Eurasiatic Major" or the like, though
I doubt that you'd be on this list if it had.
> Maybe, I am not straight-jacketed by the rules of the game
> of this discipline called linguistics.
Don't flatter yourself. What you're not straight-jacketed
by is logic. What you _are_ straight-jacketed by is an
ethnocentric and nationalistic agenda, and an unrealistic
fantasy of India's past. Again, you ought to at least first
_understand_ the rules of linguistics before you presume to
reject them as a "straight-jacket".
> I hope some people have seen my 'swadesh' list of 8000+
> semantic clusters in the Indian Lexicon.
I've seen it, but it means nothing because you've failed
to demonstrate any kind of system of sound correspondences
to account for the relationships you imagine exist, or even
tried for that matter. As many similarities as think you've
found, if not more, can occur by chance alone. The system
of classification into families for the languages in your
list, but which you reject, accounts for the similarities
by demonstrating a number of systematic sound correspondences
far in excess of what is statistically probable by chance.
Until you can do the same, no one but the linguistically
illiterate is going to take your word lists seriously. May
I ask you Dr. Kalyanaraman, do you understand the concept of
systematic sound correspondences, and understand how the
demonstration of them is essential to prove a relationship
between two languages?
David