Re: [tied] A moment of Awe

May I bring you back down to earth with a bump and point out that there are no fluent speakers of PIE around today. We can’t even be sure on the pronunciation of PIE. Can you say **for sure** that there were voiced aspirates in PIE? No, you can’t, and no one can. You little message was ridiculous.

-----Original Message-----
From: cybalist@yahoogroups.com [mailto:cybalist@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of C. Darwin Goranson
Sent: 29 May 2005 16:40
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [tied] A moment of Awe

Step back for a moment and consider what paleolinguistics has
accomplished. We can speak in tongues dead for thousands upon
thousands of years, and nigh-upon fluently at that. Were a Proto-IE
scholar to be taken back several thousand years BCE to the
Pontic-Caspian Steppes, he or she might well be able to converse with
the nomadic cultures living there. Think - 7000 years later perhaps,
and we can now speak that very language as though it had never died
out. Of course, what we speak is not exactly the same - most likely,
what we view currently as PIE is a dialect of the true tongue - but
that we can speak just as people thousands of generations ago did is
an awesome thought.

(that being said, what would be the Proto-IE equivilant of Ex Libris?
And how would I write that the book is for C. Darwin Goranson in
Proto-IE (the transliteration of it, that is). This is just a question
of common use)