Re: [tied] Substrates in Reconstructed-PIE itself??

There's an assumption in your email, O anonymous poster, that I would like
to question.

You are quite right to give the careful wording "to form what could well be
the Proto-Indo-Europeans". Here you leave open the possibility that they
were not. But the rest of your posting, and the question at the end assumes
that the scenario you describe did indeed happen. In fact we have no such
evidence at all. But we do have dialect differences that seem
irreconcilable for PIE, so that we have to suggest a cluster of closely
related dialects, not a single monolithic language. Is that the sort of
thing you mean?

Also I don't think "substrate" would be the right word for what you are
asking. We have borrowed words (e.g. the words for 6 and 7) and we have
dialect variation, as in any normal human language. But in addition there
are suggestions of pre-PIE words that appear in PIE languages. This is
sometimes called "old european", and the clues people look for are the
phoneme /b/ (e.g. the word barbaros in Greek), affricates, sibilants other
than /s/, geminates, and so on.

Suggestions have included the words that become English apple, hazel,
alder, cannabis, woad, mattock, axe, silver, cat, plough, and can (=
container); and German hemb (< *kamico-), dorf ~ Latin trab- "beam"; and
Latin caballus, salix, sagitta.

You'll find some other suggestion in JES 17, 1989, by Sorin Paliga.

Oh, and there is nothing rude in saying "The Ukraine". I believe the word
means "south", and like a number of placenames with "the", it is simply a
geographic term. Most of them lost the "the" over time. By the way, do
you say "Netherlands" or "The Netherlands"? "Hague" or "The Hague"?

Peter