From: tgpedersen
Message: 59357
Date: 2008-06-21
>http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/~pah1003/loe/Eng/Papers/AbstractsTalks/TalkAbstractHeggarty080514.pdf
>
>What is a turner?
> "When reconstruction leads either to unhelpful concepts like `king',
> or to other meanings more convenient for
> their cultural constructs, linguistic palaeontologists pick and
> choose. In the first case, they explicitly recognise
> semantic uncertainty and retreat to the vaguer `ruler'; in the
> second, they insist that the reconstruction could
> only have meant their preferred `culturally strong' interpretation,
> such as `wheel' (not just `turner').
> They cannot have it both ways; indeed their own logic can just asHow?
> well be turned upon its head.
> A number of their supposedly key Indo-European technologicalThat's right, and linguists discuss it in their papers etc, which is
> reconstructions can in fact be better explained by a scenario in
> which the proto-language had already begun diverging before the
> invention, not after it (Heggarty, May 2008).