Re: Stacking up on standard works

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <bm.brian@...> wrote:

>
> No one thinks that PIE as we reconstruct it is an entirely
> accurate description of any language actually spoken, even
> as far as it goes; it is simply the best approximation yet
> produced to the most recent common ancestor of the IE
> languages, which was indeed a real language. Questions
> of absolute chronology and homeland are to a very
> considerable extent independent of the linguistic
> reconstruction.
>

IMHO the "most recent common ancestor of the IE languages" was actually
spoken in a remote past, possibly in the Gravettian as suggested by
Villar. This "Paleo-IE" fragmented into several dialects in the
Mesolithic, which afterwards interacted among them and also with other
languages in the Neolithic. And finally, one of these paleo-dialects
underwent a rapid expansion in the Chalcolithic and the Bronze Age,
becoming a superstrate to the other varieties. Thus the IE family is the
result of the combination of an extraordinary long development phase
with a rapid expansion ("explosive" in Villar's words) in more recent
times.

This way, the "PIE" reconstructed by IE-ists would be more like a
snapshot of this later stage, with many of its features reflecting the
paleo-dialect of the Steppes while other are remains of the other
paleo-varieties which survived in the historical languages.

> > I've throughly read Mallory and Anthony, Brian.
>
> That's nice for an overview of the archaeological evidence,
> but my question was about the *language*.
>

Interestingly, Rodríguez Adrados, who has proposed a stratified PIE
model, actually supports the Kurgan theory.

> I have no idea by what strange mental contortions you
> persuade yourself that such an inference makes sense. It
> obviously makes no difference to the descendants of a
> language L when a lexical item in L entered L's ancestry.
>

I think there's a little misundertanding here. What I meant is a
significant part of say, the Latin lexicon can't be "inherited" from
"PIE" (in the way this concept is traditionally understood) but yet it's
of IE stock. IMHO this the imprint left by one or more language
replacement processes in the past.

> Which appears to have very little to do with linguistics and
> a great deal to do with getting the conclusions that you've
> already decided that you want. Despite explicit invitations
> to do so, you've yet to offer any evidence of a principled
> method underlying your comparisons.
>

On the contrary, you're speaking about of one of my *unfinished*
research projects (off-topic for this list), while you've apparently
ignored some of my last contributions:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/69232
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/69235