Re: Odp: A SinoTibetan-Vasconic Comparison: A very, very, very, ve

drogi Piotr,

ty mluvil/es' :
I find your long dispute very interesting (and I'm glad to see
it improving in terms of civility and mutual respect). Excuse my
interruption concerning a trivial point. You rely rather heavily
on various reconstructive interpretations proposed by various
experts. ALL reconstruction is speculative, but of course there
is a scale of relative plausibility. Even the best books on IE (an
exceptionally well-explored family) may contradict one another
on some moot points -- they can't all be right about everything. This
holds a fortiori of families like Austronesian, not to mention
such loose


In fact, I cited reconstructions of AC only. There is a relative
consensus as to the main features of this reconstruction. I use
basically Baxter's reconstruction, which is based on ideas by Jaxontov,
Pulleyblank and Haudricourt, with emendations by Sagart and personnal
opinions as to the particular reconstruction of individual words.
Anyway, the reconstruction and the MC transcription I give can easily
be translated into Starostin's system, for instance.
I gave no reconstruction of TB because there are none that deserves
such a name. Besides, although AN has been quite thoroughly worked
through, I cited only individual words in existing languages because
the reconstructions based on taiwanese languages (Tsuchida 1976) are
far from satisfying.

Guilaume