Re: [tied] Re: Gimbutas

----- Original Message -----

From: Glen Gordon

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2000 12:39 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Gimbutas

Glen,

 

You got carried away. The evidence for Nostratic is *not* direct, unless you happen to know of some Nostratic inscriptions or the like. As for the etymologically obscure part of Germanic vocabulary, it's reasonable to adopt "non-IE" as the optimal null hypothesis about its origin. Why? Because it can be easily falsified for individual words (by showing that this or that term has IE cognates). It's difficult to prove that a word is *not* IE (after all, it may have been lost everywhere except in Gmc.), unless you can convincingly show that it's a loanword (e.g. from Uralic or Afroasiatic) -- which, for Germanic words, is difficult to say the least -- so the conjecture that those words are IE is not a viable null. But a null hypothesis is only a starting point for further research. People who compose glossaries of a non-attested substrate on such a shaky basis can be accused of jumping to conclusions.

 

Piotr

 

 

Glen wrote:

Now what happened to good ol' skeptical Hakan who was really fighting the (very remote) Nostratic relationship of IE to AA? Suddenly I see you entertaining a supposed hidden language stuffed up way in Scandinavia that, unlike Nostratic, has no direct evidence of its existence at all. Your devil's advocate must be on vacation :)