From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 12972
Date: 2002-04-01
----- Original Message -----From: Dean_AndersonSent: Monday, April 01, 2002 3:06 PMSubject: [tied] Re: Misra, Bryant and Indigenous-Nationalist Conflation> In his refutation of Misra, Hock makes a clear distinction between the claim that Sanskrit is PIE and the claim that a relative of it is PIE. The reason that it makes a difference is that it is linguistically essentially impossible for Sanskrit to be PIE whereas for a relation or parent of Sanskrit to be PIE is merely highly improbable unless you wish to revoke the Law of Palatals and other linguistic laws that have been accepted for over a century!Well, the "parent" in question would not be anything more distant from Sanskrit than Proto-Indo-Iranian after the Law of Palatals (to use mainstream nomenclature), which is precisely why I said that it was close enough Sanskrit to make no difference. Accept that, and even the equation PIE = Sanskrit is no longer "essentially impossible", since the critical difficulties have already been ignored!I agree with the rest of your posting and want to emphasise once again that I reject Misra's rewriting of IE linguistics for purely formal reasons (discussed by Hock and partly re-discussed here). If anything I said distracted the discussion from the real topic, I regret it and promise to be even more puristic about not mixing science with ideology than I already am :)Piotr