Re: Misra, Bryant and Indigenous-Nationalist Conflation

"Dean_Anderson" <dean_anderson@...> wrote:
<<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!>>

Piotr replied:
<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.>

"Dean_Anderson" <dean_anderson@...> replied
<If it were going to be PIE, it would *have* to be more distant and go
farther back than PIIranian. Perhaps, I should have said "great-grandparent.">

Which I guess means - since we don't know WHERE the earliest innovations in
IE happened or how they moved - that India MIGHT be the PIE homeland, even if
Sanskrit is many innovations removed from PIE. Or more precisely BECAUSE of
that degree of separation. But of course we can't be certain.

Now, is ANYBODY out there satisfied with this kind of wishy-washy statement?
Of course not. We want absolute answers and we want them NOW!

S. Long