Re: [tied] Dating PIE's Ancestors (Piotr vs Renfrew)

From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
Message: 19976
Date: 2003-03-17

On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:

[...]
>
> > Renfrew needs no such deep date for *PIE, because he is (in most of
> > what he says) not placing PIE - the linguistic reconstructed language
> > - but rather placing the ORIGINS of indo-european languages. Those
> > origins would have happened before PIE, unless PIE dropped out of the
> > sky.
[...]

This may be just the mediation we need. It may be what Renfrew should have
written but didn't, much as it is what Gamkrelidze should have written but
didn't (the glottalic theory being fine for a prestage of PIE, but no good
any more for PIE itself), and what Saussure did write but shouldn't have
(the laryngeals being not pre-PIE, but still present in PIE).

Jens