Steve:
>Oh really? Is Anatolia a linguistic construct? Is 7500BC a
>linguistic construct? Carbon-14 came out of a physics lab.
You're confused. This has nothing to do with proving that a
language existed in Anatolia in 7500 BCE. Last time I checked,
language has no measurable Carbon-14 signature.
Was there a recent breakthrough at the Steve Long Laboratories
that I wasn't aware of? :)
>There is no reason to think that fewer languages from near and
>far were spoken in Anatolia BEFORE written records.
We agree here. I certainly never said or thought the opposite
but the absence of evidence isn't evidence, my dear. None of
what you say shows that some pre-IE was in Anatolia at this time.
Given the earliest historical testimony of the linguistic state
of the area, it rather points to the opposite scenario that PIE
was an interloper in the region with other language groups being
once more widespread, language groups such as Hattic and
Hurro-Urartian.
>There's not one stitch of pure linguistic evidence as to what >language was
>spoken in Anatolia in 3000BC. [... followed by
>pointless, memory-intensive iteration that only serves to
>fill up one's mailbox with extra Kbs ...]
I wouldn't go that far. It's rather likely that Anatolian IE
was present in Anatolia by 3000 BCE, as well as Hattic and
Hurro-Urartian. Archaelogy only tells that people moved about.
It doesn't tell us what words fell from their tongues and never
will.
From logical conclusions about 3000 BCE, we may project
further back to 4000 BCE and so on. It doesn't mean we may be
absolutely correct but we may approximate as best as we can
given the present data at hand. As better data (which could
only be linguistic in nature) comes our way in the future,
our projections will become more precise.
>7. And it follows from the above that there is not one stitch
>of linguistic evidence as to what was spoken in Anatolia in 7500BC.
False logic based on an impressionistic, unquantifiable
statement that there is not one "stitch" of linguistic evidence.
How does one measure a "stitch" scientifically?
- gLeN
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