Re[4]: [tied] GLEN AND ANATOLIA IN 7500BC

"Brian M. Scott" writes:
<<You're working awfully hard to miss the point. My statement is about the
collection of all cases, not about individual cases. I doubt very much that
you can show that there's a
tie in even a majority of cases. Pointing to a 'nice' case as if it were
typical is a waste of everyone's time.>>

It's not a waste of time for those who care to look at all the evidence
before they make their judgments. If should you should start caring to do
that, there is evidence you may want to look at. One of those pieces of
evidence, suggested by work of archaeologists like Sherratt and Whittier is
that high language-material culture correlations occur in historic times
where extensive economic networks have developed and persisted. I mention
again the Jared Diamond review of the evidence that the spread of most major
languages can be correlated with the spread of food production, which is
evident in the material record. (Jared Diamond is a Mallory advocate by the
way.) Now you can dismiss this if you think you would be wasting "everyone's
time". Or you can consider it with an open mind and see if it affects your
point of view.

"Brian M. Scott" writes:
<<I know that you neither understand nor trust comparative reconstruction,
but that's not the place to attack palaeolinguistics.>>

Well I do understand that that the comparative only creates a relative
chronology. Absolute time and place are a completely different issues and
any reconstruction needs "extra-linguistic" evidence to place itself. And
therein lies the rub. There is no way to set time and place unless you have
material references, which is why Anthony has worked so hard to find material
evidence of "domesticated" horses in the Ukraine and now beyond the Urals.
And why to my knowledge he has never looked in central Europe. The material
evidence is critical to that argument. His horse evidence in the Ukraine is
now extremely cultural - horses buried with other "domesticates". Of course,
if Anthony were to follow the domestication of cattle, he might come up with
a different result.

<<You've done better in the past, pointing to the obvious difficulty that
words' meanings can change (e.g., 'elk'). But while caution is indicated,
there are some controls; see, for instance, Mallory's endnote on the subject
in _In Search of the Indo-Europeans_.>>

Mallory's "controls" do not address the fundamental problem -- the "shared
words" he refers to are all thousands of years younger than the reconstructed
form. One does not have to challenge the comparative method to challenge the
conclusions. Especially since many of the sound changes the words show can't
be dated either -- that's the limitation of the comparative method when
applied beyond written records. The sound changes could have occurred long
after dispersal and represent nothing but later changes to later loan words
between related languages. (I also love Mallory's use of phrases like
"attested as Proto-Indo-European *bhergo" (p. 275). Attested by what field
linguist?)

Steve Long