> The 1.sg. pronoun is perhaps the least likely thing to be borrowed
(not
> impossible, mind you, just extreeeeemely improbable).
I am aware of this. Yet in a special case of long-term coexistence
(not actual borrowing but more like mixing of two languages), it is
not to be excluded.
I'm surprised you
> believe historical linguistics to be a discipline where anything
goes.
I do not.
> Proto-Slavic, Proto-Indo-European etc. are not arbitrary constructs
but
> what one might call logical necessities.
Yet they are fictions which can always be corrected. Not like actual
evidence.
They are not directly
> observable but without them linguistic facts would not make any
sense.
I do not disagree with that. Yet what makes the facts make sense are
the rules. Rules are established based on logical comparisons and
are therefore abstractions. The appearance of new evidence may show
the abstractions were wrongly applied to reality.
> _Inependently_ reconstructed sound changes (not something "thought
up"
> to explain just <azU>) make PSl. *azU (and attested OCS (j)azU)
regular
> reflexes of PIE *h1eg^om, for which again there is a lot of
evidence
> from various quarters.
Linguists do look for a rule to justify a development. Which may
become a process in itself and for itself sometimes.
The Iranian reflex (also regular) _happens_ to be
> similar,
And the similarity in the case of az happens to appear ONLY in
Bulgarian. Just as many other things "happen to be so" in BG. If
Bulgarians came from a region where Iranian languages were spoken
heavily, I do not see why you would prefer the theory to the
historical evidence. I would at least want to reconsider something.
partly because Iranian and Slavic share some developments (in
> particular the Satem shift of *g^ > z,
And not only because of this, in fact. Which may explain why
Bulgarians and Slavs may have mixed various gramm. features and
vocabulary readily. Especially because the languages did not deviate
from one another so much at this time. So the question would be not
how to explain everything through Slavic, but how to say which is
what.
As a would-be linguist you would benefit more from trying to
> understand such things
It is not a particularly big deal to understand such things. Many
people learn them by heart without any understanding. Yet one of the
worst things I could do is take those "things" and apply them
indiscriminately to other languages, sometimes in conflict with
actual evidence.
than from trying to negate them for the sake of
> an idée fixe.
I am not sure all scientists I meet in my environment share this
view. You are free to call it an idee fixe, to me it is a topic of
research.
Eva