At 3:11:09 PM on Wednesday, July 7, 2004,
enlil@... wrote:
> The point is whether the COMPLETE lack of lexical vowels
> is normal or abundant in languages around the planet. It's
> definitely not. If it's not abundant or even statistically
> relevant, there's no point reconstructing it for IE...
Depends entirely on the evidence. The fact that something
is rare does not mean that it's excluded from
reconstructions; it just means that the evidence for it has
to be exceptionally good. There's plenty of room for
disagreement on what's good enough -- I'd be *very* hesitant
to reconstruct such a thing even if there is an actual
example -- but you can't exclude it on methodological
grounds.
[...]
Brian