mkelkar2003 wrote:
>
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Pavel Adamek" <a.da_mek0@...> wrote:
>
>>>Please refer to the following article by Nicholas Kazanas
>>>
>>>"Sanskrit and Proto Indo European,"
>>>
>>><http://www.omilosmeleton.gr/english/documents/SPIE.pdf>
>>>
>>Do not waste time reading it.
>>Even a laic can see that the author talks about something
>>he does not understand.
>>
>> P.A.
>
>
> I qualify as a laic but still do not see your point.
There's quite a lot of nonsense already in the first paragraph, duly
developed into more nonsense in the rest of the essay and culminating in
the pseudophilosophical musings that fill the concluding paragraphs. A
full rebuttal of Kazanas would be a daunting task -- not because his
views are difficult to reject, but because he present them chaotically,
without the kind of expository discipline expected in academic
linguistics, and because a layman would first need a grasp of the
standard theory to understand why Kazanas is plainly wrong most of the
time (especially when he draws on Misra's eccentric opinions about PIE).
To prove his fundamental incompetence one could list obvious blunders
(insisting, e.g. that Gk. eleutHeros and leikHo: have something to do
with each other) or his embarrassingly naive comments on phonetic
matters, which show that he's out of his depth in the field of general
phonetics and has neither done any required reading nor even bothered to
master the correct terminology. But the whole thing is like trying to
explain to a person who knows next to nothing about history and
archaeology why von Däniken is a quack. Kazanas himself has only a very
limited understanding of the theories he proposes to "scrap", which
makes him devote a lot of effort to the futile job of erecting straw men
and then pulling them down.
I did take pains to explain the central fallacy of Misra's (and
Kazanas's) opinions about the PIE vowel system in the discussion on the
IndianCivilization list. You were there at the time, so I see no reason
to go through it once again just because you've forgotten it all. The
relevant postings can be found in the archives. Whatever one's view
about pre-PIE phonology, it was demonstrated already in the 1870s that
Sanskrit developed from an earlier stage with *e, *o and *a as separate
vowels. Neither Misra's incomprehensible refusal to accept the
well-known proof nor Kazanas's ignorance can change that.
Finally, nothing in the PIE linguistic reconstruction depends on
absolute chronologies or on the location of the IE homeland. If the
latter were in Australia or in South Africa, 5000 BC or 400000 BC, the
comparative method would yield the same results. How to correlate
reconstructed languages with ethnic groups, archaeological cultures etc.
is a question for interdisciplinary research.
Piotr