glen gordon wrote:
> M. Kelkar:
>> These views are in line with those of Antoine
>> Meillet. There was never a PIE language and hence
>> no sense looking for a "PIE homeland."
>
> Your thinking is muddled. Yes, there never was a
> single PIE language. No, there _is_ a PIE 'homeland'.
> Still confused?
>
> It's the same thing as particle-wave duality in
> physics. If we can't tell whether a particle is
> really a particle or if it's a wave, does that mean
> it doesn't exist in any location at all? (Hint: "Yes"
> is the wrong answer.)
>
>
> = gLeN
This analogy is not very convincing and not too close so let's leave it out.
Once again, there was a single PIE language, "idiome" (Meillet) or a
dialect. Just like there was a single Proto-Romance language (Latin of
Rome), a single Proto-Modern-Greek dialect (the Byzantine koine or, in the
worst instance, the Hellenic koine), a single Proto-Indic (Vedic), a single
Proto-Slavic, a single Proto-Germanic... so a single Proto-Indo-European, a
single Proto-Altaic, a single Proto-Nostratic, a single Proto-Afro-Caucasian
(my own term for the ancestor of Nostratic, Dene-Caucasian and Afro-Asiatic,
see Starostin) and a single Proto-"Out-of-African" (I mean the ancestral
dialect of all languages of Eurasia, Australia, the Americas, and some
African languages, which was spoken by people who crossed the Red Sea some
80 thousand years ago). We have no basis for claiming contrary. And if you
know such a basis, tell me about it.
Grzegorz J.
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