mkelkar2003 wrote:
> What is wrong with Mario Alinei's Paleolithic Continuity Theory? It if
> after all one linguist's view. Surely, many IEL linguists have many
> views.
True, but the differences concern debatable details, not the whole
conceptual frame. The foundations of the PIE reconstruction are pretty
solid (and have always been so since the 1870s). Alinei's theory is an
eccentric case, definitely outside the area of consensus. At the same
time, it's too naive and too deficient in sound linguistic scholarship
to be regarded as a bold paradigm shift. As Bohr said to Pauli, "Your
theory is crazy. Sadly, it's not crazy enough to be believed." We have
discussed "palaeolithic continuity" both here and elsewhere and I'm not
going to waste any more time on it.
> How does IEL decide upon who is on the right and who is on the
> wrong track?
Come on, who is to know that if not the specialists? Of course they are
only human and their collective wisdom, though based on a long line of
past scholarship and their own experience or serious research, is not
absolutely infallible, but it's obviously superior to the opinion of lay
people or of individual dissenters with an idée fixe.
> This is the precise question posed in the monograph; is
> IEL an ideology or what, for example, assuming invasions everywhere to
> explain language change?
Misrepresenting the linguists' view, as usual. Language change happens
everywhere all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with
invasions or other historical events. Sorry, but it isn't the linguists
who have this ideological obsession with invasionism and anti-invasionism.
> Is this the only model to view language
> evolution?
>
> S. Kalyanaraman
IE linguistics is not a universal model of language evolution. It is the
historical study of _just one_ language family, using the methods of
general historical linguistics. I've repeated this ad nauseam in my
numerous discussions with S.K., but apparently to no avail.
Piotr