--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...> wrote:
>Yes again. Say a group of people later to become Germanic speaking,
>decided to adopt an existing IE langauge becuase it was an important
>language of the time, just like English is today. But they adopted it
>with their existing accent. So pater became fadder etc. A Bangala
>speaker pronunces Douglas as Doglas. This could have happend just
>centuries before the Germanic family became known to history (about
>1000 years ago?). So comparativist can't simply through Latin,
>Sanskrit, Greek and Germanic into a kitchen sink and then try to trace
>a point of origin.
>The comparative method is no doubt useful to trace the history of
>Indo-Aryan or Romance langauges because there exists a Rig Veda or an
>early Church literature in Latin. This is not the case across the
>board in all the families.
>M. Kelkar
As one of the people, that I defended on this forum your right to have
and to freely present your own opinions here...I need to say that your
assertion above is a kind of "wishfull thinking" with no clear
understanding of what a MODEL is and why a model is good or not...
A MODEL is a MODEL, it's never 'the reality'...so to talk about the
FACT that It WAS or NOT sometimes in the PAST a single common IE
language (prefering not to have a common one :)) ...doesn't add any
added value here....
Because, finally, it doesn't matter to much what that reality was: the
current IE MODEL is GOOD because it explaines (more a less, well) the
evolutions of the vocabulary of a lot of languages: the IE ones....
If you want to postulate another model...do it: but please take in this
case, word by word, root by root, as Pokorny did with 'his roots', and
explains coherently for each root different borrowing paths with their
logical timeframes etc...nobody can stop you to do this job...
But if you will not start to do this : all you have said above, serves
to nothing: a model is good or bad not because the reality was 'really'
that one (because the model is one thing, and 'the reality' is
something else) but because it useful: and the IE Model is usefull
because it can be applied COHERENTLY against several thousands words in
different languages, words representing its facts.
Please trust me that only this reason and nothing else makes this Model
so powerful today.
Marius