--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "fournet.arnaud" <fournet.arnaud@...>
wrote:
>
> May I know what is your point of view
> about the closest genetic relationship
> of Indo-European with something else ?
>
> What perimeter do you ascribe to "Nostratic" ?
>
I am not particularly interested in macrogroups; not that I don't
think they exist. The pile of stuff I've put in those pages should be
seen on the background of Peter Bellwood (I think it is)'s theory that
all existing language families owe their expansion to the fact that
their founding people/culture adopted agriculture and thus gained an
advantage over the surrounding hunter/gatherer cultures of many
diverse languages, all this happening within the last 10,000 years or
so, which is manageable by the methods of historical linguistics;
since I don't see a similar type of event before that the time horizon
for the split-up of macrofamilies is in principle unbounded, which is
why I prefer to see obvious cognates between language families as
loans, the more so since the adoption of agriculture had to come with
a set of new tools, concepts and the associated words.
Torsten