On 2008-01-29 18:20, fournet.arnaud wrote:
> Absolute *lie*
Please mind your language, young man. Like any other human, I may be
wrong from time to time, but I don't deliberately lie to my fellow list
members.
> Sanscrit's system was the obvious starting point.
> and Greek morphology
> plus Anatolian have entailed little adjustements.
> That's how it happened.
It's a gross oversimplification. In the early days of IE studies it was
accepted that Sanskrit was the most ancient and most conservative
language of the family, so of course it was almost identified with PIE.
It took scholars a few decades to realise how wrong they were and to
de-Sanskritise PIE to a large degree. The old saying that PIE = Greek
vowels + Sanskrit consonants is neither literally true nor even roughly
accurate.
Piotr