> Marcantonio, A. - Evidence that most Indo-European lexical reconstructions
are artefacts of the linguistic method of analysis
Thank you for this article. Interesting and annoying. It is right that
these questions be asked; a shame that they cannot be tackled more honestly.
Some of the arguments appear to be not only misleading, but deliberately
deceptive. For example the article talks of "variants" being introduced to
explain attested forms, as if these were merely ad hoc forms. It does not
say that these are very widely attested variants that we might expect on any
IE verb, such as the -n(e)u affix for the present tense. It also ignores
the predictive ability of the model, which was seen most sharply as the
model was being developed. An example here would be the position of the <h>
affricate in Hittite.
I wonder if this idea began as someone searched for something new to write
about, and it has now become his "thing" to get published with? Some of the
points are good, such as the number of LIV roots based on a single language,
but that is already widely known.
Peter