Re: Hercynian (again)

They are loans because there were substrates, but these substrates
have disappeared and their traces are precisely these loans. Don't You
find it circular?
Anyway, circular or not, You can of course defend them
passionately, but please don't treat IE etymologies with different
criteria. If IE etymologies are correct (I don't say: true; we never
know what's true and what's not), they can never be of less value than
any other etymology

2012/2/29, Tavi <oalexandre@...>:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Bhrihskwobhloukstroy
> <bhrihstlobhrouzghdhroy@...> wrote:
>>
>> >> As I said before, it's extremely unlikle, if not possibiliy, that
> ALL
>> >> the reconstructed "PIE" roots could belong to a single
> protolanguage.
>> >
>> > Quantify 'ALL'. For example, it is seriously suggested that a lot
> of the
>> > roots in Pokorny are just coincidences or later or parallel loans.
> If one
>> > aims to list all PIE roots, one will list a lot of non-existent
> roots.
>>
>> If a root is actually a coincidence, then we have even more than
> one root.
>> If a root is a loan, it would be fair to detect the donor language
>> (= 1 find attestations of those very word in one or more non-IE
>> languages, and 2 make it more probable that the direction of the loan
>> has been from non-IE to IE and not vice versa), otherwise the loan
>> hypothesis is weaker than the hereditary one
>>
> Unfortunately, in most cases the source language can't be identified
> because it has become extinct. In fact, most languages have long
> disappeared without being attested in writing, but I'm sure a part of
> them have survived in the form of loanword to other languages. IMHO
> substrate languages are the lumpenproletariat of historical linguistics,
> for the most part being neglected.
> have been much neglected
>
>
>