Re: Ligurian

From: Bhrihskwobhloukstroy
Message: 69498
Date: 2012-05-03

2012/5/1 Tavi <oalexandre@...>
 
>
AFAIK, nobody has ever insinuated Iberian could be an IE language. In fact, it looks more similar to Basque than to any other language. (...)

Bhrihskwobhloukstroy:
   Precisely. You already know that I find convincing the proposal of an IE affiliation of Basque and therefore of Iberian. You already know that You more than strongly disagree. I've said that just in order to explain why I'd insinuated Iberian could be an IE language



> Apart from Etruscan, whose arrival in Etruria may be relatively
> late (according to the everlasting debate about its origin from
> Anatolia - be it an Indo-European language or not), the linguistic
> colonization of Europe in Prehistory is in no way a single-place trip;
> every language can have taken part to the first anthropization of the
> Continent.
> Tavi:
You should have said the *successive* colonizations of Europe, because they were two of them (Aurignician and Gravettian) in the Upper Paleolithic, followed from a more recent one in the Neolithic.

    I teach these matters and I know the succession of colonizations. A collective singular "colonization" for "all colonizations" should be understood by everybody, but the fact that you have misunderstood it raises a suspect. In that case I was compelled to say "colonization" without -s because - you will agree - if I had said "the linguistic colonizations of Europe in Prehistory are in no way a single-place trip" my sentence would have lost much of its logic: since it's you who appeared to maintain that - shortly said - "if VC, then no IE", I've simply notied that already the Aurignacian colonization can well have brought more than a single language
    

 

> Tavi: I've given several reasons which lead to that conclusion, and this is precisely why my own model is closer to Villar's than to Alinei's or your own.

Bhrihskwobhloukstroy:
   anyway Villar is closer to me than to you, and the three of us are equally far from Alinei

 
Tavi: The only real language IE-ists' "PIE" can at best approximate is the paleo-dialect of the Steppes,

 Bhrihskwobhloukstroy:
   this is the classical hypothesis of, among many others, Marija Alseikaite Gimbutiene and James Patrick Mallory. Mere hypothesis.
   I agree (against Alinei) that Kurgan peoples probably spoke PIE; with Renfrew, I think that PIE was spoken also before them, for instance from Anatolian agriculturalists; against Renfrew, I think that PIE was spoken also before the rise of agriculture and not only in Anatolia or the Steppes. All these are mere hypotheses

Tavi: which apparently acted as a superstrate to other paleo-varieties in the genesis of the historical IE languages. 

Bhrihskwobhloukstroy:
   with this I agree (although my agreement in no way makes more probable this hypothesis) 

> You don't even consider a scenario in which
> Your hypothesis has 90% or 50% or 20% of probability, according to the
> amount of other competing hypotheses.
 
> Tavi:
I'm afraid this isn't a matter of quantity but rather of *quality*. The postulate of "all things being equal" doesn't hold here.

Bhrihskwobhloukstroy:
   please state the unity of measurement for quality. Obviously, it can't be your or mine taste
 
> As You see, I'm not tied to my ideas: I have a gigantic scheme in
> which every theory - Your one as well - can find its proper place; in
> this scheme there are some hypotheses that I particularly like, other
> ones that I develop just because they haven't been considered till
> now, but my goal is to build a hierarchy of probabilities, where even
> the less probable - but always rational - hypothesis can be the really
> true explanation.
>
And of course, your own hypothesis is always at the top.

   Not always and not always alone; but it's nevertheless necessarily present, even if patently not at the top. Logical external completeness and internal coherence are fundamental requirements for every 'archi-model' (= the spectrum of all models)


> Tavi:
My model isn't actually "the opposite extreme" of yours. In fact, I agree with you that the last common ancestor of all IE languages was spoken in the Upper Palaeolithic, but unfortunately it has little to do with the "PIE" reconstructed in the 19th century by neogrammarians using the comparative method.

Bhrihskwobhloukstroy:
    Many people would agree that PIE has never been spoken as such so remotely as in the Palaeolithic.
    People - like you and Villar  - who put  PIE in the Palaeolithic don't agree, on the contrary, with the usual reconstruction of it and assign this latter to the Chalcolithic.
    Alinei, for its own, assigns PIE in its usually reconstructed form (but without any trace of laryngeals) to Palaeolithic and no later.
    I assign PIE in its usually reconstructed form - with laryngeals - to Palaeo-, Meso-, Neo- and Chalcolithic.
    
(...)
> I'll try to avoid any reply, because what You consider rational is
> just dogmatism for me and what I consider rational is consequence
> of an unwarranted assumption - and therefore wrong (which is, in
> my opinion, a false conclusion) - for You.

> Tavi:
On the contrary, I see dogmatism on your part, namely your adherence to the traditional PIE model which can only describe with a reasonable degree of accuracy the more recent stages in the development of the IE family.

 Bhrihskwobhloukstroy:

   a very dogmatic statement (i.e. without any demonstration) as to the chronological limitations and absolute dating of "traditional" (Negrammarian or laryngeal?) PIE model (why 'model'? Rather reconstruction, since you are referring to my reconstructions, not to my model, which is far from any traditional one) and moreover not happily expressed, because my adherence to anything traditional in Indo-European studies is to laryngeal reconstructions - whereas you seem to be even more traditional if (I don't know) you follow Villar with his (pre-Neogrammarian) /a/ for short /o/ or Ballester with his typologically minimalistic (and paradoxically quite Euro-centric) /b d g/ for /bh dh gh/ - otherwise, especially if you don't follow them and anyway for all other instances, both you and I equally adhere to the same reconstruction that the traditional model assigns to Chalcolithic IE: if this is dogmatism, is common to both, otherwise it isn't dogmatism at all.
    On the other side, both you and I assign PIE to Palaeolithic, so where's the dogmatism? You propose a reconstruction and I propose another one, which only happens to  coincide with the one assigned to Chalcolithic IE not only by any 'traditional' school, but by you as well.
     The difference is therefore that I postulate a longer duration of PIE than you. Is this dogmatism? You may not agree, but not everything with which you disagree is automatically "dogmatic". Pretending such an equation would be a dogma.

(from another message:)

Tavi:
The problem is the amount of valid inherited etymologies in the
mainstream PIE framework is actually lower than expected, especially in
the case Latin, thus indicating the model is inadequate.__.

Bhrihskwobhloukstroy:

    Please explain:
    1) your criterion of validity
    2) (optional) a quantification of the expected amount of valid inherited etymologies, especially in the case of Latin.