At 12:47:36 PM on Tuesday, May 22, 2012, Tavi wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <bm.brian@...> wrote:
>>> I also wonder why IE-ists insist on inventing IE
>>> etymologies for non-IE words.
>> Don't be disingenuous: you know perfectly well what the
>> reason is.
> Perhaps that their model is an *isolacionist* one?
No. The reason is that their understanding of how to do
historical linguistics is fundamentally different from
yours. They share it with most historical linguists working
on most established families and with many historical
linguists working on larger, more speculative families.
Bluntly, you aren't doing linguistics. You've decided,
largely on non-linguistic grounds, what the linguistic
pre-history of Eurasia must have been, and you force
everything to fit it, relying on look-alikes and arbitrary
semantic shifts to do so. If you have any methodology
beyond that, you're either unwilling or unable to explain
it, and I see no reason to think that you actually have any.
Although they are very different, ultimately your approach
and Sean Whalen's fail for the same reason: lack of rigorous
controls. With enough metatheses and 'optional' sound
changes one can relate damn' near anything. He at least is
starting with well-established procedures, albeit extending
them far beyond their limits. You don't appear to have even
that much methodological structure: anything goes, provided
that it fits your pre-history.