Re: Ligurian

--- 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.
>

Yes, I know most historical linguists don't study *substrate* languages, i.e. those which only survive in loanwords to other languages.

> Bluntly, you aren't doing linguistics. You've decided,
> largely on non-linguistic grounds, what the linguistic
> pre-history of Eurasia must have been,
>

Actually, I've got no preconceived ideas about "what the linguistic pre-history of Eurasia must have been". But surely your statement would apply to the so-called "Paleolithic Continuity Theory" of IE origins.

> and you force
> everything to fit it, relying on look-alikes and arbitrary
> semantic shifts to do so.
>

I honestly think professional linguists (including of course IE-ists) are far better than myself in that. To quote an example, there's a PIE root *dhabh-ro- 'smith' concocted on the basis of Latin faber, Armenian darbin and a bunch of look-alikes.

> 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.
>

If you're accusing me of having a bag of tricks, then you chose the wrong guy.