Re: Ligurian

At 4:32:49 AM on Wednesday, May 23, 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.

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

Splendidly missing the point, as usual. It isn't a question
of what is studied; it's a question of how to study it.
You've thrown away most of the progressive of the last
century and more of historical linguistics.

Moreover, (a) there has been quite a bit of serious research
into substrates, and (b) you don't study substrate
languages: you make them up.

>> 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".

<splork!!>

You need a better mirror.

[...]

>> 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.

I'm sure that you do. You're wrong.

[...]

>> 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.

No, you don't have a bag of tricks: that would imply more
systematic method than you've demonstrated here.