Re: Why the Proto-Indoeuropean numerals are not motivated within IE?

There're cases of
people with similar genes speaking unrelated languages and also of
people of very different stocks speaking the same language


Hi
The first case (like for example IE and Vasconic) is due to the very long timedepth of the divergence node (between Vasconians and Westasians, in this case that node could be as old as 30 k years i.e dated to the paleolithic)
The second case (like Haitians and Frenchmen or Mongolians and Russians) is due to language shift/sprachbund/creolisation/pidginisation etc...
According to anthropologues the Caucasian/African divergence node is as old as 100 k years SO IF WE HAVE A CAUCASIAN FOLK SPEAKING A LANGUAGE VERY SIMILAR to a language spoken by an African folk, that does not mean that those languages are genetically related (because when we have 2 languages separated by nearly 100 k years,we should expect little lexical and morphological similarities*-because of erosion-) but rather could be explained by sprachbund/language shift/creolisation etc... and even non-cultural basic words could be borrowed (see the case of Italic words in English for example)

*I suggest you the book "global etymolgies" of Merrit Ruhlen, in that book the author deals with shared lexical items across dozens of languages from all over the world and those shared lexical items are a legacy of the once proto world language spoken by the first "successful" modern human (successful in the sense that he was the most recent common progenitor of all humans living todays)


Best Regards