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

At 3:28:03 AM on Saturday, June 2, 2012, Tavi wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <bm.brian@...> wrote:

>> Bollocks. There's an enormous amount of historical
>> linguistics that has been done and is being done on other
>> families. Two of the best introductory texts -- those by
>> Larry Trask and Lyle Campbell, especially the latter --
>> use many non-IE examples.

> Oh yes, the big guys. Trask was the one who defended at
> all costs the status quo of Basque as an isolate language,

Because no one was able to make a convincing case to the
contrary, and those who tried were frequently guilty of
distorting the data or even using non-existent data. It's
probably fair to say that he was inclined to be skeptical in
the sense of taking lack of demonstrated relationship as the
null hypothesis, but that's merely good practice; anything
else would be irresponsible.

> and Campbell regards macro-families as "speculative, and
> often controversial, groupings".

He's right: that's a simple statement of fact. They *are*
speculative, since their existence has not been established
to the general satisfaction of the historical linguistic
community, and they are certainly often controversial. Only
someone who can't distinguish between the world as it is and
the world as he'd like it to be could possibly object to the
statement.