From: dgkilday57
Message: 70560
Date: 2012-12-11
>I have no doubt that you CAN offer a PIE etymology for any alleged pre-IE relic, just as you CAN offer a Celtic one for any alleged Ligurian relic, but we run into the same issues of falsifiability.
> First peopling. Of course, there's no proof either - otherwise we
> wouldn't discuss on this topic - and there are many other
> possibilities, but our first task is to fix the extreme extensions of
> what is reasonable. Such extremes are by definition scarcely
> attractive, but they are nevertheless necessary. One of these extremes
> is Drew's theory (Non-Anatolian PIE shortly before the earliest
> Non-Anatolian evidence; I don't like Indo-Hittite theory, but this is
> nevertheless a necessary extreme; S. Kalyanaraman puts himself beyond
> this extreme); the other one (on the remote side) is (Europe's) First
> Peopling. Why is it necessary? Because nothing can (still) exclude it.
> Let's leave apart non linguistic consideration and let's concentrate
> on linguistic arguments: the crucial point is how to judge anything
> that isn't universally accepted as PIE heritage (Tavi doesn't accept
> PIE reconstructions and his rejection is even more radical than what
> he states, because he operates with different - if any - soundlaws, so
> his theory is outside the scope of this discussion). As long as
> alleged Pre-IE evidence can receive PIE etymologies according to
> received soundlaws, the discussion must remain open. If and only if
> all these regular PIE etymologies were right (beside being correct),
> the equation PIE dispersal = Europe's First Peopling could gain
> something in probability, although still not definitely proven. I
> presume I can offer a regular PIE etymology for any alleged Pre-IE
> relic and I think such etymology, although not always better, is
> anyway never worse than its alternatives. This is the best linguistic
> discussion we can deepen on this topic