Re: Why do Pokorny's roots for water have an "a" in front?

From: Tavi
Message: 70594
Date: 2012-12-13

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jörg Rhiemeier joerg_rhiemeier@ wrote:
>
> > On Tuesday 11 December 2012 01:55:12 Bhrihskwobhloukstroy wrote:
>
> > It only appears like that as long one assumes that PIE was many
> > times older than the classical IE languages. If you assume that
> > PIE was only about 5,000 to 6,000 years old, the apparent rise of
> > rate of change disappears. Your assumption that PIE was 40,000
> > years old went into the input of your reason, so any attempt to
> > use this as an argument for paleolithic continuity is circular.
>
> I thought Bhr had just dropped that assumption. What is plausible is that European languages go back to a 40,000 year old common ancestor of which PIE would be a late descendant. An example of this is your idea of IE proper expanding over the territory of related languages, such as the languages of the Old European Hydronomy.
>
> Tavi may be pushing a similar idea, with the superstrate language being imperfectly acquired, needing vocabulary to be supplemented from the substrate, rather as some believe has happened with Romanian. (I say 'may', because I am not entirely clear what he is suggesting.)
>
Not only Romanian, but conceivable all the Romance languages are the result of an imperfect learning of Vulgar Latin by former non-Latin speakers. This is usual in language replacement processes, which I think are the origin of the IE family, as IMHO the "PIE" reconstructed by IE-ists has traces of several different languages, possibly more or less distantly related. One of them, which I call "Kurganic" and presumably was spoken by agro-pastoralists of the Pontic Steppes, would have acted as superstrate to other varieties, leading to the false impression it's the real "PIE".