Re: Vocabulary distribution (was: On Greek anthro:pos 'man')

Including fragmentarily attested Indo-European laguages would leave
out at least Venetic and maybe other Restsprachen as well, although
*bherg'h- is really the best preserved and most spread root; I've
tried to get an idea of the proportion between lexical attestations
in, e.g., Pokorny 1959 (IEW) and the amount of material from available
etymological dictionaries, which is approximately 20 times larger, and
surely it will be in fact still more, but in any case a reconstructed
PIE made of 20 or 40 or 60 roots is ridiculous, especially as opposed
to the obscene facility with which non-Indo-European substrates are
happily postulated and recognized

2013/2/1, johnvertical@... <johnvertical@...>:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Bhrihskwobhloukstroy wrote:
>> iv - but Indo-Europeanists often hate PIE and try in every way to
>> demolish as much as possible the reconstruction of PIE. They want a
>> small, shortly lived, and territorially restricted PIE, possibly
>> made of just those words that are continued by all IE languages (=
>> no word) or at least of roots that are attested in every IE
>> language (= just one, *bherg'h-, provided it's in fact present in
>> Latin and Greek)
>
> This is an interesting claim. Only one IE root is found across every IE
> language?
>
> I assume this actually refers to main branches (checking every single modern
> IE language from Icelandic to Bengali would be too much work for anyone),
> and furthermore also that scanty material is an issue with several branches
> - but I'd still expect more than just a single root to be found in all of
> Hittite, Tocharian, Armenian, Albanian etc.
>
> Or is the issue in including even fragmentarily attested languages like
> Macedonian in the count?
>
> _j.
>
>