Re: PIE six and seven: questions

2013/11/11, johnvertical@... <johnvertical@...>:
(...)

>
> Variation must have existed within PIE, but to reduce all variation among IE
> 'lects into variation that already existed at the proto-language level is
> equivalent to denying the existence of loanwords (both family-external and
> family-internal),

*Bhr.: No, why? Every Pan-IE word archaeologically assigned to a
phase later than PIE (suppose, agricultural lexicon if Uniform Common
PIE is projected back to Palaeolithic) should be a family-internal
loanword

> analogical changes (which are particularly frequent in
> numerals),

*Bhr.: apart IE numerals, which are the point of discussion, are
there particularly frequent instances of that?

> affective variation,

*Bhr.: I don't know such a linguistic strategy

> and any number of other mechanisms that can
> introduce phonetic distortions into a cognate set.

*Bhr.: Do You mean popular etymology? (Affixation would be of course
no cause for phonetic 'distortion')

> Proto-variation is not
> somehow a categorically preferrable explanation. In fact it's not an
> explanation at *all*, it just pushes the question backwards in time.

*Bhr.: It's Diachronic Phonology, not me


(...)