I agree with you, Gazariah, that it is interesting
to go further back. For example to find out correlatives
in Sanscrit, Old Persian, Tocharian, Albanian, etc etc.
But those are real languages, whereas IE is a virtual
language. By that I mean only existing as a mental construct.
And we can never be quite sure that there ever were people who
spoke like that. Personally, I believe that the idea that
all lines that you can follow backwards in time will converge
and all intersect one another in a single point, is an incorrect
idea. I think it was more like a hazy blob, that extended
over space as well as time, with all kinds of funny internal
processes going on. Keyword extended spatio-temporal internal
structure and local differentiation/variation.

Best regards
Xigung


P.S. I have heard it was Polomé who was the authority
on Hittite and made comparisons with Old Norse.

--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, <brahmabull@...> wrote:
> Xigung:
>
> I find Pokorny very interesting, because I am interested in IndoEuropean
> languages outside Germanic. You say that IE is an "imagined" language;
> I would prefer to say it is "reconstructed." Good scholars are aware
> that their hypotheses are just that, and hardly anybody would expect
> to find, if we had a time machine, some group of people speaking exactly
> what is reconstructed for IndoEuropean.
>
> On the other hand, there can be no reasonable doubt that the main stock
> of words in the IE languages goes back to common ancestors, and we have
> a fairly accurate picture of what those ancestoral forms must have been.
> We can even be fairly confident about the conjugations and declensions
> of IE, in general terms.
>
> For me, it would be disappointing to leave the etymology of an English
> (or Old Norse) word at the oldest recorded form in Germanic (usually
> Gothic), when it is clearly possible to go further and link up with the
> other families in the IE group.
>
> Gazariah