Re: new book on the spread of IE

On Feb 22, 4:01 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So, as recently as the Ice Age, the human brain had not yet
evolved????

Of course it has. I postulate words of one and two phonemes
for the language of the dwellers of the Blombos cave in
South Africa, Middle Stone Age, 75,000 years ago. Only
that Ice Age in Eurasia was a big challenge that resulted
in new technology and therefore also in a new level of
language. Our brain does not so much give a prefixed
behavior but allows us to cope with challenges, and this
includes development of language.

How then, do you account for the obvious fact that Australians speak
languages indistinguishable in underlying structure from every other
human language, even though they were separated from the rest of
humanity millennia before "the Ice Age"?

The dwellers of the Blombos cave left South Africa
owing to a sudden and drastic temperature drop some
75,000 years ago. Their descendants populated Asia
Minor, Eurasia, Asia and Australia.

No. "Magdalenian" is guesses (whether they're "lucky" or not, there's
no way of knowing, as no "sound laws" connecting "Magdalenian" forms
with atteted forms have ever been offered).

PIE reconstructions are based on sometimes _hundreds_ of strictly
regular and systematic correspondences. (Which because of their
extreme regularity got dubbed "laws" -- though no one ever suggested
that they were _predictive_ like "laws of nature.")

How do your strictly regular and systematic sound
correspondences account for the greatly varying PIE
vocabularies? they vary from author to author, not
only accross decades but also among scholars of
the same period of time.

Don't make up lies about "authors." If you are referring to something
in particular, produce it.

Pokorny *dhau for to strangle, throttle, origin of
Phrygian daos for wolf according to Krahe. Mallory
and Adams, in their PIE handbook, Oxford 2006,
give another word, and have nothing remotely
resembling *dhau, they give ten words for to tear,
none remotely close to "dhau. Just one example.
There are many more. For example words for sun,
big difference from author to author, for example
Mallory and Adams 2006 and Michael Janda 2006,
quite different (and, strange enough, Michael Janda
is left out by M and A, although he contributes
considerably to the reconstruction of the PIE view
of the heavens, which, according to M and A,
is largely beyond recovery).

Bull***. Colin Renfrew is an archeologist (who repeatedly admits that
some day he ought to study historical linguistics) who has never
"reconstructed" a language (or a word) in his life.

Colin Renfrew and others, Colin Renfrew et al.
Others have taken up his approach. Mallory and
Adams mention him as propagator and initiator
of an Anatolian PIE about 8,000 years old, and
they say that others follow him. He proposes
one of several homeland theories that are taken
seriously.

.

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