Recoverability

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Fri, 16 Jul 1999, Sean Crist wrote:

> [...]
> I think the point was something more like this.  Suppose for the sake of
> argument that there is in fact a genetic relationship between
> Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic (to take one possible example). Even
> if this were true, and given the evidence which we actually do have at
> hand, would we expect to be able to _show_ that there is such a relation?

> Here, the problem _is_ like trying to reconstruct PIE on the basis of only
> modern English and Albanian.

Yes it is - and one would not get very far that way. One just might
discover the relationship, though: Alb. jam 'am', e"shte" 'is', nate"
'night', dere" 'door', tre, tri 'three', me" 'me', ju 'you'. If English
had had some proper morphology, one would have been able to go further.
Collinder and Cop (the latter with c-hachek) did that for "Indo-Uralisch".
Now of course large-scale comparison is not restricted to IE and Uralic,
but includes quite a few extra branches into Nostratic - and the more
there is to draw on, the greater the chance of finding links. I think it's
looking good.

(Sorry if I shifted the focus of the question in my posting.)

Jens