IE to ProtoSteppe

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>glengordon01 at hotmail.com writes:

>Now, I can fully understand that one can have the legitimate view that
> _AT PRESENT TIME_, such things are not recoverable to a _strong degree_
>as JS points out.

-- and probably never will be, because we don't have time machines.
Linguistic reconstruction is done by 'triangulation'.  Once you're back beyond
the neolithic, roughly, even the language families with the most and earliest
written sources just don't provide enough data points.

And we're never going to get any more data, failing the discovery of the
archives of Atlantis.

>conjecture is a necessary component in good research.

-- not conjecture without evidence.  If we couldn't see beyond the orbit of
the Moon, astronomy would be impossible and all conjecture about it would be
fantasy, pointless word-games, a waste of time.

>Can we really place a limit  on what we can find out or learn at any given
>time?

-- yes; it's called "no evidence available".  The unwritten languages of
prehistory are _lost_.  The data is _gone_, vanished into entropy.

>how to warp space-time back to the time of a given proto-language,
>comparative linguistics will always be _pure theory_.

-- this is not a license to speculate without evidence; otherwise, we'll just
bring in near-miss moons, von Daniken aliens, etc.  "Theory" is not the same
as "groundless supposition".

>probability... nature of comparative linguistics!

-- a great enough difference in degree is a difference in kind.

>Surely IE is most likely related to something.

-- yes; and we can probably never know what it was related to.  The
information is gone.

>The point is: in regards to any other competing theories out there on IE
>external links (from NWC to  Benue-Congo), what is the MOST probable?

-- the difference between 0.000002% and 0.000001% is not meaningful.

The point is that there simply isn't enough evidence to build _any_ plausible
theory. Carl Popper's "Non-falsifiable hypothesis" fits here.  If it can't be
tested, it can't be meaningful.