Sociological Linguistics

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>Patrick C. Ryan

>"Irrelevant" must be your favorite word.

-- certainly, when confronted with irrelevancies.

>What happened to your "*in any era*"?

-- silly me, I must have assumed that anyone would realize this applied to
any era where we have _information_ about the languages.

What proto-people spoke like 200,000 years ago is, to coin a phrase,
irrelevant.  We'll never know.  It's even more irrelevant to Indo-European,
which was not spoken by slope-browed pre-sapient hominids.

>What "extant" languages show is totally irrelevant to what they may have
>been like in the far distant past.

-- you have a time machine?

>As far earlier stages having been "lost", prove it --- if you can.

-- since you're the one attempting a revision of the consensus, YOU prove
that they aren't lost... if you can.

So far, all I've seen is _a priori_ assertions.