IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Hans Holm]

RW>Either two (or more) languages are related or they are not.  This is
RW>the basic hypothesis of historical linguistics.
.. is it? Nice to learn indeed.
 You will find defenders for or against relationships between any two
languages. You can argue about the degrees and ways, about significance or
chance resemblances. But you can't prove unrelatedness. We had that
discussion already. Perhaps You should read Anttila 89:320..

RW>This is totally irrelevant

You mean /you/ do not see the point.
You might have missed that my ancestor example referred not to languages
but to speakers.

RW>Languages do not need a mommy language
.. really?

RW>But two genetically related languages have only one common ancestor,

.. let me take an Indo-European example, e.g. Italian and French.
Superficially seen they only have one ancestor: Latin. But this is only
the dominant ancestor.
If we look at e.g. French it has a lot of strata which can be called its
fathers: The languages spoken by the pre-celtic cultures, the Celts
themselves; later all the Germanic invaders not perfectly succeeding in
learning the current states of that language. Anttila (and others) cite
languages where you cannot even decide whether they should be named after
their mother or their father.