IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg)

>So, Parson was certainly, in a way, on the right track (and so was Sassetti
>before him, and others have been, too), but neither he nor anyone else
>before Bopp was able to put IE complx on the agenda of urgent and solvable
>tasks. >>

-- it isn't a coincidence that morphological studies were commenced _after_
the lexical comparisons (and simple comparisons like the declension of the
noun) became widely known.

There had to be a problem, before there could be solutions.  "These
resemblances are too close for chance" was the fundamental breakthrough; then
came detailed examination, and the emergence of comparative linguistics as we
know it.

Likewise, when doing a "rough cut" on a new language, lexical comparison is
still used.  Only purists get upset over this.