Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate?

[proto-language]

Dear Rick and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick Mc Callister" <rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu>
Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2000 5:27 PM

[RM]

> Larry Trask often mentions Basque being used as the rubbish bin of
> unexplained Ibero-Romance etyma

> Etruscan sometimes serves the same purpose for Latin, even though some of the
> vocabulary is claerly of IE origin; e.g. I saw a reference to Tuscan dialect
> brenti "heather" that declared it to be from Etruscan, yet there are cognate
> forms in Ibero-Romance and I'd guess that Irish fraoch is also cognate

[PR]

What would really be interesting is for Larry Trask to show statistically
how likely his immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma are as a
source for Basque, which, evidently never met a foreign word it did not
like --- while tenaciously preserving a most usual morphological system.

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit
ec at ec hecc, vindga meipi a netr allar nmo, geiri vnda~r . . . a ~eim
mei~i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rstom renn." (Havamal 138)