Pleasing everybody

[manaster at umich.edu]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
As a voice of one crying in what I will continue to
perceive as a wilderness until people start talking about
the substantive issues, I am not surprised that I cannot
please everyone, but I think it is comical that Larry
Trask attacks me for not dismissing as utter madness
the Trubetzkoy theory of IE as a result of convergence
while Roger Wright attacks me for saying that "everybody"
knows roughly (roughly!!!) when IE broke up, and quotes
Trask as one of his authorities.
 
OK, obviously who do not think there ever was a Proto-IE
dont think that there was break-up and hence cannot date
it.  But just as obviously, I would havethought, anybody
who does not accept the validity of PIE and its break-up
cannot do classificatory or comparative lx in the way that
is under discussion here.  In particular, such a person
will a fortiori have to reject Altaic, Nostratic, and all
the other proposed families whose status we have been
discussing.  Hence, such a person will have no interest or stake
in, and nothing to contribute to, this particular debate.
 
So, what I mean is that everybody who believes in Proto-languages
and who knows anything much about the literature on IE and
(I should add) does not dogmatically reject all attempts
at placing protolanguage in time and place (for there are
such people, as I recently discovered from a debate on another
list)--that everybody in this circumscribed universe probably
accpets that PIE was spoken surely more than 4000 BP and no
more than say 10000 BP and that this same everybody (myself
being one humble member of this set) knows the more detailed
proposals made in the literature and does not really need
Johanna to remind him/her, but that such a person can at the
same time maintain that dating other protolanguages, ones
surely older by far than PIE in terms of years B.A. and/or
B.P., is far less secure AND that in any case it is simply
illogical to argue that because we have no universally accepted
protolanguage older than say Proto-Afro-Asiatic, that emans
we can never in principle find another older one.  OK?
 
Is that acceptable?  Or who is offended now?
 
AMR