IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>Georg at home.ivm.de writes:

>But "hand", "eye", "I", "water", "brother" aso. are not safe. They simply
>don't bear a label "Attention ! Native word! Don't replace by foreign
>gobbledeegook !" on them.

-- effectively speaking, they do.

After all, when presented with a new language, what's the first thing we do
to determine whether it's IE or not?

We look at the numerals from one to ten, the family relationship terms, and
so forth.  Later on more detailed examination is necessary, but that's the
first step.

In fact, that's how the fact that there _is_ an IE family of languages was
discovered in the first place.

>Since it happened at some time, somewhere, it can happen anywhere.

-- well, no.  _Frequency_ or _likelihood_ is the determinative factor here.

The fact that, when flipping a coin, you may come down "heads" six times in a
row does not alter the fact that over time you'll have a 50-50 split between
heads and tails.