IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de writes:

>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:

-- nope.  It has some substrate influence from Celtic, and some loan-words;
ditto from Frankish.  But that does not alter its status as a Romance
language one iota.

If you took all the non-Romance elements out of French, it wouldn't make that
much difference.  If, on the other hand, you took out all the elements
derived from Latin, it would cease to exist.  Run it backwards, and it
becomes Latin, not a Celtic or Germanic language.