IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

[Wolfgang Schulze]

You should bear in mind that labels such as IE etc. used for individual
languages do never (or should never) reflect the ontological status or some
generic qualities of the language in question, but rather serve to identify a
network of structural aspects.... It's up to linguists to weigh this network
(mainly on grammatical grounds) and to decide whether it represents
sufficient reflexes of a former network called e.g. PIE ...

Hans Holm wrote:

> Take Albanian with a rest of 10% (!) of original lexemes (cf. Anttila
> 89:172), but nobody hesitates to name it an /IE language/.

*****************************
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze
Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
D-80539 München
Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345
Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/
*****************************