Re: Dum in Czech and Latin

On 25/10/2024 6:51 a.m., Ed Cryer wrote:

Christian Weisgerber wrote:

On 2024-10-24, Ed Cryer <ed@somewhere.in.the.uk> wrote:
>
[Czech]

For example, the word for "house" is "dům". Its declensions might look
like this:

>
It's probably from Latin "domus".

>
You might think that, but the etymological consensus is that Slavic
"dom" and Latin "domus" are cognates, both going back to PIE *dṓm.
>
The -ů-/-o- alternation in the Czech word is a common pattern, due to
a soundshift from earlier long ó > uo > ů [uː]. Polish has a similar
alternation -ó- [u]/-o-, albeit not in this word.
>

 Indo-European was never a language. Nobody ever spoke it. It's a collection of similar bits and pieces of language assembled with hindsight. And when it comes to Proto-Indo-European, well, .... castles in the air.
It's as if you were to walk through a junk-yard of old and trashed cars, find similarities, and build families of them. And then you examine the families, and find similarities in those, whence you construct a previous family.
Given some perseverance you might fathom it back prior to the Tower of Babel, and find some original lingo that all the homines sapientes coming out of Africa spoke and understood.  (:-
 Ed
 

I haven't seen this kind of radical I-E skepticism around here since the Indocentrics of yesteryear, now thankfully departed. Do you have an alternative explanation for the many resemblances among I-E languages on which scholars have based their reconstruction of the proto-language? Does your skepticism apply to all the other language families and their associated proto-languages?