The assumption of an Indo-European protopeople with definite cultural and racial characteristics is untenable. We are chasing a romantic illusion … The idea of an Indo-European protolanguage is not absurd, but it is not necessary, and we can do very well without it … There is … no compelling reason for the assumption of a homogeneous Indo-European protolanguage from which the individual branches of Indo-European des- cended. … [I]t is equally probable that the Indo-European family arose when some originally non-related languages (the ancestors of the later branches) converged and that the Indo-European languages developed from a protolanguage by divergence.
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