People From Calgary

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April 10, 2026

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"Edwin Pulleyblank claims to have reconstructed a number of rather abstract similarities in the phonetics and morphology of PIE and Sino-Tibetan. Though he fails to back this structural similarity up with any (even a single) lexical similarity, he confidently dismisses as a ā€œprejudiceā€ the phenomenon that ā€œfor a variety of reasons, the possibility, of a genetic relationship between these two language families strikes most people as inherently most improbable.ā€ He believes that ā€œthere is no compelling reason from the point of view of either linguistics or archaeology to rule out the possibility of a genetic connection between Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European. Such a connection is certainly inconsistent with a European or Anatolian homeland for the Indo-Europeans but it is much less so with the Kurgan theoryā€, esp. considering that the Kurgan culture ā€œwas not the result of local evolution in that region but had its source in an intrusion from an earlier culture farther eastā€. This is of course very interesting, (and it deserves being repeated that the Kurgan culture came from farther east), but: ā€œIt will be necessary to demonstrate the existence of a considerable number of cognates linked by regular sound correspondences. To do so in a way that will convince the doubters on both sides of the equation will be a formidable task.ā€"

- Edwin G. Pulleyblank

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