Fully agree: “Admiration and respect for PIE linguists”. Some of you newcomers into this site should understand that this is a remarkable place for getting the knowledge. I admire this source. For over 20 years. I’ve started into etymology for just one word in a short 3-line paragraph of a university book on “A History of the English Language” by Arakin. My memory accounts for circa 700.000 English words with a quarter of their history. I enjoy English, various sources, this one - adorably and discussions as they keep this site going. Thank You all.
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Please don’t throw out the baby with the murky academic bathwater.
Diachronic and synchronic analysis have been coupled for two centuries, and conjectural extrapolation beyond written records, like language itself, evolves slowly.
Despite too much silly positioning and posturing (for some reason more extreme here than in other academic ‘fields’) comparative IE syntax and semantics is an essentially coherent and meaningful space of discussion (a wider linguistic space-time evolving with agri-culture in the Neolithic Revolution and writing in the Urban Revolution, from hunter-gatherer substrates, I find particularly fascinating).
And I often find your brief digests of such discussions interesting, suggestive and helpful.
Of course they are best appreciated cum grano salis, which also aids digestion.
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I’m a big fan of Oxford’s original quotation system, and the founding member’s interest in finding the OLDEST known usages of the words. I am particularly interested in finding the first usage of words in a particular spelling for the word, since it changes. Example: cider vs cidre and cyder. I believe “cider” came from German influence, despite French and English influences on the spelling over time.
I’m looking for ways to formalize etymology down to specific dates and quotations, and allowing for crowd-sourcing those discoveries and incentivizing the contributions (I love the story of Professor and the Madman and it’s history predating that time period).
Are you very familiar with how things already work? It sounds as though you might be hoping to take credit for inventing exactly what everyone was already doing. (Except for the incentives; if you are volunteering to provide a large amount of cash, to be distributed by experts in this field, that could be helpful.) (Note that “educated and qualified” definitely does not include me.)