Origin of retroflexion in IA

[Dominique.Thillaud]

>Do you think the suggestion that retroflexion in IA is of foreign
>lacks serious analysis?
>
>Paul Kekai Manansala

        Surely not! Just not achieved by a consensus ;)
        An analogous problem occurs with the rare sound /y/ known in French
(u) and German (ue) where a "substratum" influence was longly evoked. Alas,
the submarine language was never identified and internal phenomens
(apophony, &c.) are quite able to explain the fact.
        The main problem is that we must know VERY well all the languages
involved and the historical circumstances to decide between internal or
parallel evolution, convergence, phonetical borrowing, &c. That's rarely
the fact.

        I know that many serious scholars are seriously studying the
problem but the difficulty let the door open to other ones who are able to
make freely groundless assertions.
        We are not hopeless. Remember the poor knowledge of the linguistic
in the past. I trust human capacity to explore difficult problems and I
suppose we'll have some day a performant theoretical model which up a part
of the veil ;)
        Regards,
Dominique

Dominique THILLAUD
Universite' de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France