Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Origin of the phrase Sica/reply (6)

Proto-languages, by definition, aren't attested, so that's really beside the point. You can get a good idea of what the ancestral language to all the attested varieties of Albanian was like by using the comparative method, just as you can get a good idea of what the ancestor of all the attested Indo-European languages is by using the same method. Such theoretical languages created by the comparative language are called proto-languages and are routinely used in etymologies, with the fact that they're theoretical indicated by an * next to the term. As long as the reconstruction is done by someone who knows what they're doing, it's not a problem. The references show that the Proto-Albanian form given was done by someone qualified to do so. You can't remove Proto-Albanian as unattested without also removing Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Slavic, since they're equally unattested. You seem to be confused about the relationship of Proto-Albanian, Proto-Slavic, Illyrian and Proto-Indo-European: in spite of meager evidence for Illyrian, it's pretty much universally agreed among modern linguists that all of them are Indo-European. In fact, the "Alb. thika 'knife'" in your first post refers to an Albanian word that's in the etymology you replaced. Contact between the ancestors of the Albanians and the Romans is strongly suggested by loanwords in Albanian that had to have come from Latin at a fairly early stage.

As for your edit comments about De Vaan: not everyone agrees with him on every issue, but I doubt any serious linguist would dispute that he is a serious scholar and a good source on Indo-European linguistics in general. You, on the other hand, seem to be so offended by the mere mention of the possibility of any connection between the Albanians and anything Classical that you're indiscriminately throwing in stuff from 90-year-old references that you don't understand and making strange accusations about bias and Albanian nationalism, even though Michiel de Vaan is the Dutch author of an important work on Latin and Italic etymology and Vladimir Orel was a Russian expert on Proto-Slavic.