www.alphadictionary.com

Lithuanian peasants do not nor have they ever spoken PIE.

I think the original comment came from the apparent belief among some linguists that, of all the known actively-spoken Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is considered to be among the most conservative, still using tenses and such that have fallen out of use in other modern languages. I've seen sometimes in etymologies that the current Lithuanian word is compared to the ancient forms in Latin, Sanskit, Greek, and sometimes Armenian.

The truth in each of these ideas is that people in isolated areas do, in some cases, hold on to speech characteristics that larger societies have discarded.

...which was pretty much the point of the original quote. Lithuania may have been ruled at various times by Germans, Scandinavians, Slavs, and even Mongols, but they usually concerned themselves with cities, leaving the folks in the countryside alone.

Being of peasant stock is not a shameful condition. Abraham Lincoln said God must love the common people best because he made so many of us.

Hear, hear. Proud of my Gullah heritage, even if I am a born-and-bred suburban New Yorker. I guess that was my comment on today's academics being too PC to refer to their contemporaries as "peasants." Or my opinion, in any case.

I found this - which may be of some interest here:

http://indo-european.info/dictionary-translator/

Luke: I look somewhat askance at this reference: http://indo-european.info/dictionary-translator/ . I put in the numbers from one to ten and got what I might expect from some random PIE language. I don't have all the characters in my caracter set but they were something like: oinos dwou trejes q∂twres penqe seks septm oktōu newn dekm. Just what does "translation" mean. I was looking for the root PIE words for our English counting numbers. I got roots from some source resembling English for all but four,five and ten. Q∂twres, Penqe and dekm are apparently roots for four, five and ten in, for example, Latin, Farsi and Hindi. Of course we see quadrant, pentagon, and decimal in English that come from this man's set of PIE words. Latin is Unus duo tres quattuor, quinque, sex, septem, octo, novem, decem. I can count in Farsi but I cannot write in Arabic letters so I cannot accurately write the numbers using Roman letters, but doing the best i can, five is pangh and ten is dach in Farsi, making it close to Latin. Five seems to be the number at greatest variability in PIE languages.

An almost uiversal PIE word is paw for any kind of foot. of course we use it for cat and dog feet. Sure enough the referenced site gives me his PIE's pods for foot.

Probably no one is following me on this so I will quit the examples. What I don't know is how this man decided these were the PIE roots. Why do Germanic languages say something like foot? Is there a PIE root for the word foot.

Unless someone of recognized authority puts his/her imprimater on this reference, I will be sceptical. If the Good Doctor gave his opinion, I would go with him.

But the counting numbers you listed have there is equivalence in several Latin languages uno dos tres Cuatro Cinco Seis siete. Ocho, nueve dies. Compare.

I am not a linguist, and I honestly don't know, but I put
out a feeler to some linguists with whom I correspond
on another sit. Will post here what I get from them.