IE Trees: innovations unmarked

[ECOLING at aol.com]

This thread is no longer really about the UPenn work.

It is about two other issues.

One is that calling a descendant language by the same name
as an ancestor does not make it the same language
(i.e. unchanged).

It may be purely a matter of cultural politics that the same name is used.

The other is that trees, as discussed by the proponents
of orthodox theory in this thread, do NOT fully reflect
notions about retentions vs. innovations.

We cannot see from a single binary branch on a tree
whether the RIGHT branch innovated (and all further
descendants of that branch share such innovation(s)),

or whether the LEFT branch innovated (and all further
descendants of that branch share such innovation(s)),

or whether EACH OF THE TWO branches had
innovations common to all descendants from their own
respective branch.

Perhaps I have missed something, but the defenders
of the orthodox theoretical view seem not to be taking
the valid part of the commentors' messages with enough
weight???

Should we MARK points of innovation on trees,
to indicate which branch innovates, or if both or
more than two do?

Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics