Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

<<No it wasn't.  A main point in my hypothesis was that the Stammbaum was not
>showing a language that it clearly assumed existed.  And that was a language
that >shared none of the innovations that "created" the daughters.  This
narrow PIE or >proto-language is always the one that is NOT INNOVATING on the
> Stammbaum.

-- incorrect.

The Stammbaum shows a language that is innovating just as the daughter
language does _up to_ the time of split.

After which it innovates one way, while the daughter language innovates in
another.

Which is to say, the language from which Indo-Iranian split was not the same
as that from which Anatolian split.  The futher length of the stem represents
a period of shared innovations.

Or to put in another way, think not of the languages, but of the people who
spoke them.  It's just as accurate to say that the other IE language-speakers
split away from, say, the Anatolians as the other way 'round.

Group A moves so that it's too distant from the others to share innovations.
It encounters other unrelated languages. It now has linguistic innovations
which do not spread to the rest of the former speech-community; and it does
not acquire the innovations proceeding in the other areas of the former
speech-community. (Eg., it doesn't lose laryngeals).

It becomes Anatolian.  But by the time that happens, the people back in the
original speech area have had innovations of their own, and they're no longer
speaking quite the same thing as they were when Group A left.

Now the people speaking our (changed) ur-IE stretch out to the east.
Innovations occurr there that don't spread all the way across the
speech-community. (Satemization, for instance).

Now the Indo-Iranian languages have, amoeba-like, split off from the body of
the western IE languages.  They're both innovating in ways they don't share.
Shortly thereafter, a tentacle stretches out to the southeast from the
western group and the Graeco-Armenian group breaks away and starts to have
innovations not shared by its former neighbors; conversely, they have
innovations _it_ doesn't have....