What is Relatedness?

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>Does all this reflect the possibility that an accurate and true
>morphological IE tree would and should look different than an accurate and
>true lexical IE tree?

-- no.  Not if you're talking about determining genetic relationship.
Vocabulary is borrowed much more freely than morphology, and from a wider
range of sources.  Therefore morphology gives a more accurate picture, on the
whole.

>This misses the point.  The point is simply evidentiary.  The radically
>changing language could have little or no evidence left of its genetic
>affilation.

-- if 99% of the original language has been replaced, you're not talking
about borrowing, you're talking about language succession; ie., abandoning
one language and adopting another.

To give examples of how this works in the real world, Persian and English
both have very large stores of borrowed lexical items -- from Arabic and the
Romance languages, respectively; amounting to around 50% of the total
vocabulary.

Nevertheless, any linguist could -- without any prior knowledge of these two
languages -- take a brief look at modern Persian or English and give you a
perfectly accurate analysis of their genetic relationships, including the
period in which the massive borrowings took place.