Urheimat in Lithuania? (was Re: the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE)

[Richard M. Alderson III]

On Wed, 15 Mar 2000, Robert Whiting (whiting at cc.helsinki.fi) wrote regarding
the conservative nature of Lithuanian:

> Expressed in terms of a tree model, it sounds very much like a scenario that
> Steve Long proposed:  At any node on the tree, there is a non-innovating
> branch and other branches.  If we follow the non-innovating branch from each
> node, at the bottom of the tree we arrive at a language that is practically
> identical to PIE (in this case, Lithuanian).  Now everyone said 'no, no, that
> can't be right because actually all branches innovate, just in different
> ways.'  The example of Lithuanian would seem to argue against this.  Nodes in
> a tree must be based on some comparative linguistic information.  The only
> such information that is useful is some innovation that appears in one branch
> and not in the other.  Shared retentions don't propagate either as waves or
> trees.  They just stay where they were left, like a well-trained dog.  Of
> course the fact that Lithuanian was always on the non-innovating branch (or
> least innovative branch if you prefer) after satemization and RUKI (and only
> partly on the innovating branch even there; sort of holding on to the end of
> the branch with one paw) says nothing about where it was located
> geographically.

The problem is that there is *no* IE language without significant innovations
vis-a-vis all the others.  Lithuanian is conservative in its *retention* of the
nominal case system (for the most part--though it loses one and adds a couple
based on a Finnic model), but it is innovative in the verb; which counts more
heavily?

Further, if we look at the *phonology*, Lithuanian is extremely innovative:  It
merges the voiced plain and voiced aspirate series of stops, it has contrastive
palatalized and non-palatalized series of obstruents, it merges *o(:) and *a(:)
and otherwise disturbs the vowel system, and it moves the IE accent from the
center of the word to the ends.  So now tell me how conservative it is.

There is *no* branch on the tree that can be labeled "non-innovating", and we
do ourselves a disservice as linguists, and a greater one to the non-linguists
looking to us for guidance, by pretending that there is.

								Rich Alderson