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

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/24/2000 10:04:49 PM, BMScott at stratos.net wrote:

>Start at the root, and at each node
>follow the non-innovating branch; you *must* end up at some
>leaf of the tree.  It is equally true that if you always follow
>the innovating branch you will arrive at some leaf.  Which leaves
>these are is of interest; that there are such leaves is not.

>At each node you start afresh, so it's not really meaningful
>to speak of 'one and the same branch'.

Actually one would not start afresh at each node.  IF your "branch-offs" only
mark a limited set of innovations at each node, then those innovations in
theory will not be found in the last chronological residue of the
non-innovating language/languages.

There is nothing in the data you are using to justify saying anything new
happened in that non-innovating residue.  Only certain innovations are
determinative at each node.  Other innovations don't count, just as
retentions don't count.

So the "node" ONLY represents languages in which the defining innovations
occur.  There is nothing 'new' in the other languages that can mean there is
a 'fresh start' at such points for those languages.  They are treated
precisely as if they were made up entirely of retentions.  The fact that they
may be changing internally is irrelevant to this kind of methodology, because
these changes have not been designated in any of the nodes.

(I have brought up in the past that there are taxonomic methods used in some
areas of evolutionary theory that do measure the relative quantative variance
in biological morphology and do use it as a narrow measure of chronological
relatedness, mutation or parallel adaptiveness.  These methods in effect use
both retentions and even minor innovations to guess the number of generations
separating filials from parentals.  In this kind of analysis, ANY and ALL
innovations (or lack of retentions) are used to measure something like
relatedness.  The starting assumption is that all progeny should be identical
to the parent in all forms and in every filial generation.  Quantitative
variances in effect yield rates of mutation or other effecting factors.

In this kind of analysis, you may in some ways be "starting fresh" at each
new F generation.)

>It is equally true that if you always follow
>the innovating branch you will arrive at some leaf.  Which leaves
>these are is of interest; that there are such leaves is not.

Well, it is interesting to some of us.  Because it means that the methodology
yields an IE language or set of IE languages which innovated nothing - within
the scope of the innovations that were used earlier to differentiate all the
other IE languages.  Depending on whether you call something an innovation or
retention can of course completely change the identification of that language
which 'innovated nothing.'

Regards,
Steve Long