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

[Brian M. Scott]

Robert Whiting wrote:

> On Tue, 28 Mar, petegray <petegray at btinternet.com> wrote:

> [quoting Brian M. Scott]

>>> I fell into the same trap at first, but Bob's right, assuming
>>> that one can always classify one branch as innovating and the
>>> other as non-innovating.  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.

>> Yes - you're right!

[...]

> Yes, he is right, but he is also not right (and since he was
> defending a position that I had taken originally, I was also both
> right and not right).  He is right if you only consider the
> behavior of the tree at the nodes.

Yes, I was making a statement only about the structure
of binary trees.  I took it as obvious that there will
have been innovations along branches, so that the
'non-innovating' branch may in fact be nothing of the
kind.  I wish that I'd thought of generalizing to
weighted trees to get a more realistic result, though!

[Snip weighted trees and incompleteness of tree models; I
agree with all of it.]

To clarify one other point:

BMS:

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

Steve Long responded:

> 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.

My statement that each node is a fresh start was in response
to the comment that 'it is not necessary that it is always one
and the same branch which does not innovate'.  Every minimal
path through the tree from the root to a leaf is a branch, so
every non-terminal node and edge lies on more than one branch,
and it is therefore not clear what can be meant by 'one and
the same branch' unless one has chosen a particular branch
beforehand.  From a tree-structural point of view each node
is the root of a subtree that does not depend on the ancestors
of that node, so you really do start afresh there.  This is
also true from a linguistic point of view, since change is
inevitable along every edge.

SL:

> There is nothing in the data you are using to justify saying
> anything new happened in that non-innovating residue.

The data that I have in mind comprise everything known about
the IE languages.  This discussion at this point is (if I
understand it correctly) about their actual history as it
may be (partly) modelled by tree structures, not about the
methodological details of some particular tree construction.

Brian M. Scott