Age of various language families

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, Mikael Parkvall wrote:
> [...]
> So, what I really wanted to do was to check this claim -- to what extent do
> or don't other well-established language families behave like IE in terms
> of splitting rate? Of course we won't get a clear answer to this, but I
> suppose we could get a very general and approximate idea.

There just is no such thing as a rule of language survival. Tribes and
peoples influence each other by domination and genocide, some disappear by
famine or floods. The oldest language group of all may have completely
vanished, the most proliferate may be of quite recent making (as a
split-off from something which has not remained or cannot be made out to
be related). The whole expectation the rpompted the question is based on a
monumental mistake. Sorry, but that's how clear it is to me.

Jens