The UPenn IE Tree

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> On Sat, 21 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> [...]  But there is another view, the
> Schwundhypothese, which holds that all these features were present in
> broad PIE but then lost in Anatolian.  I'm afraid I don't know if
> anybody is defending the Schwundhypothese today.

I am. And I'm not alone. But even so, there are a precious few really
palpable innovations common to extra-Anatolian Indo-European (the
inflection of the word for 'earth' would be decisive by itself) that do
prove that Anatolian was the first branch to go (or be left behind). BTW,
who calls the opposite "Herkunfthypothese"? It appears more like a
"Hinzukunftshypothese", but I guess that's not sensible German. The main
point is the time depth of innovations. The opponents to the "Schwund-
hypothese" claim that the Hittite grammatical poverty basically represents
the original state of affairs, an attitude disproved many times (its
extreme version "can be shredded, point by devastating point", to copy
your own words on a different issue). They say the extra features have
been added in the non-Anatolian trunk after the separation from its
Anatolian branch, which in most particular cases just cannot be.

Jens