Pre-Greek languages

[Sean Crist]

On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, petegray wrote:

> Stanley Friesen may be in good company in maintaining that the NW IE
> languages separate early - this is the position taken by Lehmann among
> others.

Well, for whatever an argument from authority is worth, there are several
prominent Indo-Europeanists who have reached conclusions approximating
those of Ringe et. al., but on the basis of different kinds of
argumentation from those used by Ringe et. al. But let's set that aside
and argue this on the basis of evidence rather than on authority.

When we have a family of related languages, on what grounds do we decide
what the internal structure is for the family tree?  In other words, how
do we decide which of these languages are more closely related than others
in the family? Nearly everybody agrees that we should do so on the basis
of shared characteristics of the languages which cannot reasonably be
attributed to parallel innovation or to borrowing.  The differences of
opinion arise partly from differing interpretations of the
characteristics, and partly because the problem is a very hard one,
computationally speaking.

If you believe that there is a grouping of "NW IE" languages (and I put
quotes around it because I'm not clear on exactly which branches are to be
included in this clade- Celtic? Germanic? Balto-Slavic?), this amounts to
a claim that these branches are characterised by a set of shared
attributes of the sort which I just mentioned.  I'm interested in hearing
what shared characteristics are proposed as evidence.

(I earlier listed some of the evidence on whose basis Ringe et. al.
produced the tree which I quoted; I can repeat both the tree and the
evidence, if there's interest, but I hate to clutter the list with what's
already been said.)

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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