Renfrew's Celtic Scenario

[Stanley Friesen]

At 10:47 AM 2/11/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>Yeah, well as you know, I'm looking forward to exactly how you calculate this
>differentiation - especially with Hittite and whatever you are
>differentiating it from.

One measure is basically how hard one must work to explain the differences
in cognate words.

> If your formula finds Hittite an awful lot like any
>language, it sure would have saved Kurylowicz et al a lot of time and
>trouble.

The problem with Hittite is not the level of differentiation in phonetics,
it is the *dearth* of cognates.  The ones that *are* there are all very
obvious, and easily correlated with their Sanskrit and Greek counterparts.

[I still would like to know: do the other early Anatolian languages have so
many non-IE words, or is this trait specific to Hittite itself].

>(And I don't know why you think Farsi and Hindi are more differentiated than
>Hittite and Sanskrit - haven't a clue.  Are you talking about a numerical
>degree of differentiation that can be demostrated?  ...

I know how similar cognate words are in Hittite and Sanskrit.  After one
abstracts out the differences in writing systems, they are very little
different at all.  Indeed, if the phonetic differences were all there were,
they would be more like dialect variants of one language.  Farsi and Hindi,
on the other hand, do not have many such transparently similar cognates
(and most of those are accidental - much like the fact that in my dialect
of English, "worm" is pronounced almost identically to the reconstructed
PIE root it derives from [*wrm] - sans endings).

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May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com