Italic close to Slavic?

[petegray]

LLoyd seesm intersted in the place of Hittite, Tocharian & Albanian.   For
what it's worth, which is very little, I have spent some time working out a
"pseudo-map" of the dialects based on as many usable isoglosses as I could
find.

The well-known 8 dialects have to go in their usual positions in a kind of
circle.   That's uninteresting.   The interesting bit is fitting in
Tocharian, Hittite, Albanian and Armenian.  To get the simplest map, these
all ended up in the middle of the circle, in a kind of square - in clockwise
order, Hittite, Albanian, Armenian, Tocharian, Hittite.

Armenian has to lie close to I-I and Greek.   It shares one isogloss with
Greek against I-I, and one with I-I against Greek, and three with Slavic or
Baltic & Slavic against both Greek and I-I.  There are five that separate
Armenian, Greek and I-I from everything else, and another 6 that separate it
off from most others.

Albanian on the other hand appears closer to Baltic and Slavic (at least on
the isoglosses I used, and on my interpretation of them).  I find 7
isoglosses between Albanian and Hittite, 8 between Alb and Toch.

Hittite and Tocharian seem much closer to each other - the only major PIE
isogloss I have found to separate them is the distinction of short o and a
(merged in Hittite, Germanic, I-I etc).  And both, of course, are centum,
appear to have a new tense system derived from the perfect, and so on.
Hittite appears on my pseudo-map closer to Germanic than anything else.

I found this a helpful exercise to do, and perhaps in gross terms there is
some value in it as a kind of broad overview.

Peter