Indo-Hittite Hypothesis

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/25/2000 3:30:24 AM, Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de wrote:

>>the "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis is accepted by very few, almost all
>>students of one person (and certainly of one department) in the US.

>.. correct. I hope that is now clear to everyone in this list at least.
>Unfortunately, Ringe did feed this opinion /into/ the UPenn tree. (It was
>/not an outcome/ of the Warnow tree, because the algorithm produces
>so-called 'unrooted' trees).

Actually, I've tried to figure out how the UPenn tree could possibly
'confirm' the Indo-Hittite hypothesis and I think that the term may have been
misapplied in the papers that are available on this subject.

You may recall that the top of the UPenn tree was diagrammed on this list as:

>                                     PIE
>                                    /   \
>                                   /   Anatolian

This is not the I-H hypothesis, which would yield something like this:

>                                     PIH
>                                    /   \
>                                PIE   P-Anatolian

The premise being that PIE and proto-Hittite/Anatolian are sister languages
with a common parent.

My understanding is now that the difference between these approaches is not
trivial.  The reconstruction of the hypothesized PIH gives substantially more
weight to the Anatolian languages than does a reconstruction of PIE that
makes Hittite et al a mere branch of Indo-European.  And although the I-H
hypothesis has been associated with, e.g., the new version of the IE
obstruent system offered by Hopper, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, I'm told that the
actual scope of its possible ramifications for PIE reconstruction has not yet
been explored.

As far as I-H support goes in the US, I suspect that the biggest problem it
faces is the understanding of its implications.  And possibly - as evidenced
by the usage in connection with the UPenn tree - even its proper definition.

Hans_Holm at h2.maus.de also wrote:

>Unfortunately, Ringe did feed this opinion /into/ the UPenn tree. (It was
>/not an outcome/ of the Warnow tree, because the algorithm produces
>so-called 'unrooted' trees).

I do not believe - again, from the papers we have - that the algorithm used
on IE at UPenn ever produced an 'unrooted tree'.  Contrary to what has been
said on this list in the past, the external adjustments appeared to have been
made directly to the algorithm from the outset.  What we see in the papers is
a model of a 'unrooted tree', but I could not find one that represents the IE
languages.

Regards,
Steve Long