Northwest IE attributes

[petegray]

Sean said:
> So, what I'm saying is that the IE family is such that a tree
> representation of the family is possible; and since this is the more
> restructive formalism, it is the one we should choose.

Thank you, Sean, for a full and clear (and patient!) response.   Allow me to
blunder further into an area where I probably should hesitate to tread.    I
guess I would reword my initial posting to say that an either-or between a
wave model or a tree model obscures the evidence;   and either model has
implications for the history of PIE (or IE dialects) which we may not wish
to make.

A tree model implies a separation of branches to a degree which may at times
be untrue - the status of Baltic between Germanic and Slavonic seems to
indicate that.  I am sure that a purely wave model has its inadequacies as
well.   Hence my preference for a spectrum with fuzzy groupings within it,
with all the historic implications that go with that!

Sean also said:
>The wave representation of a tree will have
>the special property that all of the set boundaries will be nested: you
>won't get any overlapping lines.  Wave models in general do allow
>overlapping lines; we can define trees as that subset of wave models where
>there are no overlapping lines.

Pardon me if I'm wrong - but isn't the pattern of isoglosses in IE precisely
a set of overlapping lines, like spokes in a wheel?   I know there is a
debate about the nature and choice of isoglosses, but there are so many that
cut every which way, that I find myself compelled to believe the dialects
remained in contact, which would allow wave phenomena - which happen,
whether we like it or not, across any area where speech is spoken.

So I find belief in a system of separated branches difficult, and therefore
resist too strong a stress on the tree model.

Peter