the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>colkitto at sprint.ca writes:

>In historical linguistics (and probably in other related fields) the terms
>`more archaic' and `less archaic' need some quantifying.  To take one fairly
>obvious, albeit extreme, example, probably no scholars would rate English as
>`more archaic' than German overall, and yet for certain features, in
>phonology, morphology, and syntax, this is an fair statement.

-- true, but not really relevant.  All languages conserve; all languages
innovate.  The overall degree of either is obviously what we mean when we
refer to a _language_ as conservative or innovating.

I don't think anyone would deny that Lithuanian taken as a whole shows less
innovation vs. a vs. PIE than, say, Polish; and that both show less than,
say, any Germanic language.