One Step at a Time

[petegray]

> Suppose the parent of a "half-a-dozen languages" was a language that had
> two different classes of verbs:  those from a language X that conjugated one
> way and those from a language Y that conjugated another way.  ...

To some extent this has happened within IE, with athematic verbs showing
change in accent and vowel grade in certain forms, and thematic verbs which
have a stable root.   The former are well represented in Sanskrit, and the
latter in Latin and Greek - though the separation is not as neat and
complete as in your hypothetical situation.

The comparative method here recognises the value of "relic" forms.  Greek
has been particularly useful in this respect.   Although almost all its
verbs are thematic like most in Latin, it preserves a good handful of relics
which are in line with athematic verbs in Sanskrit.   We might perhaps have
found the route to reconstruction less clear without Greek, but we ought to
have been able to reconstruction the PIE situation nonetheless.

Peter