As the old dictum goes, "Sanskrit
consonants + Greek vowels = PIE", which of course mostly reflects the
traditional bias of IE scholars. All the IE languages directly attested in
the second millennium look more archaic than most of the younger languages,
which is hardly a surprise, but on the other hand all of them had undergone
deep transformations between reconstructable PIE and the attested stages. As
usual in such cases, there are too many factors involved for objective criteria
of similarity to be definable or worth defining, and the intuitive assessment of
"closeness" differs from linguist to linguist. Even if you believe that a given
branch has been highly innovative, it will usually show interesting archaisms in
the balance.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2002 4:46 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Why is PIE more centum than satem?
*****GK: That is certainly the case. On the other
hand,
not all languages spoken at the same time
(whether the context is 1500 BC or
2002 AD) are
equally similar to PIE ? It would be interesting to
know
which of the groups attested in the 2nd
millennium BC are closest to the
reconstructed PIE.
***