Germanic again

Dear Piotr,

 

Please excuse my rather late reply on the materials concerning the position of Germanic in the IE dialect tree.

 

I used to relay on the scheme of IE dialects by T.Gamkrelidze & V.Ivanov developed by Cyril Babaev. It can be represented in the following form:

 

                                                 PIE

                                                /      \

                          Non-Anatolian IE     Anatolian

                           /                    \

          (Western block)           (Eastern block)

               /              \                  \       \       \

(Non-Tocharian W.)  Tocharian       \       \       Greek-Thraco-Phrygo-Armenian

 \      \       \        \                           \       Indo-Iranian

   \      \       \        Celtic                   Germano-Balto-Slavic

     \      \        Italic                                   /                \

        \        Venetic                                            Germanic        Balto-Slavic

        Illyrian

 

 

To my mind this scheme remains "correct" , i.e. inwardly non-contradictory (at least in the aspect of Germanic), if we take into account only morphological evedences and ignore phonological ones (which are very strong indeed: satem/centum division, RUKI rule).

 

 

I think your scenario given in the message of November, 2 can be shown in the analogues form (please correct me if I represent it not quite precisely):

Germanic     extinct group                            Balto-Slavic    Aryan

                ("Old European") 

 

 

Again, this scheme is absolutely "correct" (inwardly non-contradictory) if we take one sort of evidences (phonological in this case) and ignore another one (morphological: *m/*bh division and other). 

 

 

What to do in such a situation? To my mind:

 

1. To try to prove theoretically that one sort of evidences is principally more conclusive for problems of genetic kinship than another one. For example: "morphological evidences should be considered only if they don't contradict to phonological evidences" or vice versa. We treat so lexical evidences now - as the weakest argument for genetic relations. If this question is solved theoretically we get the hierarchy of arguments (in order of decreasing the conclusive ability): phonological-morphological-lexical or morphological-phonological-lexical.

 

2. If the question formulated above principally has no general solution we need to consider contradicting evidences together and to find a compromise solution of the highest probability.

 

Piotr, you have suggested a variant where Germanic is an independent (non-West and non-East) branch of IE family. It can be shown like this: