--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <tgpedersen@...>
> To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Monday, February 03, 2003 10:55 AM
> Subject: Re: [tied] Reconstructing a future language
>
>
>
> > Explain.
> >
> > Torsten
>
> It's shared innovations and their order that count, not overall
similarity. To give an example from zoology, elephants and tenrecs
are more closely related to each other than either group is to
shrews, moles or hedgehogs, but morphologically tenrecs "cluster"
with shrews, moles, hedgehogs and other "insectivores", and were
until recently classified among them. Crocodiles are more closely
related to birds than to lizards.
>
> Piotr
The algorithm works OK when applied to attested and contemporary IE
languages. It groups them as we know they're supposed to be grouped.
But when they add reconstructed PIE to the mix, as said before, PIE
ends up somewhere near the root of the group of Romance languages. So
what you're saying is that the "innovations" that PIE shares with the
Romance languages are misleading since PIE is not a Romance language?
If so, you are agreeing with the authors; it's exactly their point.
The question is: why does PIE falsely share these innovations wiith
the Romance languages? Because they share the same habitat (and I'm
only half joking)?
Torsten