From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 18417
Date: 2003-02-04
----- Original Message -----
From: <CeiSerith@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 5:43 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Reconstructing a future language
> I'm wondering if there would be an answer that would be acceptable. Is reconstructed PIE supposed to be exactly as related to one branch as it is to any other? That expectation seems a bit silly to me.
"Relatedness" is a relation and a hierarchy derivable from the structure of the family tree, but it is not convertible into non-arbitrary scalar values. You can legitimately say "LgA and LgB are related" (they have developed from a common ancestor), and you can say "LgA and LgB are more closely related to each other than either is to LgC" (their latest common ancestor is more recent than any ancestor they share with LgC), but you can't say that "the relatedness between A and B equals 7.385".
It follows that no IE language, whether dead or alive, can be more closely related to PIE than any other IE language is, since in each case the latest common ancestor is the same (namely, PIE itself), QED.
Which said, you may of course define "similarity" or "distance" between languages in any way that makes sense. For example, you may define the distance from LgA to LgB as the sum of the temporal distances from their latest common ancestor (*LgAB) to, respectively, A and B. Such a metric is arbitrary, but it does make some kind of sense, and it could have a useful application. Under this definition, any language spoken 3000 yrs ago is less distant from PIE (by exactly 3000 yrs) than any modern language is, but all the modern languages are equidistant from PIE. Or you may compare selected features of languages to determine their similarity, and you may conclude that, e.g. Greek is more similar to PIE than Sanskrit is (or the other way round, depending on the features being compared). Finally, you may use no formal criteria and assess similarity impressionistically, but of course this kind of judgement is entirely subjectve and there will certainly be a clash of opinions between you and other people :)
Piotr