From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 20044
Date: 2003-03-18
----- Original Message -----
From: <lookwhoscross-eyednow@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 7:26 PM
Subject: Re:Re: [tied] Veneti
> Piotr, what are "cladistic relationships"?
> -Michael
An interdisciplinary metaphor. In biology, a clade is a historically self-contained entity consisting of an ancestral species plus _all_ its descendants (and of nothing else). A cladistic classification is one in which all taxa are valid clades, and in particular the following kind of taxa are disallowed:
paraphyletic (not containing all the descendants of the common ancestor);
polyphyletic (not containing the most recent common ancestor of all their members).
If we use the same principles in the genetic classification of languages, then e.g. IE is a valid clade since it contains PIE and doesn't exclude any of its descendants. So is Germanic, since it includes PGmc. and all its offspring. But "Italo-Celtic" may not be a clade, since it hasn't been demonstrated that there existed a common ancestor whose only descendants are Italic and Celtic.
Piotr