At 4:07:02 AM on Saturday, November 29, 2003, P&G wrote:
> Shouldn't this have raised a few eyebrows:
>>The resulting tree matches many existing ideas about
>>language development. Spanish and Portuguese come out as
>>sisters, for example - both are cousins to German, and
>>Hindi is a more distant relation to all three.
> In what way is Hindi a "more distant" relation to
> Spanish-Portuguese than German?
According to Bobby Bryant, posting in sci.lang, they come up
with the following tree, which does indeed make German a
closer relative to Spanish and Portuguese than Hindi is.
The labels are Bryants; 'Other' substitutes for descriptions
like 'Balto-Slavo-Germano-Italo-Celtic'. The dates are
dates of branchings, so that for instance -8700 is their
date for the splitting off of Hittite.
IE (-8700)
Hittite
Other (-7900)
Tocharian (two listed, split -1700)
Other (-7300)
Armenio-Greek (no date)
Armenian (two listed)
Greek (several listed, split -800)
Other (-6900)
Albanio-Indo-Iranian (no date)
Albanian (several listed, split -600)
Indo-Iranian (-4600)
Indic (several, with some sub-structure,
split -2900)
Iranian (several, with some sub-structure,
split -2500)
Other (-6500)
Balto-Slavic (-3400)
Baltic (three listed)
Slavic (several, with some sub-structure,
split -1300)
Germano-Italo-Celtic (-6100)
Celtic (several, with some sub-structure,
split -2900)
Germano-Italic (-5500)
Germanic (-1750)
West Germanic (several, with some
sub-structure)
North Germanic (several, with some
sub-structure)
Italic (several, with some sub-structure,
split -1700)
The post and thread stemming from it can be found at
<groups.google.com/groups?threadm=pan.2003.11.29.22.16.35.827303%40mail.utexas.edu>
Brian