Re: [tied] Mother of all IE languages

From: S.Kalyanaraman
Message: 27912
Date: 2003-12-03

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "P&G" <petegray@...> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Perhaps that's because they only looked at vocabulary (and a very
small> list!) Amazing that their tree also removes Indo-Iranian
from the> Greek-Armenian group, presumably for the same reason.


That is right, Pete. The methodology is flawed ab initio. The sample
is not only small but is a biased, non-random sample from the
lexical repertoire of the languages involved. One can't draw
conclusions about the population (language relationships, in this
case) based on such a sample.

The error gets further compounded by using the questionable premises
of semantic or phonetic distances sought to be gleaned through
linguostatistics and glottochronology.

The biggest mistake occurs from trying to extrapolate the recent
perceived relationships into the time periods as deep as the 7th
millennium Before Present.