--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Joao" <josimo70@...> wrote:
> Abstract
> The phylogeny of the Indo-European (IE) language family is
reconstructed by application of the cladistic methodology to the
lexicostatistical dataset collected by Dyen (about 200 meanings, 84
speech varieties, the Hittite language used as a functional
outgroup). Three different methods of character coding provide trees
that show: (a) the presence of four groups, viz., Balto-Slavonic
clade, Romano-Germano-Celtic clade, Armenian-Greek group, and Indo-
Iranian group (the two last groups possibly paraphyletic); (b) the
unstable position of the Albanian language; (c) the unstable pattern
of the basalmost IE differentiation; but (d) the probable existence
of the Balto-Slavonic-Indo-Iranian ("satem") and the Romano-Germano-
Celtic (+Albanian?) superclades. The results are compared with the
phenetic approach to lexicostatistical data, the results of which
are significantly less informative concerning the basal pattern. The
results suggest a predominantly branching pattern of the basic
vocabulary phylogeny and little borrowing of individual words.
Different scenarios of IE differentiation based on archaeological
and genetic information are discussed.
There's some careless parrotting in the paper. What do they mean
by 'Europe'? Europe less Russia? I thought Uralic and possibly the
threee Caucasian families were also native to Europe! They've also
forgotten that some of the meanings on the 200-word list do *not*
keep their words well - 'because', 'dirty' and 'stab' are
particularly likely to change the associated word - see
http://www.ntu.edu.au/education/langs/ielex/IE-RATE1 .
It is worth noticing that the high rates of word-replacement in Indo-
Iranian languages has, on their own admission, affected their
results. For studying IE, as opposed to cladistics, it seems they
should have used Latin and Sanskrit, if their tools can handle time
differences.
Contrasting with Gray and Atkinson, it's interesting to see that the
Graeco-Armenian clade gets no support from the robuster method of
the three in this paper, but I get the feeling Gray and Atkinson
used robuster techniques.
I wish I knew what to make of Romano-Germanic-Albanian - artefact or
reality. If it's real, it adds to the argument that Satem is in a
sense polyphyletic - an areal change rather than an inherited change.
Richard.