Re: [tied] Re: A New language tree

At 11:43:02 AM on Saturday, May 7, 2005, mkelkar2003 wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
> <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>> mkelkar2003 wrote:

>>> Just liket that graded ablaut stuff, the actual 5 vowels
>>> are not observed in any langauge.

>> If you mean that /a/ /e/, /o/, /e:/ and /o:/ don't appear
>> as different vowel phonemes in any IE language, Greek and
>> Latin, for example, immediately falsify your claim. Both
>> retain the original vowel system very faithfully.

> That is the problem. The "orginal" system has been
> projected back in time by looking at what exists in
> reality. According to Richard Worthington:

> "A problem with reconstruction is that shared changes are
> very easily projected back."

> In other words changes that are NOT shared are a matter
> faith.

No. You completely missed the point of Richard's comment;
indeed, you essentially inverted it. The point is that
shared changes can look as if they derive by inheritance
from a common ancestor when in fact they do not; see his
'tobacco' example. (You do, I trust, realize that
Proto-Romance cannot have had a word for tobacco.) You've
misunderstood Garrett's discussion of Greek in exactly the
same way.

> One has to assume that the original language had
> them (archaisms?) that were preserved in one brach but oh
> so conveniently were lost in the other.

Since just this sort of divergence can be observed in
historical times, your rhetorical 'oh so conveniently' looks
pretty silly.

> Or they are "later" innovations. But there is a thrid
> possibility. Those dialects do not genetically belong to a
> family at all. The Nichols/Garret wave model is in action.

Eh? Garrett is talking about convergence of closely related
dialects.

>> PIE *a, *e and *o fell together as *a in
>> Proto-Indo-Iranian, but traces of the old distinctions
>> are observable

> Or what was together elready expanded later as Misra has
> shown in the case of the Gypsy language.

Only to those who believe that water spontaneously flows
uphill, I'm afraid.

> The Sanskrit system could be and inmho IS the origina.

But by your own admission you're incompetent to hold an
informed opinion.

Brian