--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
>
> I was just reading Joseph Salmons' article on the
> IE-ness of Gmc and this stuck out
>
> 1) Representation of selected branches among Pokorny's
> IE etymologies (Bird 1982)
> Germanic 67.4%
> Hellenic 60.4%
> Baltic 53.7%
> Indic 49.3%
>
> If Indic has the smallest percentage of IE vocabulary,
> how can anyone rationally claim it to be the center of
> IE?
The same way Baltic (Pontic Steppes) with just a little more than half
is claimed to be.
By the way Germanic is the bad apple that is ruining the IE tree
model. See below:
Indo-European and Computational Cladistics. By: Ringe, Don; Warnow,
Tandy; Taylor, Ann. Transactions of the Philological Society, Mar2002,
Vol. 100 Issue 1, p59, 71p; (AN 6373948)
"There are at least two scenarios that might have given rise to the
peculiar pattern of data involving Germanic. One is that the
diversification of the IE family must be modeled at least in part as a
network rather than a tree (as discussed in the previous section), (p.
52)."
"For instance Garrett (1999) whose discussion is unusually clear and
well articulated suggests that various subgroups of IE arose by
borrowing of innovations among closely related dialects which were not
very different from other, neighboring dialects (p. 50)."
"It is possible that the position of Germanic in the IE family is a
problem of this sort, but only if it occupied so central a position in
the family during its early diversification that its removal from the
data would resolve the remainder into a relatively clean tree.
Whether that is plausible mathematically or archaeologically is
unclear to us (p. 52)."
Mathematical Approaches to Comparative linguistics (Warnow, 1997).
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/tandy/pnas.pdf
"When Germanic was removed from the data set a tree was obtained on
which every character was compatible!..This suggested that Germanic
might be a singular problem for the Indo-European family and suggest
that the correct tree for the Indo-European family will be obtained by
placing Germanic within one of the optimal or near-optimal trees
obtained when Germanic is removed (p. 3)."
M. Kelkar
> I realize Pokorny is dated but it's the relative
> numbers that count.
> BTW: How do other languages rate?
>
>
>
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