From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 52059
Date: 2008-01-29
----- Original Message -----
From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 10:05 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Can relationships between languages be determined after
80,000 years?
<snip>
> I most emphatically disagree. Given enough time, anything could have
> happened to phonological systems. You wouldn't be able to reconstruct
> even the phonological inventory of PIE, by just looking at the daughters
> and speculating "what is necessary". Cognates, besides lots of other
> important things, allow you to identify conditioned changes, historical
> mergers and splits, and without that knowledge no linguistic genius can
> guess which features are really old and which represent inovations.
>
> Piotr
***
This is why I patterned my Proto-Language sound system according to
Anttila's idea of what a minimally _complete_ sound system might include.
So far, IMHO, it has worked out very satisfactorily.
30 consonants, 3 vowels.
Patrick