At 12:40:46 PM on Thursday, February 28, 2008,
fournet.arnaud wrote:
>>>> When it comes to B. and E. They share phonological
>>>> features.
>>>> Voiced stop > voiced spirant
>>>> Unvoiced stop > unvoiced spirant
>>>> Glottalized > unvoiced stop
>> Your 'demonstration' (as quoted above) is circular.
>> What's more, if the existence of that common ancestor
>> *could* be demonstrated, it wouldn't matter whether
>> Basque and Etruscan shared phonological developments.
> I disagree.
> Languages are *especially* related because they share the
> *same* phonological developments.
No. The IE languages are all related, but they exhibit a
very wide variety of phonological developments. For a
concrete example, French and Armenian are demonstrably
related despite having undergone very different phonological
developments.
Perhaps you meant that related languages that share the same
phonological developments are more closely related than
those that do not, i.e., that they have a more recent common
ancestor; that is certainly likely to be the case, though
it's also certainly possible for languages to undergo
similar changes independently.
Or perhaps you meant that relationships are easier to spot
when the languages involved have undergone similar
phonological changes; that's true enough.
But neither of these interpretations contradicts what I
wrote or justifies your 'I disagree', and the fact remains
that similar phonological developments are *not* a
prerequisite for common ancestry.
Brian