On 2008-05-25 17:39, david_russell_watson wrote:
> > Piotr is not the only person on the list.
>
> No, but he is the most linguistically informed person on
> the list, and when the rest of you differ with him, you
> usually turn out to be wrong.
It's kind of you to say so, but I could name quite a few list members
who are at least as well informed as I am, and in some cases are my
scholarly betters in many respects. It's a pity that only a few of them
post regularly; I've learnt a lot from all of them and would liem to
hear from them more frequently.
As regards the monophyly of Satem, I still abide by my gut feeling that
the "core Satem" languages, i.e. Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic (which
also share the RUKI rule) are more closely related to each other than to
any outgroup. I have some doubts about the position of Albanian and
Armenian (not to mention Thracian), which might or might not be "basal
Satem". Both show unique innovations not shared with other groups. The
position of Germanic as a sister group to Balto-Slavic, resulting from
many computer-aided cladistic analyses, is IMO an artefact of the choice
of the linguistic characters (with areal convergence effects mistaken
for genetic relationship). But it's all debatable and I'm as fallible as
anyone else, so there's no reason to take my opinions as authoritative.
Piotr