Re: Divergence vs. convergence (was: Witzel and Sautsutras)

From: Brian M. Scott
Message: 70302
Date: 2012-10-26

At 2:03:46 PM on Friday, October 26, 2012, Tavi wrote:

> One thing is the "reconstructed PIE" and another one is
> the *real* PIE, which is only a subset of the former.

Since no reconstruction can possibly hope to be complete,
the real PIE cannot be a subset of any reconstructed PIE.

If you merely mean that PIE reconstructions, lexical,
morphological, and phonological, are not all from the same
stage of the language, and that some of the ones belonging
to later stages are branch-specific or at least specific to
a subset of branches, you're preaching to the choir: this is
old news.