🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Jan.6.16.07.53.1993.13867@pilot.njin.net>, hubey@pilot (Hubey) writes:

>No, I was referring to the book Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans.
>
>One of the evidences and rationales (among some archeological stuff and the
>beech/salmon stuff) is that taking into account the various
>expansions/transitions, the descendant language that stayed closer to the
>'homeland' --since it would not have any problems with the substratum or the
>invaders/dominators--would experience the least changes, whereas more changes
>would be found among the descendants as they moved out further
>assimilating/domineering other-language speakers.

I see.

However, languages change whether or not they encounter speakers of other
languages.  Thus, there is no language in the Indo-European family that is any
closer to the Ursprache than any other at the same time depth, for some notion
of closeness.

That is, the phonology and/or the morphology and/or the syntax will be changed
from that of the parent language.

(I will define "parent" in another post.)

Besides, given current thinking on the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European,
somewhere at a midpoint between the Eastern Goths and the Western Armenians
would be best under your proposed model.  There are problems with that location
as well.
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_