🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <300ts4$77t@csi0.csi.uottawa.ca>,
Mark Israel <misrael@csi.uottawa.ca> wrote:
>In article <aldersonCssywn.Gsq@netcom.com>, Richard M. Alderson III <alderson@netcom.com> writes:
>>
>> Each language in the family contributes to the reconstruction, 
>> ideally with the same weight though this has not always been 
>> entirely true in the past.
>

Within the context of Indo-European historical linguistics,
I'd consider this a fairly direct allusion to Sanskrit (maybe
Greek and Latin too).  

>   Why "ideally with the same weight"?  I can immediately think
>of three reasons why equal weighting would not be ideal.
>
>(1) Our earliest records of the various languages are not 
>contemporaneous.  Since we have Latin, we can give zero weight
>to French and Italian.  Since we don't have a 2000-year-old 
>ancestor of Lithuanian, we have to use modern Lithuanian, but
>we should give it a lesser weight than Latin, since it makes
>sense that older languages would be tend to be closer to the 
>original.

True, although I would give a little more than zero weight
to Romance.

>(2) We know that geographical displacement correlates negatively 
>with language change:  U.S. English and Quebec French are more
>archaic than British English and French French.  Hence we should
>give greater weight to languages whose speakers must have migrated.

I doubt that is a "constant".  It's true that U.S. English is more 
archaic in some respects. In others, it is clearly not.  South African
Dutch (Afrikaans) has retained some archaic words, but in grammar 
(inflection), Dutch Dutch is far more 'archaic'.
Furthermore, this argument leads to circularity in matters such as
the "Indo-European homeland".  It's usually safer not to assume too
much about "who must have migrated".

>(3) Some changes are intrinsically more likely to have gone in
>one direction than in the other (or don't you believe this)?  We
>should give greater weight to languages with forms that are 
>intrinsically likely to be earlier.

Yes, some changes have that property.  Unfortunately, most do
not.  I'm afraid I don't understand the phrase "languages with
forms ... likely to be earlier".  This generalization from
individual forms to languages does not apply.  If you compare
any two (related) languages, you'll find forms intrinsically
likely to be earlier in *both* languages.  The best you can do
is find a greater proportion of them in one of the two.  If
that's what you meant, you have a point.

-- 
Miguel Carrasquer         ____________________  ~~~
Amsterdam                [                  ||]~  
mcv@inter.NL.net         ce .sig n'est pas une .cig