----- Original Message -----
From: "John Cowan" <cowan@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2003 4:57 AM
Subject: Re: Indo-Hittite (was "Wife" (was: Homosexuality etc.)
> Roger Mills scripsit:
>
> > But as I understand it, that _is_ the current view; it just isn't called
> > Indo-Hittite anymore. Hittite is recognized as clearly divergent from
all
> > other IE; IIRC it lacks/has lost the feminine gender; lacks/has lost
some of
> > the verbal system; plus it retains traces of two of the laryngeals
> > (transliterated "-h-" and "-hh-") that show up in all other IE only by
their
> > affects on surrounding V or C.
>
> Poking around on the net indicates that some people do think Hittite
> broke away earlier, but other people don't think so, and attribute its
> deviancy to the influence of non-IE languages. Celtic after all is
> the only VSO branch, and nobody thinks that there is a high-level split
> between Celtic and non-Celtic.
>
> AFAIK the only absolutely uncontroversial node in the tree between the
> standard branches and IE itself is Indo-Iranian. Some people accept
> Balto-Slavic and others reject it; almost nobody thinks there's an
> Italic-Celtic or Italic-Celtic-Germanic node any more.
> What's worse, the evidence about grouping based on phonology absolutely
> contradicts that based on morphology.
I think a Balto-Slavo-Germanic node is accepted by some. I think a computer
aided IE tree placed Germanic branching off from Balto-Slavic quite early
on.http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~histling/ This also suggests an Italo-Celtic
node, a theory which I thought was current, anyway, and a Greco-Armenian
node.