Re: Indo-Hittite (was "Wife" (was: Homosexuality etc.)

Joe scripsit:

> 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.
This is a very ingenious application of the methods of cladistics (a type of
biological taxonomizing) to languages.  Cladistics, however, is known to be
extremely tricky to get right; specifically, it's hard to be sure which
characters truly mark their clades and which are "shared primitive" (all
mammals show signs of having five fingers/toes, but this is not a mammalian
character, because all land animals except amphibians share it).

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
I must confess that I have very little notion of what [s. 4 of the British
Trade Marks Act, 1938] is intended to convey, and particularly the sentence
of 253 words, as I make them, which constitutes sub-section 1.  I doubt if
the entire statute book could be successfully searched for a sentence of
equal length which is of more fuliginous obscurity. --MacKinnon LJ, 1940