Re: "Wife" (was: Homosexuality etc.)

John Cowan/Andreas Johansson wrote:
> > Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
> > > BTW, I recently read a piece which suggested that Indo-European be
> > renamed
> > > Indo-Anatolic, on the grounds that it's basically made up of two
> > branches -
> >
> > This "Indo-Hittite hypothesis" has been around a long time, possibly
> > as
> > far back as the discovery that Hittite was IE-related.  I thought it
> > more
> > or less died out in the 1940s, and I haven't heard of any new
> > evidence.
Right. Maybe a more precise term would have been IE-Hittite. Apparently the
IE unity persisted for a while after the Hittites broke away.
Indo-Anatolian may not be quite correct, as there's doubt as to whether the
other Anatolian langs. are necessarily related to Hittite.  They're poorly
attested of course, and IIRC there's a 1000-plus year gap in the written
record.

There's been a similar change in the Austonesian area-- what Dempwolff
(1934-38) reconstructed as PAN (which does NOT drool) is now called
Malayo-Polynesian; a form can only be called PAN if it's also attested in
Taiwan. At least that's the view at present.......(Taiwanese langs. were
recognized as belonging to the family early on, but were poorly known/
little investigated until after WW2. IIRC the first major publication on
them was around 1955.)

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