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The distribution of linguistic structures in the world is the joint product of universal principles, inheritance from ancestor languages, language contact, social structures, and random fluctuation. This paper proposes a method for evaluating the relative significance of each factor — and in particular, of universal principles — via regression modeling: statistical evidence for universal principles is found if the odds for families to have skewed responses (e.g. all or most members have postnominal relative clauses) as opposed to having an opposite response skewing or no skewing at all, is significantly higher for some condition (e.g. VO order) than for another condition, independently of other factors.
After the very well-organized Leiden conference for which we must be grateful to Tijmen Pronk, it seems appropriate for me to review some of the papers, as I did after the previous conferences in Zagreb and Copenhagen. The aim of this review is merely to point out some of the differences of opinion which require further debate.
In his early years, C. C. Uhlenbeck was particularly interested in the problem of the Indo-European homeland (1895, 1897). He rejected Herman Hirt’s theory (1892) that the words for ‘birch’, ‘willow’, ‘spruce’, ‘oak’, ‘beech’ and ‘eel’ point to Lithuania and its immediate surroundings and returned to Otto Schrader’s view (1883, 1890) that the original homeland must rather be sought in southern Russia and may have included some of the later Germanic and Iranian territories. It is clear that the Mediterranean region and the area around the North Sea can safely be excluded because the arrival of the Indo-Europeans was comparatively recent here, as it was in Iran and the Indian subcontinent. It is difficult to be more specific within the limits of central and eastern Europe and central Asia. Uhlenbeck was impressed by the lexical correspondences between Indo-European and Semitic which had been adduced in favor of an eastern homeland but pointed out that borrowings from Semitic may have reached the Indo-Europeans through an intermediary. He agrees that the Indo-European words for trees and animals point to a moderate climate but questions the possibility of a more specific localization as well as the concept of homeland itself.
In an earlier study (1983) I argued that unlike aorists and athematic presents, Indo-European perfects and thematic presents originally had a dative subject, as in German mir träumt ‘me dreams’ for ich träume ‘I dream’, e.g. Greek oida ‘I know’ < ‘it is known to me’, édomai ‘I will eat’ < ‘it is eatable to me’. On the basis of Oettinger’s epoch-making book (1979), I proposed that the Hittite hi-flexion originated from a merger of the perfect, where *-i was added to 3rd sg. *-e in order to supply a new present, with the thematic flexion of causatives and iteratives, where the final *-e of 3rd sg. *-eie was dropped before the loss of intervocalic *-i- (1983: 315).