While I agree that this belongs in a different threat, I wanted to sumarize my thoughts on that: I personally think the methodology of Gray and Atkinson is fundamentally flawed, first because it assumes that replacement of words in vocabulary would be regular (which is absurd), second, because they are basing this off vocabulary, not off sound changes. If you were to incorporate sound changes you would see that the tree that they have layed out is pretty impossible.
The problem with the Albanian-Talysh connection is that this would not only place Albanian inside Indo-Iranic, but also inside Iranic, which is pretty impossible. I would say that Indo-Iranic is one of the best established sub-branches of Indo-European, other than Balto-Slavic, or let me put it differently, the support for Indo-Iranic is more solid than for, say, for Italo-Celtic (though I would say that it is valid as a sub-branch).
I brought up earlier in the thread that there is a merger *o, *e > *a (and *ē, *ō > *ā), which is a key sound change of Indo-Iranic. Another feature is the merger *l > *r . For Iranic, a key sound change is the sound shift of word-initial *s- > *h-, which by the way, is a feature that Iranic shares with Armenian and Greek. Albanian, in contrast, does not feature any of these sound-laws. As I said, *e and *o were kept as distinct vowels in Proto-Albanian, and *l and *r are distinct vowels, and word-initial *s has a number of outcomes, depending on the rest of the word - oncluding *ɟ (spelled "gj"), and *θ (spelled "th").
As for the examples you gave, I won't go into detail about all of them, but for some of them I can readily give you cognates in other branches of Indo-European:
Compare with English "to bear", German "(ge-)bären" (to give birth), Latin "ferre" (to carry), Greek "pherō" (φερω).
English "tree" is also a cognate (Grimm's Law), Old Irish "dair" (oak), Welsh "derw" (oak), also found in Gaulish "
druides" (literally 'tree-seers').
This is not true. Glottochronology is fundamentally flawed as a method, in particular because you do not have words that change "slower" over time. Whenever a sound change occurs, it applies to
all words of the vocabulary. If there are
seemingly exceptions, these are conditioned by their own set of rules.
Where does that leave Albanian, though? As we said, Albanian is a Satem language (which it indeed shares with Indo-Iranic, but also Armenian and Balto-Slavic), and Albanian does share the sound shift of short *o > *a with Balto-Slavic and Germanic, so you could argue that it sits halfway between those, with reservations. I might add that Dacian, in contrast, preserved *a and *o as distinct, and if you argue for a closer relationship between Dacian and Albanian, it must be argued that the *o > *a merger in Albanian occured at a later point.
(Happy New Year, by the way
)
