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I found this Quora post on the topic of the centum/satem split interesting, and it goes far further than I had considered, and is perhaps what the other comment

by danans 4y ago

I found this Quora post on the topic of the centum/satem split interesting, and it goes far further than I had considered, and is perhaps what the other commenter was referring to: https://www.quora.com/What-are-satem-and-centum-languages https://www.quora.com/What-are-satem-and-centum-languages One thing it suggests is that the simple branching + isolation model of language evolution is incomplete and that areal changes can be shared among co-located languages. It proposes the idea (sort of like my understanding) that "centum" or a form thereof was the initial state, and that satemization might be a later innovation in a particular area that spread over a subset of the languages before they spread.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> One thing it suggests is that the simple branching + isolation model of language evolution is incomplete and that areal changes can be shared among co-located languages. Yes, this is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_model . That was a very interesting post, and it does mention Tocharian as a problem for the theory of a centum/satem split, but it doesn't really discuss why it would be a problem other than to say that it could be easily resolved. The argument really seems to revolve around Hittite.