Re: [tied] Agriculture and IE

From: george knysh
Message: 13348
Date: 2002-04-18

--- x99lynx@... wrote:
It seems to have taken
> about 1500 years for Latin to split into modern
> Italian, French, Spanish,
> Romanian, etc. But Hittite and Mycenaean Greek seem
> much farther apart than
> the Romance languages - at least to some people. So
> how much time would it
> have taken for a theoretical proto-indo-european
> parent language to split
> into all the different IE languages is a little
> tricky. We don't have a lot
> of exact measurement of documented
> language-splitting time to go by, really.

*****GK: I think Steve has hit the nail on the head
here. Whether one prefers the West-east or East-west
(and then east-east) IE spread scenario, the major
problem is in coming up with an explanation of why
there is such divergence and diversity so "early" in
the known history of IE languages, given the fact that
it took such a long time for even fairly closely
related languages to "diversify" (Steve offers the
Latinate family, an equally strong example would be
the Slavic family. Others will have yet other examples
of this). In the mid-second millennium BC one has
attestations of Anatolian (Hittite), Greek, and
Indo-Aryan. If there ever was a unified PIE (we have
theoretical reconstructions which is an entirely
different matter), how far back in time must one go to
find it, and what processes must one postulate for its
differentiation? I don't believe that either cultural
or technological innovations can provide decisive
answers, at least such as would be conclusive in all
or most cases. But perhaps a "hybridization" process
might, viz., one that envisages speakers of IE coming
into contact with a variety of pre-IE languages, whose
influence would be great enough to explain the
emergence of distinct early families relatively
quickly. Tricky indeed. If one still looks for
"linear" developments re the diversity, must one go
back to the Cavalli-Sforza school of genetics which,
correct me if I misremember, speaks of the population
of Europe after the last Ice Age from two sanctuaries,
one in the Crimea, and the other in southern Iberia?
Or a combination of this (which we would expect to
have produced a LOT of local lingos) with some variant
of the hybridization process? Very tricky. Which is
why we can continue to talk about it and profer our
favourite (all highly volatile pace everybody)
solutions, followed by endless argument.******


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