> Do you mean palaeolithic? Also, I would have expected members of
> the same tribe (= many bands) to understand one another's number
> words. Another issue is that you could very easily see a mixture of
> hard bondaries and far ranging dialect continua (rather like today,
> in fact.)
Yes, sorry, I meant palaeolithic. I typed too fast. I would expect
that way back then, the notion of "tribe" would be foreign. I like
to stick to the term "bands". I would see local bands being able to
understand each other's dialects, but that doesn't mean that one
band is going to adopt the dialect of another. So if one band says
'two fives' and another says 'two hands' and another says 'ten', it
doesn't mean that there will be a comprehension problem nor does it
mean that all the bands will say things the same way necessarily.
> Speculation, again.
Of course it's speculation. This is a forum about protolanguages. Since
when WASN'T it speculation?? ;) However, what I'm saying about
language change is all common sense. Languages don't evolve as nicely
as we'd like them to. Check out the evolution of Modern English or
the evolution of Chinese. It doesn't look so messy until we get into
the historical details.
> Who needs dialects? An individual's speech can have multiple
> unrelated forms - e.g. 'dozen' v. 'twelve', 'score'
> v. 'twenty', 'brace' v. 'pair' in English.
Yes, but even dialectal merger can, does and has happened. Why do I
pronounce "Tuesday" with /tS-/ but "tune" with /t-/ instead of /tS-/?
This is commonplace in languages and I see it happening in IE. In fact,
we _know_ that here too it _has_ happened. Many IEists have been
noticing that satem dialects don't evolve as nicely as they're supposed
to, sometimes showing centum-like reflexes thanks to the innovations
from their related neighbours. It really gets trippy if you think about
Pre-IE in this 'liquid' model manner. You realize that it's not so
linear afterall and much of the puzzle is in finding where each
individual innovation originated, not where any 'dialect' has, since
a 'dialect' is nothing more than a set of these individual isoglosses,
each of which spread like waves on their own.
= gLeN