Re: [tied] Greek+Slavic

>> The point of course is : how can you tell whether the
>> specific characteristics of Slavic, those which make
>> it a distinct group of IE languages, already existed
>> at the time of Mycenaean Greek. Germanic for instance
>> (if one considers the Grimm shift essential for its
>> identification) likely did not yet exist at that time.
>
> This is an interesting question. It has, of course, been considered
> before,
> and it is the reason many linguists now speak of PIE as a cluster of
> related
> dialects, rather than a single language. Your question reduces to whether
> or not it is possible to think of PIE as a single undifferentiated
> language
> at any stage (allowing for early removal of some dialects, if you wish -
> like Hittite). Or must we think of PIE already containing the
> differentiation that we see reflected in the full-blown language groups of
> IE?
>
> Vocabulary certainly does not seem to have been universally shared. Is it
> easier to explain this by vocabulary loss, or by the concept of close
> dialects with slightly different vocabularies (as we find in modern
> related
> dialects)?
>
> Morphology is not universally shared. Can we really derive all IE
> morphology from a single origin, or is it easier to think in terms of
> related dialects, with slightly different morphologies, as we see in
> modern
> languages with dialects?
>
> Which is more like real language, a dialect cluster, or a single uniform
> undifferentiated speech?
>
> There is a different (and much more trivial) question about labels. Is
> pre-Germanic Germanic? Is pre-Slavic Slavic? Who cares? Call it what
> you
> like. The real question is whether pre-Germanic and pre-Slavic were ever
> absolutely identical. I'm arguing no.

I would agree. I think it's not at all questionable that IE was not a
unified language. Every language has dialects (except maybe those that are
spoken in only one village and similar cases) and so did IE. And it's not
at all strange that dialects have some different words, slightly different
morphology etc. When we try to reconstruct unified IE, we are really
reconstructing some pre-PIE or some ideal IE which is just a construct
(ofcourse, reconstruction is inherently a construct anyway) - something
like an average PIE dialect maybe.
Also, we can never be sure exactly how to reconstruct something. For
instance, many are unwilling to reconstruct both *-bHos and *-mos (or
*-mus) in dat. pl. (not to mention *-bHyos) because it is supposedly not
really likely that IE would have two or three different endings for a
single case (although it was also the ending of the abl. pl.). But in my
native language, some nouns have like 3 possible gen. pl. endings, some
have 2 possible instr. sg. endings etc. So I guess it's quite possible
that IE had both *bHos and *-mos/mus in dat. pl. Maybe they were dialectal
differences, maybe dat. had *bH, instr. had *m, we cannot know. But all
these things are indeed very possible.

Mate