Re: [tied] Greek+Slavic

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, mkapovic@... wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> But do we know that more than one dialect participated in the
> expansion of IE into the daughter languages? Can we know that the
> dialects of PIE did not just die out without affecting the development
> of a single norm that was the only one to be continued? If the IE
> dialects just disappeared without leaving traces in the IE we have
> come to know they are of no interest to us. How does one decide what
> picture to imagine?

That is ofcourse also possible. But I think that there are more then
plenty of differences which would point to a dialectal diversity in PIE.
Ofcourse, it is not impossible to think of some other scheme in order to
explain them, but it's not the simplest way in my opinion. But we will
probably never know without a time machine.

Mate