>brentlords@... writes:
I don't mean to sound impatient, but it would save you and everyone else a
lot of trouble if you'd simply read a few introductory works on historical
linguistics before you tried to critique the field. You're in the position
of someone who has no calculus trying to offer alternatives to General
Relativity.
You don't have the knowledge-base to _understand_ the theories you're
criticizing.
>THE SOUNDS ENTER BEFORE THERE IS EVEN AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THERE TO BE AN
EVOLUTION IN THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE.
-- this is easy to detect because different languages don't undergo the
_same_ sound changes.
Eg., Proto-Germanic had a word for "king", roughly *kunningaz; from this are
derived our "king", "koenig", etc.
The same word was borrowed from Proto-Germanic into Finnish, where it
survives as... kunningaz. You can also trace a series of very early PIE
loans into proto-Finno-Ugrian.
>Maybe the relationship being found between the earliest languages does have
more to do with adjacency and interaction than an expansion of a culture and
its diversification into subcultures.
-- the way languages develop through differentiation of dialects and thence
into a language-family of related tongues has been historically observed
(with Latin ==> Romance, for instance, and Proto-Germanic ==> Germanic
languages.)
It always happens this way. Language expands territorially, dialects diverge
because innovations are no longer shared, separate languages emerge.
Furthermore, languages don't borrow their basic vocabularies. More than half
the English vocabulary is loan-words (mostly from the Romance languages) but
the _basic_ vocabulary, things like kinship terms, body parts, and common
objects, is almost all Germanic in origin... and, in fact, mostly PIE.