Mark:
>For myself, I use 'unity' in the sense I apply to present-day >English, and
>historically, to the 1000+ year period before today. [...] Under different
>historical circumstances, English could have, >and probably would have
>broken into daughter languages, quite >analogous to the case of Dutch and
>Afrikaans.
I'm sorry. I don't follow. Have you ever heard people speak "Guyanese
English"? Are you saying that Guyanese doesn't qualify as a real language
because it hasn't been nominated an official language?? English is hardly
unified unless you have a specific definition of "English". Don't get me
started on HongKong English, now...
This problem of precise definition of a language is also existent with
Indo-European. There are many stages of IndoEuropean from which daughter
languages spring from and we might go so far as to consider IndoTyrrhenian
as "IndoEuropean". The only way to really define a language in this case is
to identify an area, some common grammatical rules and an arbitrary time
period, as is done in defining "Old English".
Of course, I suppose the time period can't be too arbitrary and should be
set by determining at which point IndoEuropean begat the oldest branches
like Anatolian and Tocharian. To do that, we might want to determine the
chronological order in which the many innovations in IE took place so that
we can map them with dates and archaeology, giving us a detailed period at
which we can define PIE (senza Etruscano e tuti :)
Why, this chronological listing is precisely what I've devised! Am I mad? Of
course! In order to squash further nonsensical fantasies about trivial and
'nuff-said linguistic issues (like how Etruscan might be related to
Dravidian or that it isn't related to the planet Xenon or that it's somehow
"undeciphered" and it's all a big fat mystery, yadayada), I've set out a
long and detailed summary of phonological and grammatical changes taking
place between ProtoSteppe and IndoTyrrhenian, and then from IndoTyrrhenian
to IE and Etruscan.
Yes, folks, it's gLeNicology like you've never seen it before.
My hypothesis is not perfect but forever progressing. It will no doubt be a
source of heated contention (Oh I do hope so) but I urge everyone to check
it out so that we can debate on it and consolidate in unified solidarity
reconstructing ProtoSteppe in happy bliss as One (Perfect for my evil
linguistical purposes).
I think that this will be an excellent topic in relation to the IE homeland
and precise date of unity. It's located at:
http://glen-gordon.tripod.com/language.html
This'll keep you guys pondering for weeks. Break out the Tylenol!
...Tata mes amis. (One more week to a short vacation in Vancouver... yahoo!)
- gLeN
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