Re: [tied] Re: Gimbutas.

Thanks, Peter. I think Piotr will give some comments within a few days.
Germanic pronunciation seems to have changed more than most IE languages.
Perhaps this was one of the reasons why they developed the weak conjugation,
to make the conjugation of less frequently used verbs more regular? But yes,
their declension kept a lot of PIE. If they had left the "homeland" much
earlier than 3000 BC, wouldn't we expect to see more changes?

Marc

>Marc wrote
>> Perhaps Germanic
>underwent more foreign influence, so that Gothic retained much less
>PIE grammar than Latin, Greek or Sanskrit?
>
>Foreign influence is not needed.
>Gothic shows all the basic PIE morphology that we expect, in both nouns and
>verbs. It lacks only the developments which built the verbal systems of
>Greek, I-I and Latin. It can be argued that Greek and I-I retained

contact

>and developed the perfect-aorist system together at a late, post PIE stage,
>albeit in slightly different ways. The elements from which this system was
>built were re-formed in Latin, Celtic and so on, and are also to be found

in

>Gothic, with the single exception of the -s- aorist, which we suspect for
>other reasons is a late development (one scholar even denies its existence
>for PIE!) Peter