Re: [tied] Re: Agriculture and IE

----- Original Message -----
From: george knysh
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 7:27 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Agriculture and IE


*****GK: My apologies for having expressed myself too hurriedly. Of course I
must agree that there was some
sort of "ancestral" language to all subsequent attested families of IE.
Whether this language was the
"reconstructed" PIE is another matter. And what remains unclear to me is the
time frame and location
of this language, as well as the manner of its spread and differentiation.
And, let's be frank about this,
the reason for its complete disappearance. Within particular language
families it seems less difficult
to imagine the primary or proto- language of the group. But the processes
which led to the emergence of
the various IE families were certainly much more complex and convoluted.
After all Greek, Indo-Aryan,
Celtic, and Slav are tremendously more different from one another as "total"
linguistic realities than
Italian, Spanish, Latin and Portuguese, or Polish, Ukrainian, Serb, Russian
and Lusatian.******

... Which may simply mean that Greek, Hittite, and Indo-Aryan had diverged
considerably more than 2000 years before their earliest attestation. Of
course there is no universal "genetic clock" for languages, but I find it
intuitively clear that we need a sufficient time depth to account for the
degree of differentiation visible already in the mid second millennium BC,
which is one of the reasons why I like the early neolithic spread scenario.
By the way, PIE did not _disappear_.

Piotr