Re: [tied] On Non-Linguistic IE Languages

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 13449
Date: 2002-04-24

Baltic and Slavic, Indo-Aryan and Iranian are recent branch-size bifurcations. We routinely combine the latter two into one branch only because we happen to know their closely related "Old" stages -- the modern languages are not so similar at all. Germanic as we know it (with Grimm, Verner and the stress shift) is also a recent product -- not even 2500 years old. Portuguese and Romanian have perhaps already grown about as different as Celtic and Latin (and maybe even pre-Grimm pre-Germanic) were 2500-3000 years ago. Linguistic "speciation" requires a sufficient time depth; what's a dialectal difference at present may become a branch division in two thousand years' time in favourable circumstances. What had arisen by 3000 BC were not the modern branches as we know them from very much later written records but the ancestral languages of some of them, still quite similar to one another.
 
Piotr
 
----- Original Message -----
From: george knysh
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 5:42 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] On Non-Linguistic IE Languages

****GK: Thank you for your helpful comment Steve. As
usual it contributes a lot to a solution of these
issues.It would be even more helpful if you
demonstrated on purely linguistic grounds how it was
possible for so many IE families to arise in the first
let's say 2500 years of the saga, and why we haven't
seen anything similar occur in the last 2500 years.
Something went wrong with "purely linguistic"
dynamics?****