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 -----
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?****