****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.
George,
First, our written evidence of MOST IE languages is no older than about 1500
years ago, so the time for the specific differentiation you seem to be
referring to would actually be about 6000 years old. (5500BC to 500AD)
Maybe a little more.
In theory, the relative difference between the languages you are referring to
would have been smaller and smaller the further you went back in time.
"Innovations" that kept separating one language or groups of languages from
another have piled up over thousands of years, creating larger and larger
differences.
The abstract principle is "tree-branching." The term "language family" is a
relative one applied in reference to adjacent branches coming from a common
"node." E.g., Slavic is a family. Balto-Slavic was a family.
Balto-Slavic-Germanic (if it existed) would be a family. Northwestern IE
would be a family. IE would be a family. This is, BTW, precisely the way the
terms are used in phylogenic biology.
As I mentioned, the distance between *PIE (at 5500BC) and most written IE
languages would be about 6000 years. For comparison, in roughly 1500 years,
we see the differences in modern French, Spanish, Romanian and Italian - 1500
years ago they were in principle all one language - Latin. So in historic
times Latin - a member of a family (Italic) - became a parent to a different
family (Romance).
Descartes, writing in the preserved Latin language, would use "cogito ergo
sum" and while writing the same statement in French, "je pense donc je suis."
This example shows why Latin and French, when tested on the sentence level,
have a mutual comprehensibility of next to zero. Innovations over the years
have made the parent and daughter very different languages. However,
linguists can document the step-by-step development of much of Latin into
much of French. They are "related" languages. And that is what puts the
"Rome" in "Romance" languages. A linguistic analysis of relatedness.
(Unless you understand "relatedness" as a concept in historical linguistics,
everything about it will be baffling.)
If the difference between Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian is not large
enough for you, given 1500 years, then give it some time. French already has
started its own "family". Haitian Creole, considered a French dialect by
many orthodox linguists, is barely comprehensible in modern French, using
many 17th C. constructions lost in modern French. If it is not yet a
daughter language, it may become one. The same may be true for Koumansman
and the dialects spoken in Morocco, Burundi, RÈunion, Caledonia, Mauritius.
Now, if you put aside the issue of descent and turn to rate of change, with
actual, historically recorded rate of language differentiation in other
places like Australia, you might ask a completely different question. And
that is why there aren't 1000 IE languages given that amount of time. In New
Guinean highlands, there are something like 12,000 different languages. And
those particular location suggests the answer. Along with other forms of
consolidation, more modern IE languages unlike early IE languages have
writing, grammar books and teachers and Academies and Dictionaries, etc.,
that "standardize" major or state languages and cause minor languages and
dialectical off-shoots to die. (In fact, languages around the world are
dying out at an alarming rate, probably due in large part to standardized
language literacy and the electronic media.) And standardization is one more
reason why you haven't seen the rate of branching you are asking for.
<<Something went wrong with "purely linguistic" dynamics?>>
Your "impression" that you've discovered something wrong with "linguistic
dynamics" in the question above again misses the point.
If you really think about what I wrote in my last post, you'll see that what
you think is a stumper of a question is really not even relevant. The idea
of IE would not exist without linguistics. The ancestor *PIE was
linguistically reconstructed from the very languages you mention above. So
it is what it is. If it happened overnight or in 10,000 years. It's all
you've got to work with if you are talking about "IE" languages.
<<*GK: Well of course if you put it that way, if you forbid any other
interpretation of "Indo-Europeanism" except a strictly linguistic one then
you really are living in a vacuum.>>
George, I don't live in a vacuum. Trust me on this one.
And I don't forbid anything. Logic does however.
<<To me "Indo-Europeans" are all those populations which HISTORICALLY have
spoken languages basically classifiable as Indo-European.>>
Same point. "Historically", of course, in ordinary academic terms and in the
dictionary means "recorded" time. Remember that Yamnaya for example is NOT
historic. It is pre-historic. There is no written record of what those
people spoke. So they're not included in your definition?
And also note that "languages classifiable as Indo-European" are classified
that way linguistically - unless you have some other way of classifying those
languages. Otherwise, your definition of Indo-Europeans DEPENDS entirely on
linguistics. Logically.
<<But I am interested in the total concrete cultural realities represented by
these peoples, not just in their formal or abstract linguistic identities. And
even these identities are not strictly "Indo-European" in all respects are
they?>>
You mean like the guys from Japan who made me sing American cowboy songs with
them at the Sushi restaurant. They all spoke IE-type English quite well by
the way.
<<And just in passing, let me say, belatedly, that PIE became extinct a long
long time ago. No one except highly trained specialists would be able to
understand something written in that reconstructed language. To say that it
evolved and is still around today is shall we term it "somewhat
disingenuous"?>>
Oh come on. I never said it did. But, hey, when they promoted Jurassic Park,
they said that the dinosaur lives on in birds. So who complained? What's
the point, anyway?
<<To use a polite turn. What exists today of course, is not PIE, but many
mutually incomprehensible great great etc etc etc granddaughter languages and
dialects.>>
This is IMPORTANT! Let me ask you how you know that? How do you know they
are "granddaughters"?
<<**GK: With all due respect Steve I'll proceed as I see fit in a discussion
of the Indo-European question.>>
And so will I.
<<The very fact that at least five major hypotheses (all propounded by
distinguished scholars) are possible with respect to the localization in time
and space of the abstract schemes of linguists should tell you something.**>>
That this subject is a little too emotional?
S.