Re: [tied] On Non-Linguistic IE Languages

--- Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

> Baltic and Slavic, Indo-Aryan and Iranian are recent
> branch-size bifurcations.

***** GK: I wouldn't exactly designate something that
happened ca 2500 and 4000 years ago "recent"*****

(Piotr)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.

*****GK: I have no problem in seeing "Indic" and
"Iranic" as distinct families, And "Nuristanic"
also.*****

(Piotr)Germanic

> as we know it (with Grimm, Verner and the stress
> shift) is also a recent product -- not even 2500
> years old.

*****GK: About as "recent" as Baltic and Slavic*****

(Piotr)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.

*****GK: Well maybe they have to you as a professional
linguist. But they haven't to a simple mortal like
myself. With my latin I can make my way through the
Romanian and Portuguese of 2002 AD (although even here
I would probably need a dictionary, as I originally
did for Polish and Russian). Celtic remains terra
incognita to me (my loss) and the Celtic of Brennus'
time would be no different I'm afraid.*****

(Piotr)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.

*****GK: It's hard to say exactly what had arisen by
3000 BC. I would suspect that it is the next thousand
years which saw the definitive and radical
fragmentation of PIE though I cannot rule out anything
specific for the previous time period. There just
isn't enough hard evidence. nit even for the
"Anatolian" divergences.******


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