The differences were far less "enormous"
than you probably imagine. Hittite was more apart, but Greek and Indo-Aryan
shared a lot of structure, including similar inflections, lots of cognate stems,
etc., even some shared poetic formulae. And that was after some 3000 years
of independent development (mutual intelligibility cannot be expected to last
that long). Whatever metric of linguistic distance you
use, differences between PIE and Vedic will probably turn out to be
smaller than the differences between Vedic and any modern Indo-Aryan
language.
You arguments remind me of the mode of
thinking which negates evolution because no-one has seen a new species emerge in
historical times. Well, 'istorical times ain't long enough.
For your information, the common
(Proto-)Slavic period extends rather long _after_ year zero. The Romance cluster
is to all intents and purposes a new branch of IE with more internal diversity
than you can see in modern Baltic (though being at the same time a subbranch of
Italic in the historical perspective -- I hope you have no problem with
"embedded families"); and it is of roughly the same age as Slavic.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 12:19
PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: On Non-Linguistic
IE Languages
*****GK: Of course not. Whether or not there
were
linguists capable of classifying languages into
internally related
related clusters at the time
(similar though not identical to the clusters
of 2002
AD) the differences between e.g. Greek, Hittite and
Indo-Aryan
were already enormous in 1500 BC, and an
"Anatolian" cluster certainly
existed. After the
appearance of proto-Germanic, proto-Baltic
and
proto-Slavic (all some time before year zero) I see no
further
"creation" of such clusters, just further
differentiations within
them.*****