----- Original Message
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Sent: Wednesday, April
24, 2002 12:36 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] On
Non-Linguistic IE Languages
***** GK: I wouldn't exactly designate something that happened ca 2500
and 4000 years ago "recent"*****
In everyday usage I wouldn't designate
something that happened a year ago "recent", but if the time depth tobe
considered is about 7600 years, such events are _relatively_
recent.
*****GK: I have no problem in seeing
"Indic" and "Iranic" as distinct families, And "Nuristanic"
also.*****
Hope you don't. A "family" in this sense is
any language plus all its descendants, whether extinct or extant -- the
linguistic analogue of what the biologists call a clade. So, for example, not
only "Germanic", but also "North Germanic", or even "English" (including Scots
etc.). The fact that in the last case the languages in question are still
mutually intelligible and form dialectal continua is irrelevant; what counts is
that they are [all] the offspring of a common ancestor.
>>(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*****
Hey, it was you who claimed that nothing exciting has happened for the last
2500 years. Have you changed your mind? :))
>>(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.*****
That's because you know (a close relative of) Proto-Romance -- which, BTW,
is far more than most simple mortals can boast of :(. You don't know any
Proto-Celtic, though. There you're in the position of someone who knows
Portuguese but no Romanian and is trying to figure out the meaning of a sentence
in the latter: "p&mîntul era pustiu Si gol; peste faTa adincului de ape era
întunerec". ("S, T" = "s, t" with underhooks, "&" = "a" breve). Even with
your Latin you might be at a loss.
Piotr