Re: [tied] density fo IE languages

----- Original Message -----
From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, November 09, 2002 10:15 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] density fo IE languages


> Possibly, for reasons easy to understand, the greatest
density occurs in some remote highland areas where a large
number of minor Iranian, Indo-Aryan and Nuristani languages
have survived and no official state language has managed to
wipe them out -- I mean, in particular, the northern
borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the answer
depends at least partly on the criteria used to decide whether
something is a "language" or a "dialect".
>
> Piotr
>

[Moeller]
mmm. that is right. And it can be that this area is not so
well searched, so a statistic cannot be made. But from the
point of what we know today, and with the criteria we use
today for speaking about a language, not about a dialect, it
seems Europe is somehow the place with a wide spectrum of IE
languages. But a such idea will be ad nullum to see if we
reduce all the germanic languages and slavic languages just to
2 ( proto-germanic and proto-slavic) for instance.
But in this way, we can reduce almost every groups of
languages to a "proto-group". So , the important question here
is where should be the point zero, where we have to start as
speaking about languages and not anymore about proto-language.
And here it seems to be difficult enough because the languages
did not have hade the same evolution on the timeline ( from
what we know).
If for germanic we have already before christus evidences of
several languages, we do not have it about slavic. But we
cannot say that there have been no slavic languages until
there.
Is reasonable to speak about the "languages" taking as point
zero the most ancient sources which speak about languages and
folks or there must be other criteria for establish the point
where we cann say " ok, from here we speak about
differentiated IE languages?".