Jens:
>Could there not be many IE-like peoples among which only a few
>were influential in the development of the IE languages? That would yield a
>huge archaeological homeland with a small linguistically relevant spot
>somewhere inside it.
This is precisely how I've been conceiving this in my head for
the longest time. There would be para-IE dialects surrounding
a core IE. The para-IE dialects would be remnant dialects on
the wane, probably retaining tasty archaicisms from Old or Mid
IE that were lost in the core Late IE... or, gasp, perhaps some
of these archaicisms were re-introduced in the core IE thanks
to the para-dialects!
So far I haven't come up with any linguistics pointing at these
yummy para-dialects aside from a suspicious plethora of suffixal
variants with similar function which seem to derive from the same
origin. An example would be the whole mess with *-r/*-n/*-r-o-
(< MIE *-en) and *-er-/*-or-/*-on- (< MIE *-ene).
However, I haven't thought it out in detail yet.
- gLeN
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