Michael:
>In other words, we see no family that is medial between Uralic
>and Indo-European, or between Altaic and Ainu, or whatever ("genetic
>spaces"), or between Hellenic and Indo-Iranian, or
>Thracian and Phrygian, etc.
Keep in mind that whatever traces of languages that may have
existed in Europe before the coming of IE were pretty much wiped
out by IE. Same with Hellenic and Indo-Iranian. There were most
likely intermediates at some time but they died out or were
replaced by the more popular languages around them.
I already mentioned that one can think of a core IE being
surrounded by "para-dialects" that are almost IE but not quite.
Again, these para-dialects would be overthrown by the more
popular core IE over time, giving us a "genetic gap", as it
were.
- gLeN
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