From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 23310
Date: 2003-06-15
Yes. Of course they have their peculiarities, thanks to their relative isolation within Indic and a long history of contacts with Nuristani and Iranian languages (not to mention Burushaski), but they are Indic, full stop.
50 years is hardly enough for divergence to set in.Yes, a family tree is not the best way to describe the situation when dialects developed for a long time without proper isolation.Still I'd like to clear up the situation for myself a little better.Suppose we have a mother language which produced 2 dialects which were well isolated for a while, and then started to interact again intensively.What can happen then? I see 2 variants:1 - if these 2 languages (dialects) remained mutually intelligible, they form a dialectal continuity again;2 - if they managed to change considerably, they remain 2 distinctive languages with extensive mutual borrowings.Which scenario will be realized? It must depend on how long was this "while" (and on the intensity of changing both languages during the period of isolation, of course, but usually we can't measure it).If the period of isolation was as short as 50 years, surely we get the first situation.
I doubt if any concrete numbers could be justified. The rate of change is unpredictably variable, and mutual intelligibility is a fuzzy notion. I'm not being evasive; that's just the way the cookie crumbles, as the saying goes.If the period of isolation was as long as 2000 years, surely we get the second situation.Where is the border (approximately)? What is the critical period?
Indic and Iranian are clearly distinct; so, I believe, is Nuristani. But the divisions within Iranian are less clearcut, with areal factors strongly interfering with old genetic clustering (as in Romance or Slavic). The internal structure of Indic (leaving aside early stray sheep like Mitanni IA) is even less definite -- and little wonder, since the Indian convergence area is more compact. The genetic status of clusters like "Central", "Northern", "Northwestern", "Romani", "Dardic", etc. is doubtful to say the least. It is a tangled bush, and not a tree.I guess the answer can depend on the epoque and on linguistic peculiarities. If so, let us restrict the question to the Indo-Iranian languages and the epoques of the Middle Bronze Age - the Early Medieval Age (about 2000 BC - 1000 AD).
Piotr