Richard atttempts to skewer me:
>But why should they? Are you saying, amongst other things, that:
Okay... here we go, folks.
>(a) There was no time when all significant Indo-European speakers
>belonged to a single "culture".
No, no, no! Never, ever, ever. I know that might not make intuitive
sense to some but think about this _deeply_. Let's first imagine in
our heads a map with a boundary drawn representing the IE language
area as it stood at, say, 4000 BCE when it was about it split up. Now,
the area should be reasonably vast and within it we may dissect it into
budding dialect areas such as Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Tocharian, etc.
which are slowly becoming more mutually incomprehensible by the
decade.
Now, let's slowly go backwards in time into the realms of pre-IE. So
logically we would expect that all of Indo-European derives back to a
single, tiny point in space-time, a kilometre in diameter. Therefore,
we naively would conclude that all of IE-speakers belonged to one
culture, maybe even one small band... WRONG!
The fact is that language evolution is way more complex than this.
The small "pre-IE language area" that we end up visualizing in our
heads is in fact surrounded by other pre-IE "para-dialects", the
"almost-IE-but-not-quite" dialects. So what? Well, the para-dialects
most likely affected the development of pre-IE and its later dialects
that we currently recognize (Germanic, BS, Hellenic, etc).
So a more accurate picture of IE and pre-IE is that there NEVER was
a single culture, ethnicity, area, or language called IE, or even pre-IE.
Rather, at every point in time, it is a grouping of closely related
dialects,
some of which make it to the Proto-Indo-European stage, others not.
Yet at every stage, each dialect is affecting its neighbour too.
It makes better sense if you really check out how English developped.
Any moron knows that "English" was never spoken by one single
people or culture, nor is it in the present day. It was always a grouping
of related dialects, some of which survive to the present day, others
which haven't but which still may have affected the ones that have.
It's a very complicated situation, don't you agree?
Now you get it? Good.
>(b) There was no time when all significant Indo-European speakers
>belonged to a single "ethnos".
No, never.
>(c) I am irrational if I don't subscribe to (a) and (b)?
Yes, that's right. You are irrational. I'm glad we established this :)
= gLeN
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