Re: [tied] Re: Why did Proto-Germanic break up?

----- Original Message -----
From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, October 24, 2003 12:01 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Why did Proto-Germanic break up?


> With the two other big European IE branches, Romance and Slavic, we
> know they expanded into their present area just before their breakup
> (and they probably broke up because their area was now bigger than
> one man was likely to travel through in his lifetime). Why is that
> not the case with Germanic?

Did I say it wasn't? What I said was that the breakup of Germanic was a
gradual process rather than a sudden event. The same is true of Slavic and
Romance. The expanding "Slavia" was not dialectally monolithic even at the
very beginning. Geographical conditions (distance, natural barriers,
different contacts) were responsible for the appearance and limited spread
of post-Proto-Slavic innovations (resulting in the emergence of new regional
dialects > daughter languages), and still later contacts between various
Slavic groups led to secondary convergences (the status of South Slavic, for
example, is areal rather than genetic). You have a similar (or even more
complicated) palimpsest of genetic and areal affinities (trees and waves) in
Romance. All the three groups went through a long-lasting stage when they
were networks of strongly interacting dialects rather than individuated
languages. Not a Big Bang with all the fragments flying off along divergent
trajectories, but the expansion of a dialectal continuum, followed by a
prolonged period of slow and gradual fragmentation.

Piotr