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

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

>
> ----- 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,

> > 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

> 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.
>

All right, I change 'just before' to 'some time before'. Either there
must have been dispersal 'some time before' the breakup, whether that
was gradual or not, or Proto-Germanic was able to stay undivided
longer than Romance and Slavic.

Torsten