It is amazing what thoughts go through one's head when the great
abstract notions are addressed in concrete terms: What does breakup
really mean? I can't see it means anything other than "the fate of
later becoming known in more than a single shape". That means, there
may have been a thousand breakups of Germanic or Slavic or Celtic or
Indic or Greek or whatever that we do not care about because they
have left no traces in material that has come to our knowledge. Only
those splits that led to language varieties that were recorded in
such a way that they have entered the basis of later scholarship, or
even - the best cases - were allowed to live and become separate
languages of the present-day world, can be seen as part of the
breakups we care about. This shows that the much in the business of
prehistoric dialectology is based on whims of chance and therefore
extremely suspect.
Jens
--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
wrote:
> Let my try another angle:
>
> 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?