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

elmeras2000 wrote:

> 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

That makes me to think about how right are the some assumtions. In fact
it seems that the difference between languages which belong to the same
subgroup are not the lexical differences but the gramatical structure
and morphology, the whole "building-system" of the language. I guess the
Romance here is a very pertinent example, specialy the East-Romance(less
Italian language due other historical data)

Alex