From: tgpedersen
Message: 26644
Date: 2003-10-27
>than
>
> --- 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
> > one man was likely to travel through in his lifetime). Why isthat
> > not the case with Germanic?
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "elmeras2000" <jer@...> 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
>
How right you are. Put that way, life is complicated, historical
linguistics is extremely suspect and why bother with it at all? Let's
all meet again on a list on algebra. At least that way we can all
dodge the question of the non-dispersal of the Germanic languages.
Torsten