Peter on para-IE:
>What makes you think it didn't? We must allow that there may have been
>dialects of PIE which have not survived, and in the same way, there may
>have
>been contact languages, trade languages, Languages for Special Purposes, or
>whatever, which no longer exist.
This might help the discussion on English as well as IE itself, because we
do
know that there were many old dialects of English throughout its history
that
had appeared and disappeared or that had been absorbed into other dialects.
I remember some dialectal phrases in Hamlet where "a" was used for "he".
The whole complex process of split and merger seems to be a common
manner of evolution in many languages.
The simple view is that language just fractures into distinct dialects. This
is
only true on the most superficial surface. In reality, different regions of
a
language area will produce idiosyncracies of their own (aka "dialects"),
that may affect neighbouring areas to produce a hybrid set of
idiosyncracies.
If you think of a language innovation (an isogloss) as a wave that spreads
and which stops at some arbitrary point from the center by an arbitrary
amount of time, we can better understand the heady para-dialect problem
and find more exact solutions for IE itself.
The wave concept makes the development of (pre-)IE a heckuvalot more
understandable and even more intriguing. If we just think of the various
dialects such as Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, etc that
had developped and we work backwards in time, we expect a small, solid,
homogeneous group of IE speakers at some point in the past, say 5000
to 4500 BCE or so. However, this is only half of the reality of the
situation.
In fact, more likely, IE was one of many para-IE dialects in a larger and
older Mid IE language area, in turn situated within an Old IE language
area! Waves within waves within waves.
Even trippier is when we fully absorb the implications of this concept
because it then begs question whether innovations such as the e-augment
or satemization are honestly random innovations on the part of a
localized area of IE spekers, or whether this was due to an absorption
of non-IE or even _para-IE_ influence! In fact, I often wonder if it is
possible that satemisation was brought about by some lost para-IE
language that had split away from the rest of the group at a much earlier
time only to develop its own unique flavour. Imagine what IE or any
language for that matter would have been like if a different course of
events had happened.
= gLeN
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