aquila_grande wrote:
> The strange ting is this: Even the most early attested Greek shows
> the main dialectical differentiation that is seen in later times.
What's strange about it? Dialectal differentiation is normal in any
language with a sufficient number of speakers and with enough territory.
English was also divided into dialects at the time of its earliest
attestation.
> This means that any such thing as Proto-Greek has to been placed
> very far back in time, and very near common IE.
How does that follow from the preceding sentence?
> Perhaps Proto-Greek never existed. Perhaps the Greek language
> evolved in a geographically confined area from several IE dialects
> or branches that mutually influenced each other.
The idea of "Proto-anything" as a completely homogeneous language is, in
a way, a figment of the comparative method, which heuristically assumes
the uniformity of the common ancestor in order to constrain the
reconstruction and make it more reliable. The assumption is
methodologicaly useful, but we shouldn't forget that internal variation
always occurs in real languages. As an analogy, you may consider genetic
diversity in biology. A species is not a set of identical clones. Even
in the event of geographical speciation, when a new species evolves out
of a local population which is internally less diversified than the
whole ancestral species, there will normally be at least _some_ initial
variation in the founder population if it is large enough to survive.
It may happen, both in linguistics and in biology, that one relatively
homogeneous variety manages to expand at the expense of its "sisters"
and displaces them successfully so that much of the original variation
is lost (this may also happen as a result of an evolutionary bottleneck,
when a catastrophe kills off the whole species exceopt for a small
group). Thus, all Modern Greek dialects (except Tsakonian) have
descended from the Hellenistic Koine, whose base was mainly Attic with a
significant admixture of Ionic and traces of Doric elements.
> Perhaps the Greek dialects even were independent IE branches before
> the tribes speaking them entered the Greek Sone.
If those dialects were mutually intelligible (like, presumably, the
dialects of Anglo-Saxon England), they were by definition varieties of
one and the same language. This would only mean that Proto-Greek was a
normally variable language (which no-one can doubt anyway), but still
_a_ language. If you mean that Proto-Greek arose from the coalescence of
several mutually unintelligible languages, i.e. that it's some kind of
linguistic hybrid, I don't think the dialectal facts warrant such a
hypothesis.
Piotr