This same thesis has been advanced by Berkeley linguist Andrew
Garrett. See:
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~garrett/BLS1999.pdf
>
> ---Greg
Thanks Greg
I read through this paper, and find it interesting. If I understand
it right, it tells the following story:
Some time after the split of common IE, there was a dialect
continuum stretching from the area north of the Black See and
westwords through the whole of Sentral Europe. In this area there
were no sharp borders between mutually unintelligible languages, but
two dialects some distance apart may have been so.
From several parts of this area there were migration of settlers
towards the Greek sone. Because they originated from different
spots, their language differed, and some may not have been easily
mutally understandable.
During the next periode these languages/dialects mutually influenced
each other so they gradualle became the same language.
But still some of the original dialectical/language differences
persisted and those defined the main dialectical groups of the Greek
language.