--- P&G <G&
P@...> wrote:
> > The point of course is : how can you tell whether
> the
> > specific characteristics of Slavic, those which
> make
> > it a distinct group of IE languages, already
> existed
> > at the time of Mycenaean Greek. Germanic for
> instance
> > (if one considers the Grimm shift essential for
> its
> > identification) likely did not yet exist at that
> time.
>
> This is an interesting question. It has, of course,
> been considered before,
> and it is the reason many linguists now speak of PIE
> as a cluster of related
> dialects, rather than a single language./ etc./
*****GK: I'm glad you stated the issue so well. That's
precisely the problem I had, as a non-linguist, with
much of the discussion about PIE. It somehow seemed
slightly unreal, assuming things (e.g. linguistic
uniformity)about the long evanesced past which would
not be accepted for contemporary situations. PIE
specialists acting as a belated Academy of Sciences
"reconstructing" norms for a language which perhaps
no one would have spoken in quite this way at the
time.I was curious whether it might not be possible to
make an attempt at hypothesizing the nature of (some
of ) the dialects of PIE on the basis of the surviving
daughter languages. If I understand the basic approach
of today's experts, they tend to believe that the
differentiation of the "reconstructed" PIE occurred
for the most part as a result of the operation of
rules internal to the language. There is probably a
large dose of truth to this. But somehow I think that
two other factors (and perhaps more) need to be
integrated to the total explanation, viz., the
absorption of numerous substratal populations which
would have influenced the type of PIE they contacted
with (not just at the level of the lexicon), AND the
fact that PIE was dialectically structured from the
beginning. Or is the inclusion of these factors just
too complex a problem? But then is ignoring them not
ultimately self-defeating from a "truth of things"
aspect, no matter how majestic the results so far
achieved? *******
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