[tied] Re: Indo-Iranian Vowel Collapse (was: IIr 2nd Palatalisation)

> ***
> Patrick:
>
> You are the champion because you do such a good job at it that no

one else

> need bother.

Oh, thank you.

>
> However, I believe in the Nordwestblock insofar as I believe the

Northern

> people of Europe, at the very least, adopted IE rather than spoke

it

> originally.

>Germanisch is not IE.

Germanic, if that's what you mean, is IE. But 30% of the vocabulary
can't be IE (Piotr the Moderator thinks it's much less, but he
thinks one should guess the exact figure oneself or one is not a
good linguist and besides there are at least as many non-IE roots in
Celtic), and the strongly creolized nature of the central languages
of N and W Germanic (ie all minus High German and Icelandic) is
indicative of a substrate, cf that those dialects of Latvian that
are spoken on former Livonian territory have lost all trace of
person and number inflection as have the Scandinavian languages.
In Kuhn's opinion the sequence of languages in the Nordwestblock
area is: Non-IE ar-/ur- language, IE Nordwestblock language (for a
short time), IE Germanic.

> And as IE spread over Central and Southern Europe, it is not

possible that

> traces of the earlier non-IE languages have not been fitfully

retained.

>
> Your armor is not dented but only unused.
>

Well, _I_ didn't dent it.


Torsten