On 2006-05-16 12:58, tgpedersen wrote:
> The maximum variety argument would place the urheimat of West
> Germanic in Belgium, between German and English.
I don't follow. Does Belgium have a particularly great diversity of West
Germanic languages and evidence of very early dialectal divisions?
"Between German and English" sounds more like a centre of gravity argument.
Then, of course the centre of gravity of West Germanic is now deep
underground, with so many English speakers across the big water as well
as Down Under :)
> Used together with
> phonology, it would place the urheimat of the Romance languages on
> Sardinia (which it didn't receive a large influx of Greek-speakers).
Aren't Italian dialects diverse enough? Some of the oldest division
lines within Romance (masked by the emergence of standard national
languages but still discernible) cut right across the Apennine
Peninsula. Of course Sardinian (or the whole Corsico-Sardinian zone
before the waves of secondary infiltration that disturbed the local
dialects in the late Middle Ages) _is_ archaic, and little wonder: the
islands were taken over by Rome in the 230s BC, long before Iberia,
Gaul, etc.
Piotr