Babel

> Did I say so? I could more easily imagine myself saying that PIE
> never existed without any dialects. That's what one expects of any
> natural language with enough speakers to guarantee its long-term
> survival. One could fancy (but scarcely demonstrate) that the actual
> common ancestor of the IE family was just one of the PIE dialects
> and that the consequences of that fact were similar to the founder
> effect in biology, but even if that "bottleneck scenario" should
> have been the case there would be no reason to assume that the
> parent dialect was "pure", i.e. free of interdialectal borrowings
> and its natural share of grammatical and/or lexical variation.

BTW I think it is instructive to imagine the Tower of Babel story as
having actually happened; in the course of the tens or hundreds of
years it would have taken for proscribed peasant labor to build a
record ziggurat in after-harvest time sessions, the language of all
the world was confounded ie. their language changed into dialects and
into new languages, until the project became unrealizable.

The IE people, on the other hand, was semi-nomadic(?) It would have
taken longer for them to have their language confounded.


Torsten