--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> On 2008-01-27 00:20, mkelkar2003 wrote:
>
> > So there was never a prot-Romance language to start with. Latin is
> > proto Romance.
>
> No. The opinions you quote only question the reality of a clear
"primary
> split" within early Romance. As you say yourself, Latin (as spoken by
> the common population of the Roman Empire) was Proto-Romance, which
> makes Proto-Romance real enough. No-one to my knowledge insists that
> actual protolanguages were homogeneous. That would be unrealistic. We
> may not be able to reconstruct dialectal divisions within them, but
> that's a separate issue.
>
> > How could there be a proto-Indo-European language then?
>
> Just as there was a language called Latin.
> Piotr
So PIE must have been a real spoken language then. I have two diffrent
responses for this:
1. Buying into your argument that PIE must have existed "Just as there
was a language called Latin."
sorry for the long link
<
http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/~pah1003/loe/Eng/Papers/06_12_07_DataShow_PaulHeggarty_TreesOrWebsSplitsOrWaves.pdf>
Slide 31: The heartland where we know Latin was spoken or written i.e.
Italy or France historically are the "homeland."
and slide 53: where "Indo-Iranian" occupies that position hence India
is the homeland of this single language.
2. Not buying into your argument that PIE must have existed "Just as
there was a language called Latin." Refer to slide 50 the green line
on top of the Romance languages has a 100% posteror probablilty but
the higher node immediately prceeding that has only 46% and 2 nodes
before that only 44%.
I am going with position 2!
M. Kelkar