Yet that's not always the case. In some cases, the
language is replaced by immigrants from the
countryside, or a regional lingua franca takes hold,
leaving a substrate among the elite. This is what
happened in Tawantinsuyu --where the elite spoke some
version of Aymara while immigrants speaking Runasimi
moved in speaking the lingua franca, and the masses
adopted that language. The result is that the Qosqo
version of Runasimi has Aymara phonological traits. I
surmise something similar occurred in Mesopotamia
first in regards to Akkadian vis a vis Sumerian and
later Aramaic, and in Palestine re; Aramaic, which
became the spoken language as opposed to Hebrew.
--- tgpedersen <
tgpedersen@...> wrote:
. . .
> I always relate underclasses to to substrates and
> therefore to
> previous conquests and they consequently becomes yet
> another
> touchstone which my claim has to be tested on. You
> might think that
> disregarding history and archaeology to obtain a
> clean science of
> linguistics is methodologically unsound; it isn't to
> people like me
> who is more interested in wie es eigentlich gewesen:
> you are the one
> who is warping the science of linguistics, not me.
> How would you
> explain all the early English names in P-, eg., if
> you disregard NWBlock?
>
>
> Torsten
>
>
>
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