> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski gpiotr@ wrote:
> >
> > IMHO the traditional PIE needs a major revision because it has
> > become obsolete.
> >
> > "Traditional" (Brugmannian) PIE has been revised very thoroughly,
and
> > the process still continues.
> >
> Unfortunately, the "revised" model is still unsatisfactory IMHO.
>
Some professional IE-ists have proposed different models than the
traditional one. Unfortunately, they write in Spanish, so their work has
been generally ignored in the English-speaking world.
The Spanish IE-ist Francisco RodrÃguez Adrados, whose speciality is
verbal morphology, has proposed a chronological 3-stage model:
- IE I (pre-flexional)
- IE II (monothematic)
- IE III A (polythematic) + IE III B (bithematic)
Summing up, from IE II he derives Anatolian and IE III, which later
split into two varieties A (Indo-Greek) and B (Old European+Tocharian).
His colleague Francisco Villar (University of Salamanca), specialist on
the study of ancient toponymy and hydronymy, has pictured a different
model closer to my own, with a very ancient PIE from which split several
paleo-varieties in the Mesolithic, later ovelapped throught language
replacement processes, specially in the Bronze Age (that is, IE
languages are the result of the superimposition of several of these
paleo-varieties).
While I agree with him in the long time-span between PIE and the
historically attested languages, we disagree in the role of the
languages spoken by the Neolithic farmers who came to Europe from the
Near East, which IMHO weren't IE (Vasco-Caucasian and Semitic).