2012/12/10, Jörg Rhiemeier <
joerg_rhiemeier@...>:
(...)
> What excludes it is the fact that words pertaining to farming,
> wheeled vehicles and metals can be reconstructed for PIE.
> *All* of these things were utterly unknown 40,000 years ago,
> so you get an egregious anachronism. What did *h2arh3trom,
> *kWekWlos and *h2ayes mean in the Paleolithic? These words
> yield a _terminus post quem_ at about 4,000 BC, when the wheel
> was invented and metalworking began in Europe (farming was
> earlier, though, but not earlier in Europe than 6,500 BC).
>
> Also, it is hardly plausible that the rate of linguistic change
> rises by a factor of about 10 in the very moment in history
> when the relevant languages are first put to writing. Just
> consider how similar Sanskrit and Latin were about 2,000 years
> ago, and how different Hindi and French are now, only a puny
> 2,000 years later. Sanskrit and Latin cannot be separated by
> 40,000 years of independent development!
>
> --
The rate of linguistic change can be different and differently
vary according to the level of analysis. It's apparent that
reconstructable phonology has had an impressive rising of its rate of
change in the latest millennia (at least up to the Middle Ages
included). On the contrary, lexical change doesn't exhibit a
comparable variation. Phonological differentiation inside IE classes
is greater and much more complex than *just* between IE classes;
lexical differentiation inside IE classes is minimal if compared to
the one between IE classes.
What is highly probable is that IE classes had the same
reconstructible phonological system immediately before their first
attestation; that the huge lexical differentiation from each other
took place in just the same short period would be even stranger than
continuity from Palaeolithic.
Anyway, in a idasystem with the same phonological inventory every
loanword, especially as long as important cultural words like
*h2arh3trom, *kWekWlos and *h2ayes are concerned, would be completely
indistinguishable from hereditary lexicon.
Please don't put every Continuity Theory into the same slot; the
extreme possibility to be taken into consideration is a PIE diasystem
(in fact a very differentiated lexical one, just as one would expect,
but with extreme conservativism at *reconstructible* phonological
level, i.e. plosives, not liquids or vibrants) encompassed a whole
linguistic history from Palaeolithic to Chalcolithic