The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.)

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 4/1/99 2:03:39 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

<<-- there isn't enough difference between the Slavic languages even now for
there to have been any significant distinction at that time. >>

One has to watch oneself on this list, or one will forget what point one was
originally making.

Just to repeat: I've still seen no direct evidence that OCS was comprehended
or even heard by the northwestern Slavic speakers who lived in the Elbe-Oder
area in the time OCS first rolled out.  (And possibly include the Poles in
that.  The Czechs heard OCS, but how much of it they comprehended is another
matter.)

My ORIGINAL statement was in response to Miguel's point about the original
gradiated PIE dialects in Europe being "swallowed up." I said that the
"swallowing-up" languages he mentioned were all standardized languages and I
included Slavic as being in the process of standardizing from the earliest
evidence we have.

I wrote:
<<<<Church Slavonic was designed specifically to give "all Slavia one tongue to
worship with" and it provides the earliest records preserved of Slavic. >>

There is no question that Russian (or Eastern Slavic) and Church Slavonic
converged.  As Comrie writes:  "...Old Russian of this early period was
characterized by diglossia [between the] (the low variety) and Church
Slavonic (the high variety).  With the passage of time, the divergence
between the two varieties lessened, in particular with many Church Slavonic
forms gaining acceptance into even the lowest forms of language."  And from
everything that the Greeks tell us, this standardizing was intentional.  And
it certainly also went on in Serbian and Bulgarian

To say that this convergence was already entirely there contradicts this
evidence that OCS was a standardizer.  Of course, it's a matter of degree.
And obviously it is easier to standardize two Slavic languages into a single
"official" tongue than it would be Japanese and Bantu.  But my point again is
that Slavic was already being standardized from the very first evidence of
anything Slavic.

<<This is a classic case of rapid language spread from a relatively small
nuclear area promoting relative linguistic uniformity.>>

Documented in the case of Latin.  But unfortunately for your premise,
undocumented in Slavic.  And unfortunately for my premise, undocumented in
PIE.

<<-- sigh.  We have written records of Polish and Russian from the 11th century
on.  Take a look.  They were extremely similar back then, too.  Much more so
than now, in fact.>>

Actually, the first sentence in Polish shows up in the late 13th Century and
real text comes from middle 14th Century.  Before that there are only proper
names written with little system so that many sounds are "almost impossible
to distinguish."  The evidence therefore is some 500 years after OCS
originates.  The first Russian appears of course in OCS texts, so that it is
arguable that it is in fact Russian.  At the time of a valid direct
comparison between Polish and Russian however there are fairly significant
"differences in how words are stressed, vocabulary and numerous syntactic and
morphological developments," perhaps more than would be expected "given the
extreme instabilities of the borders between the two languages."

<< Also, the extreme archaism of OCS (and of the Slavic languages generally)
argues powerfully that they were quite uniform then.>>

And of course as we have learned on this list, Germanic is "archaic," while
Slavic is merely conservative - although it shares many features with the
"innovative core" that Germanic does not.  However it seems that since we
assume that all these IE language groups were once "uniform" (for about ten
minutes at least)  - archaism proves nothing about when they were uniform.

Finally, the problem with reconstructions, of course, is that they are to a
lesser or greater degree conjectural, which is fine for linguistic modeling.
But taking such reconstructions as hard evidence for some broader historical
fact or pet theory may be going too far.

Regards,
Steve Long