Standard Languages

JoatSimeon at aol.com JoatSimeon at aol.com
Fri Mar 12 03:33:01 UTC 1999


Standard national languages are just dialects themselves, and our experience
with them tends to lead us to expect unrealistically sharp and definite
"edges" to language areas.

All languages are dialect clusters; this is particularly obvious with the
Romance languages, which (apart from Romanian) have plenty of "bridge"
dialects.

If you set out from Huelva in say 1500 and zigzaged your way across the
Iberian peninsula and through southern France and down Itay to Sicily, there
would be few places (execpt where you ran into unrelated tongues like Basque)
that you could say "This village speaks X, and the next one speaks Y".  They'd
merge imperceptibly.

I suspect that towards the beginning of the 2nd millenium BCE, you could have
made a similar journey from the Rhine delta to the Tarim basin, and found a
series of overlapping IE dialects all the way.



More information about the Indo-european mailing list