IE and Substrates and Time

Yoel L. Arbeitman yoel at mindspring.com
Sat Mar 13 04:32:47 UTC 1999


[ moderator re-formatted ]

At 01:10 PM 3/11/99 -0800, you wrote:

>Steve Long raises the question of the length of time it would take for
>speakers of a generic Indo-European to lose the ability to interact (in
>conjunction with the issue of the splintering of the IE Ursprache into a large
>number of small languages).

	The point as a whole is well taken. Yet the implied analogy between the
differing languages of non-Greek Italy before its Latinization with the
dialects of Greek in Magna Graecia and with the Germanic and Celtic
languages is inadequate. Osco-Umbrian, at the earliest attested stage is
not at all dialectal to Latin as e.g. the Greek dialects are one to
another. Furthermore, the foremost authority on Venetic wrote in 1981 (Gs
J. Alexander Kerns, CILT) that after 50 years of full time devoting himself
to the question, he could not conclude whether or not Venetic was a
genetically Italic Language. The other recently worked on lE languages of
pre-Latinized Italy, e.g. South Picenean (sp.?) are available only to the
specialists at the present.

	So Italy was already by the time of its first literacy so divided as to
allow no communication amongst Latin, Osco-Umbrian, and Venetic, and other
languages of which we know little. The question of Etruscan, which is most
likely not Italic, if IE, is another matter. But how long then do we
ascribe the presence of these IE languages in Italy?
	YLA

>First, let me note that in, for example, the Italian peninsula, we find at the
>time of our earliest records a number of languages, all with recognizable
>dialect differences from place to place within the language areas, or in the
>Greek world a couple of dozen widely diverging dialects with literary
>traditions till the koinization brought on by the Alexandrian conquests and
>their aftermath.  The same thing we would expect to hold in the Celtic and
>Germanic regions of Europe.



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