IE and Substrates and Time

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/12/99 10:54:07 PM, our moderator wrote:

<<let me point out the anecdotal evidence that speakers of Spanish and
Italian can, with some difficulty, communicate with each other successfully,
and my own personal experience with a group of speakers of several different
Slavic languages (Polish, both Warsaw and Krakow; Ukrainian; and Serbian,
Croatian and Moslem speakers), who communicated fairly well with each other
for business and personal purposes.

So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required
for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years
for them to be so large as to prevent communications,...>>

I believe this is true.  But the situation in Neolithic Europe should have
been different.  The languages you mention have been subject to strong
standardizing agents that froze them to some degree against diverging far from
their common ancestors.   And of course there is the open and constant lines
of communication and commerce between the different languages that permit
borrowing and mutual understanding in other ways.  We don't have evidence of
such influences that hold up in the Neolithic - except for the slow spread of
agriculture.  And agriculture tends to create localization.  (Aside from the
notion that one would need to adopt a new language whole cloth in order to
adopt farming.)

The fact is that when we've seen an internally stable language suddenly
covering large distances and populations, it has happened quickly - so the
language doesn't have time to splinter.  How long did it take an insignificant
dialect in a corner of Italy to suddenly become the primary language of half
of Europe.  Start Roman expansion at about 300bce and it took about 500 years.
Mallory has a chart in his book about the spread of Turkish, which is even
more phenomenal and happens in something like 300 years.  For PIE to have
stayed one thing or even a group of similair languages, it should have moved
faster than 3 or 4000 years.

I think that the agricultural hypothesis is the result of us having nothing
much else to go by that far back.  It's the one singularity that passes
through Europe before the Bronze Age.  But trying to correlate it to the
spread of IE leads us to make language do things it just doesn't do.  And
creates impossibly distant dates for the prolonged unity of PIE.

Regards,
Steve Long