IE and Substrates and Time

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>No, *much* further apart.  More in the neighbourhood of French and Spanish,
>English and German.

-- not at all.  There's no basic intercommunicabilty of that sort between
modern English and German.  OE and ON are structurally much more similar --
they're both highly inflected, for instance.

OE and ON are also much closer in time than modern English and modern German.
English began diverging from the other western Germanic dialects during the
Migration Period, 1500 years ago.

1500 years before 1000 CE takes you back to 500 BCE -- Proto-Germanic period,
_early_ proto-Germanic at that, pretty well complete linguistic unity, less
divergence than among English dialects today.