The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization)

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>WHATEVER keeps a language from splintering either phonetically or
>grammatically is a standardizing agent

-- the point made here was that a standard written form doesn't keep a
language from splintering; it just disguises the process.

Latin had a standard form, but nevertheless went right on splintering into
regional dialects, and eventually into separate languages.

>It is quite clear that Latin remained a spoken language well into second
>millenium

-- on the contrary.  Nobody actually spoke it as a first language; it had
become a "learned" tongue, used only for scholarly and religious purposes.
Medieval churchmen and scholars used Latin as a written language, but spoke
early versions of French, German, Italian, and so forth.

>The Hittite, Sanskrit and Mycenaean texts that are all we know about those
>languages are all optical.

-- you're confusing the standardization of poetic or administrative languages
with effects on what people actually speak. Incidentally, Sanskrit wasn't
written down until over a millenium after the composition of the Rig-Veda; it
was preserved orally.

Meanwhile, the actual spoken language continued to change, becoming the
Prakrits and eventually the modern Indo-Aryan languages of Hindi, Urdu,
Bengali, Orissian, etc.

>language change

-- people change which language they speak for political and social reasons,
generally.