The Neolithic Hypothesis

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl
Fri Mar 26 14:22:15 UTC 1999


JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>>The Slavic lgs. split up some 1500 years ago, and the differences between
>>Greek and Sanskrit and even Mycenaean/Vedic are bigger than that

>-- true, but the Germanic languages have a similar time-depth (perhaps
>slightly more)

Definitely *much* more.  West Germanic started to split up c. 500
BC (Mallory's Jastorf Iron Age), which still makes West Germanic,
as we would expect, older than Slavic or Romance.  The split with
North and East Germanic was considerably earlier than that,
possibly as early as 1500 BC (start of Scandinavian Bronze Age).

>and they're far more diverse.  The Slavic languages are unusually uniform,
>given the degree of spread.  There's still a high degree of mutual
>intelligibility.

I don't see anything particularly unusual about it.  Most Romance
languages (time depth c. 2000 years) are also mutually
intelligible, although with a little more effort than in the case
of Slavic.

>Mycenaean and Vedic aren't mutually comprehensible, true, but they're
>transparently very similar.  Even some stock poetic phrases are still pretty
>much the same;  Homeric "heiron menos" and Vedic "ishiram manas", for
>instance.

>1000-1500 years seems more than ample.  Sometime between 3000 and 2500  BCE,
>in other words.

>>(now Vedic-Avestan does feel like somewhere in the 500-1500 year range).

>-- far too long.  They're virtually the same language.  Eg.,

>Avestan:  tam amavantam yazatem
>Sanskrit:  tam amavantam yajatam

>		   surem damohu sevistem
>		   suram dhamasu savistham

>		   mithrem yazai zaothrabyo
>		   mitram yajai hotrabyah

Yeah, I've read Mallory, p. 49, too.  Avestan and Sankrit are
similar, but they're not in any way "virtually the same
language".  The differences are far greater than between Swedish
and Danish.

[ Moderator's comment:
  I'm not sure that the attested differences are much greater than between, for
  example, the forms of Spanish spoken today in Madrid, Buenos Aires, Caracas,
  and Mexico DF.
  --rma ]

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam



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