reality of PIE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>petegray at btinternet.com writes:

>Quite!   My point is that we cannot go beyond the "tolerably unified" and
>speak of a single, undifferentiated language.   I thought this was standard
>stuff.   To reconstruct PIE without allowing for some internal variety would
>seem to me - in my innocence, and in light of the IE evidence - somewhat
>doubtful. >>

-- I don't think anyone has ever argued that PIE was completely internally
undifferentiated.

Particularly not in the "late PIE" period, when the spread/dissolution was
under way.

There are plenty of late isoglosses which are shared by several of the IE
daughter languages/language families but not by others -- satemization, for
instance.