Dating the final IE unity

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard M. Alderson III" <alderson at netcom.com>
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2000 8:23 PM

[snip]

> In anticipation,

>> Really, 500 years.  Kind of Italian (1500AD) to Italian (2000AD) - except of
>> course for the lack of gender in Hittite - and some other small matters like
>> that.  Nothing important.

> How about English (1000CE), which had grammatical gender in nouns, and
> English (1500CE), which did not?  French (1200CE), which had a case system in
> nouns, and French (1700CE), which did not?

[Ed]
Two remarks:

1) French? A 'case system' consisting of nominative and accusative can hardly
be called that. (the plural -s was/had become a more or less independent
feature). The V.Latin/Romance genitive had given rise to new words, considered
to be nominatives. Very soon, the (morphological) accusative was used for all
cases, like in virtually all Latin languages (with loss of the final nasal,
which had already begun in Latin).

2) A comparison with the case of 20th century Dutch in Holland and Flanders is
interesting : in the Netherlands (starting in Holland proper), the grammatical
M/F distinction for inanimates and animals has virtually vanished in the last
60 (yes: sixty!) years or so (the neuter is maintained, but not generalized to
all inanimates - except ships - like in English): they all became formally
'male'. In Flanders there is no sign of that, probably due to the fact that in
local dialects the articles, demonstratives etc... are still flected
differently for M/F (and neuter) (which makes a speaker much more aware of
grammatical gender, cf. German), while this is no longer the case in the
standard language after the end of Middle Dutch (except in artificially
archaïcizing book language until WW II, a bit like Greek Katharévousa).

Example: the indefinite article (M/F/N):
Standard: een, een, een.(/@n/)
Many Flemish dialects: ne, en, e. (e = /@/): ne man, en vrouw, e kind (a man,
woman, child)

[snip]

>> On the other hand, if early IE were as undifferented as being claimed here,
>> many of these problems in discipherment logically should not have occurred.

> One would think so, but then, one would have only to look at things like
> early Latin inscriptions, some of which have not been satisfactorily
> deciphered to this day, to know that logic has nought to do with the
> question.  After all, we are supposed to *know* Latin...

[Ed]

How true this is! A few years ago I read two different Spanish translations (by
actual linguists!) of a sentence from Strabo(:n) about the Iberians: according
to one (A. García y Bellido) they had a 6000 year old tradition of poems,
laws etc. in verses, according to the other (J. Caro Baroja) they had poems
6000 verses long (hexakischilio:n epo:n). Aren't we supposed to know Classic
Greek?

Ed. Selleslagh