Minoan is an IE language?/Sound Equivalence

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 4/2/01 6:41:03 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
davius_sanctex at terra.es writes:

> I think the number of "possible" isolated languge in mediterranean area is

-- on the contrary.  The current situation -- where virtually every language
in the Mediterranean Basin is of the Indo-European, Semitic, or Uralic
families -- is the product of a radical, and comparatively recent linguistic
simplification.

(For example, the prevalence of Arabic in North Africa is the result of a
process only a little more than 1200 years old and one which only reached
completion in the last couple of centuries.)

It's highly probable that pre-Indo-European Europe had a linguistic situation
much like New Guinea or pre-Columbian North America, with hundreds of
distinct language families and many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of distinct
languages covering very small areas.

The linguistic landscape we see is a product of 'reformatting' in the late
Neolithic and subsequent periods.