The Indo-European Hypothesis

[Peter &/or Graham]

>On Thu, 1 Apr 1999, Ray Hendon wrote:

>> But I do have a question about Indo-European as the proto-language

I would of course endorse the responses you have had, especially from
sources I respect so much, but I would also add a caveat:  the family tree
model explains the origin of the PIE languages, but cannot be used
exclusively to explain their subsequent development.   We also need
language-contact models, and convergence models, including the notion of
"sprach-bund".

This affects individual languages, but there are also scholars who have
argued that the entire Germanic language family, for example, is a
contact-language;  though I believe support for this is not strong at the
moment.

So alongside the diverging family-tree model, we need other models which
describe other linguistic processes, even for IE.

Peter