Northwest IE attributes

JoatSimeon at aol.com JoatSimeon at aol.com
Sat Dec 18 07:23:42 UTC 1999


>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>It would be good to know - however - why *specifically* you think some group
>of IE speakers could not have branched off from PIE right from the start and
>moved Northwest.  That would be very interesting.

-- because Baltic and Slavic share innovations, late isoglosses, with both
Indo-Iranian and with Germanic.

Eg., Both Baltic and Slavic and Indo-Iranian undergo satemization, and both
groups also show the 'ruki rule' (modifications in *-s- after r, u, k or i.

But Baltic and Slavic both share dateive and instrumental case endings in
*-m- rather than in *-bh- as in all other IE languages which still have these
cases.

Exemplia, Lithuanian 'vilkams', OCS 'vulkomu', meaning 'to the wolves', but
Sanskrit 'vrkebhyah'.

This overlap indicates that after Indo-Iranian had moved far enough away to
no longer share innovations with, say, Germanic, it was still in contact with
Baltic and Slavic, and that Baltic and Slavic were still in contact with
Germanic.

In other words, there was still a dialect continuum across the whole
Indo-European field at this time.



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