IE and Substrates and Time

[Richard M. Alderson III]

Steve Long raises the question of the length of time it would take for speakers
of a generic Indo-European to lose the ability to interact (in conjunction with
the issue of the splintering of the IE Ursprache into a large number of small
languages).

First, let me note that in, for example, the Italian peninsula, we find at the
time of our earliest records a number of languages, all with recognizable dia-
lect differences from place to place within the language areas, or in the Greek
world a couple of dozen widely diverging dialects with literary traditions till
the koinization brought on by the Alexandrian conquests and their aftermath.
The same thing we would expect to hold in the Celtic and Germanic regions of
Europe.

This picture of small languages across Europe was wiped out in a relatively
short time by the spread of Latin dialects--which diverged noticeably in short
order, as witnessed by Catullus' insults--which replaced the native languages
over time.  The replacements still show much the same kind of chaining.

Second, let me point out the anecdotal evidence that speakers of Spanish and
Italian can, with some difficulty, communicate with each other successfully,
and my own personal experience with a group of speakers of several different
Slavic languages (Polish, both Warsaw and Krakow; Ukrainian; and Serbian,
Croatian and Moslem speakers), who communicated fairly well with each other for
business and personal purposes.

So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required for
communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years for
them to be so large as to prevent communications, i. e., to require one party
to learn the other's language before communication can take place, if both are
members of the same general speech community.