IE and Substrates and Time

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/17/99 8:06:51 PM, TomHeffernan at utk.edu wrote:

<<...I am somewhat skeptical of the degree of intelligibility claimed for Old
Norse, Old English and Old High German. If one looks at a very familiar text --
a text we know was preached in the churches on Sundays in the vernacular --
like that of the Parable of the Sower and the Seed in the three languages the
differences seem considerable enough to preclude immediate intelligibility....

Old Norse reads " En sumt fellr i [th]urra jor[th] ok grjotuga...;
Old English reads " Sum feoll ofer stanscyligean...;
Old High German reads: "Andaru fielun in steinahti lant....">>

My question of course would be how long did it take to see this kind of
divergence and why it would not apply to PIE as it "spread" from the Danube
over a period of thousands of years.

A similar thing did not happen in the Latin version of that parable, of
course, because something was keeping it from happening.  And from the things
I understand those old missionaries went through out among those pagans, it
was not "elitism."

Regards,
Steve Long