GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, you wrote:

<<The hypothesis does not require that those languages change slowly at all.

-- yes it does, because the first recorded IE languages are still so similar.
 Any "intermediate steps" would have involve very little change for the
descendant languages to be so close.

Short form:  linguistic nonsense.>>

So let's stick to linguistics and let's not find ourselves arguing the
archaeological evidence - which seems to keep happening in the last posts.

Let me suggest a date of @4500BC for the functional final unity of
non-Anatolian 'narrow PIE' and located it at that time stretching from
Holland across north central in a 6 degree lat band to the upper Dniestr,
Dnieper and Bug - the extent of the Bandkeramik culture.  (This is I think
roughly half the expanse of Latin about100AD.)

You are saying that that in 3500 to 4000 years this language would have given
rise to more differentiation than is seen in the attested IE languages at
those later dates (1000-500BC)

Your 3500BC? date for wide PIE - 3500 to 4000 years later -  would give us
the IE languages of 1-500AD.  Can you point to the increased differentiation
in that period?  It isn't that more languages are attested, is it?  Because
that is not differentiation, that's preservation.

I'm beginning to suspect that 'linguistic nonsense' may be a two-way street.

Regards,
Steve Long