Celtic's rate of differentiation

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>You have no problem with proto-Latin arising among the other Italic languages
>before 500BC, wiping out those other languages and giving rise to modern
>Romance languages 2500 years later.

-- obviously not, since it's historically observable that this is what
happened.

Although Late Latin starts to give rise to the modern Romance languages about
1000 years later, not 2500 -- roughly around the time of the fall of the
Western Roman Empire, the centuries after 400 CE.

Nor does the structure of early Latin contradict a reasonable divergence date
for the IE languages.

On the contrary, early Latin shows very strong similiarties to all the other
early IE languages; which is, of course, just what you'd expect if they
hadn't been separated all that long.

>But you do have a problem with proto-Celtic arising among related languages
>before 800BC

-- on the contrary.

We were discussing _Renfrew's_ hypothesis, which is that the Celtic languages
developed _in situ_ among established IE-speakers all across their historic
range from the British Isles to the Danube.

That is, that there were no migrations of Celtic speakers in the recent past
to account for the uniformity of the Celtic languages as observed by
Classical authors and surviving textual evidence.

You now disagree with this?

>wiping out those related languages and giving rise to the
>Celtic languages 1000 years later.

-- now you're postulating a Celtic Empire analagous to the Roman Empire?
Interesting...

To recapitulate:  when first observed, the Celtic languages show very close
similarities, and a rather conservative overall structure -- particularly
when compared with the extensive restructuring they undergo in the early
medieval period.

In other words, early Celtic is much more similar to, say, Latin, than Gaelic
is a few centuries later.

This indicates that the Celtic languages had spread from a fairly small core
sometime not long before they were first observed; something like a millenia,
or less, before the 200's BCE. (Early Urnfield at the earliest, if you want
an archaeological reference.)

(Incidentally, the linguistic comparisons also indicate that Italic and
Celtic had diverged sometime quite recently -- second millenium BCE, I'd say.)

>Obviously, a lot could have gone on between Renfrew's 'an early indo-european
>language' and the rise of an identifiable Celtic.

-- whatever it was, it couldn't have involved much linguistic change, since
the early Celtic languages lack most of the distinguishing features which
they later developed.

Eg., Hispano-Celtic retains the PIE labio-velars; and one could go on.

>There could have been plenty of languages and dialects that developed in
>between.

-- not an leave the early Celtic languages so similar, and with so little
change between them and PIE.

>THERE IS NOTHING THAT SAYS THAT A STRING OF ANCESTRAL
>LANGUAGES CAN'T SEPARATE NON-ANATOLIAN PIE FROM CELTIC.

-- well, yes, there is.  The similarity of early Celtic to PIE.  There is, so
to speak, not enough linguistic "room" between proto-Celtic and PIE.  No
'space' for many intermediary languages.

>Nobody said anything about the languages staying uniform over any great
>period of time.

-- Renfrew did.

>You are simply not comprehending that there is no requirement that Celtic
>come directly out of PIE - any more than that modern Greek came directly out
>of PIE.

-- compare modern and Mycenaean Greek, and then the latter with PIE, and you
may begin to grasp this point.

Modern Greek is much more different from PIE than Mycenaean Greek is.

Eg., in Mycenaean Greek, the word for "cow" is still 'gous', which is very
similar to the PIE *gwous.

Early Celtic (still less proto-Celtic) is just _not different enough_ from
PIE to be the result of a long process of intermediary change.

There aren't enough changes.

>NOT DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH?  HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?

-- by use of the comparative method; which is how we know that there's such a
thing as "PIE" in the first place.