the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) wrote:

>Is there some compelling reason for rejecting Edgar Polome's (JIES 22
>[1994] 289-305] with references) linguistic arguments (based on earlier
>studies as well) for an initial closer link between Germanic and Baltic,
>but Slavic and Iranian, then a movement of Slavic closer to Baltic with
>Germanic moving closer to Italic, then when Italic tribes moved south into
>Italy, closer contact between Celtic and Germanic? This would not imply an
>original unity but successive post-PIE areal contacts at different stages
>of cultural development.

One of course cannot reject what one hasn't seen.

I could be wrong, but my own impression is that the
Slavic-Iranian contacts are relatively recent (much like the
Germanic-Celtic ones).  Indeed the Scythians appear late in the
western steppe region.  It largely depends on whether Cimmerian
was an Iranian language or not (if Hamp's identification of a
"Cimmerian" substrate in Slavic is correct, it definitely wasn't
[*bh > p, *p > b]).

[Aha, Hamp (sometimes) uses H-sub_a to denote H2 (or is it @2?)]

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl