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#123141 02/18/04 05:11 AM
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Having just had another look at AHD's aesthetically pleasing graphical display of the IE languages, it got me wondering about how long PIE lasted. Is there any evidence of how long it existed, and when it faded away, superseded by its daughter tongues?


#123142 02/18/04 12:29 PM
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Dunno if this helps, but Britannica Concise Encyclopedia says:

Family of languages with the greatest number of speakers, spoken in most of Europe and areas of European settlement and in much of southwestern and southern Asia.

They are descended from a single unrecorded language believed to have been spoken more than 5,000 years ago in the steppe regions north of the Black Sea and to have split into a number of dialects by 3000 BC.




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It's a really good question without much of an answer. In a sense all of the present-day IE languages are modern PIE. Languages don't change at the same rate. Did PIE split into two daughter languages or more? Or did a whole bunch split off. There's no written record of PIE, and it's very difficult to associate archeological artifacts with languages. (E.g., there's some who doubt that the Celts occupied the wide area across Europe that they're usually thought to have. NB: I'm not saying this theory is correct/incorrect. I don't think there's enough evidence either way.) Take Latin, when it stopped be the official language in the western Roman empire, did it "split" into what became Italian, French, etc.? It remained in place and gradually started to differentiate into its daughter languages? Latin survived, but only as a kind of artifical language for academic / ecclesiastical discourse. A lot of ink (and ultimately blood) was spilled over which "race" speaking a daughter language represented the PIEs (Aryan) or which daughter language was closer to the ancestral to the mother tongue (PIE). Lithuanians today claim that there's is mainly due to some phonological, grammatical, and lexical claims made in the 19th century. Most IEists today don't buy it. There was a Flemish scholar named I. Goropius Becanus who figured out that the Antwerp dialect of Flemish (his language coincidentally) was the language of paradise. Chauvinism of this sort is still with us today. IEists aren't even sure where PIE originated, though many today have reached some agreement on the steppes of Central Asia.

There's been some new work done at UPenn by Donald Ringe and some colleagues: it's based on algorithms from biotech called cladistics. But he just gives relative dates of splits between individual branches.

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~dringe/home.html



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As a rule of thumb, speakers could probably understand each other perhaps 500 years apart, but not 1000 years apart. So labels like "Greek" over longer periods are for our convenience. They just continually change: you never actually get one language changing into another. A language doesn't last for a certain length of time.


#123145 02/19/04 02:17 AM
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They just continually change: you never actually get one language changing into another.
Linguatones!


#123146 02/19/04 02:54 AM
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Linguatones

that may be stretching it a bit thin, eh, Jackie?




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#123147 02/19/04 10:08 AM
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An Esperanto doo-wop quartet.


#123148 02/19/04 10:19 AM
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An Esperanto doo-wop quartet


I was in an acapella group called the "NoteTones". of course, if you say it fast...




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#123149 02/19/04 10:57 AM
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In reply to:


I was in an acapella group called the "NoteTones". of course, if you say it fast...


A friend is learning Panjabi, and I was intending to join her, until I learned that it has three tones, two more than I.


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Could someone give a short account of the evidence for the existence of a language of which there is no record?


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