Ygorcs
Active member
- Messages
- 2,259
- Reaction score
- 812
- Points
- 0
- Ethnic group
- Multiracial Brazilian
I really can't understand this sentence: "Proto-Germanic is not any older than 2500 years", you yourself confirmed that PIE didn't exist some thousands years before this date but we see one of the most regular sound shifts (in fact chain shifts) from PIE among all IE languages in proto-Germanic:
bʰ > b > p > ɸ
dʰ > d > t > θ
gʰ > g > k > x
gʷʰ > gʷ > kʷ > xʷ
About the Satem languages, it can be said that prot-IE [k], first changed to [kʲ] then [c], [tʃ], [ts], [ʃ], and finally, but proto-IE [k] could be changed to what other than [x] after spirantization?!
As you probably know ancient Greek basis is cognate with English come, both of them are from proto-IE *gʷem-, the English word is from proto-Germanic kʷem (gʷ > kʷ) but it seems to be clear that the PIE word was not changed directly to ancient Greek basis.
Is it possible that the direct ancestor of Proto-Germanic could be something other than proto-IE?
Let's suppose that there was a common European language which even existed in 500 BC, for example Ancient Greek boûs, Latin bōs and Celtic bāus were from the same origin, how English cow could be related to them? Of course no one should talk about Old Armenian kow or Tocharian kewa!
It's very clear to me that you just didn't understand anything I wrote, because your rebuttal makes no sense in relation to what I said in my comment. You sound confused in your concepts of linguistics, maybe you should first learn basic things about historical linguistics, learn what professional linguists have already studied and published and then try to devise your own hypothesis about PIE and other topics of historical linguistics. It's humbler and wiser, because you're saying a load of nonsense as anyone who understands a modicum of historical linguistis has noticed.
I have not said PIE "didn't exist some thousands years before this date". I said mainstream linguistics, since decades ago, and with increasing confirmation by archaeological and genetic evidences, postulates 5000-6000 years ago as the dating for PIE. Do you know what PIE means? PIE means "the last stage of linguistic evolution in which all the earliest forms of the known IE subgroups are supposed to have been so similar that they were just very close dialects of the same language". There's a "subtle" chronological difference between ~2500 and ~5000 years ago.
Proto-Germanic is NOT proto-IE because it's comparable to Latin, not to the earliest proto-languages that stemmed directly from Late PIE. You talk as if we had written attestation of all IE languages and all stages of their linguistic evolution that have ever existed. That's a huge mistake. Just like Latin became the sole survivor of the Italic language family, but that obviously does not mean that Latin derives directly from PIE and never had sister languages, as well as that all the sound shifts and other characteristics that set Latin apart from other IE subfamilies happened right after its earliest Pre-Proto-Italic (or maybe a Proto-Northwest-Indo-European) language. Ditto for Proto-Germanic. Proto-Germanic means just, like any proto-language, "the earliest common stage of the linguistic evolution of all extant Germanic languages in which they are supposed to have been just very similar dialects of the same language". That's it. It happened between 2000 and 2500 years ago, not any further back than that, because we actually have inscriptions in early North Germanic (and a sole but fascinating inscription in a Slovenian helmet in an early Germanic/late Proto-Germanic dialect) that are very similar to reconstructed Proto-Germanic. It's obvious that Proto-Germanic wouldn't have evolved suddenly from PIE, let alone in the 6th millennium B.C., and it would then remained untouched by any later changes for almost 5000 years. Utter nonsense and lack of understanding of historical linguistics. As for sound shifts, Germanic is not defined solely by that chain of regular sound shifts (you probably know that already, or you should at least), and in fact you and nobody has any evidence AT ALL that that chain of sound shifts happened right after the earliest pre-Proto-Germanic split off from PIE (it's actually probable that pre-PGM split off not from PIE, but from an intermediary daughter language of PIE that was actually its immediate descendant). We just don't know. Proto-Germanic is defined by a series of sound shifts that happened successively and cumulatively from the period PIE was spoken as a common dialect continuum (circa 3500 B.C.) to the period Proto-Germanic was spoken as a reasonably homogeneous dialect continuum (circa 500 B.C.). That's a lot of time, and those changes may have happened at any time, though they probably happened pretty early.
Last edited: