Re: Indo-European question
| From: | Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, June 19, 2001, 4:55 |
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At 11:42 am +0200 18/6/01, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>En réponse à Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...>:
>
>>
>> When one is offered several choices above, are those variations within a
>> single word class, or examples of different declensions?
>>
>
>Both! it seems to depend on dialect, neighbouring sounds, etc... the
>picture is
>very blurred here.
Of course, it must be. It was very unthoughtful of the Proto-Indo-European
speakers not to standardize their language for us; the trouble was they
were around before anyone had invented writing & that made standardization
extremely difficult. PIE is an abstraction; what we have is a set of
related and continually changing dialects; they had a long history behind
them and were going to have a long history before them. The reconstruction
just pushes beyond the earliest written forms to something that is, we
hope, vaguely like the set of dialects that gave rise to the family of
languages we now call Indo-European.
To look for a single, 'standard' PIE will IMO be crowned with the same
success as looking for the end of a rainbow.
Ray.
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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
[J.G. Hamann 1760]
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