Linguistics and Archaeologyhardly have come into existence any later than ca. 2000 B.C.
The divergence of this original Greek from an original Sanskrit
was accordingly placed well back in the third millennium.
Today many linguists are quite aware that linguistic change
has not always proceeded at a glacial pace. In preliterate socie-
ties, language may change rather rapidly: literature has a con-
servative influence upon both vocabulary and grammar, and a
people without literature might be relatively uninhibited in its
linguistic innovation. 22 Arabic, for example, has changed less
in thirteen hundred years than some nonliterary languages have
changed in the last two centuries. It is quite certain that the
rate of linguistic change for Greek was far more rapid before
Homer's time than after. The same may have been true for San-
skrit before and after the Vedas were composed.
A specific linguistic argument takes us much further. This
argument, most clearly seen and presented by William
Wyatt, 23 has been hammered out by specialists on the Greek
dialects. Indicating as it does that "the coming of the Greeks"
- In his retrospect on the several linguistics papers delivered at
the First International Colloquium on Aegean Prehistory, held at Sheffield
on March 24-26 of 1970, Grassland noted that "a key question in work on
all these problems is that of the rate at which linguistic change takes place"
(Bronze Age Migrations, 330). Grassland goes on to comment that "most
studies of language-differentiation within historical periods have been con-
cerned with languages whose rate of change may well have been abnormal,
because they were used in the administration of empires or large states, like
Latin, or as traditional literary or religious media." The languages of pre-
historic societies, Grassland suggests, may have changed much more rapidly
than "literary, liturgical and administrative languages" (p. 331). - W. F. Wyatt, Jr., "Greek Dialectology and Greek Prehistory,"
Acta of the Second International Colloquium on Aegean Prehistory, 18—22. Wyatt
presented the argument here in clear and simple terms (his audience at the
colloquium was largely made up of archaeologists), and it is unfortunate
that the volume in which it was published has barely been noticed (see
Muhly's review of it in A/A 79 [1975]: 289-91). Wyatt dealt with some
aspects of the same argument, but not with chronological matters, in a de-
tailed and technical study, "The Prehistory of the Greek Dialects," TAPA
loi (1970): 557-632.
37