Re: another language reconstruction question

Florian Rivoal wrote:
> And how can there be only one "winner" on such a wide area?
Because it was gradual.  The earliest Greek texts mention unrelated
languages spoken in that area.  Etruscan (non-IE) was at one time the
major language of Italy, until the Romans conquered them, and to this
day, Basque still survives along the border of Spain and France, and the
Finno-Ugric languages are still the main languages of eastern
Scandinavia and Estonia, and a few others existing in western Russia,
plus, of course, Hungarian (altho that was a later invasion).  The
Indo-Europeans spread into Europe, and slowly assimilated the peoples
there.  This was accelerated when more advanced civilizations began to
spread.  It probably took millennia for the non-IE langs to disappear.

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