"In my 2008 article, I highlighted the word for ‘broadband’ in Germanic: we have breiðband in Icelandic, breëband in Afrikaans, breedband in Dutch, breitband in German and bredbånd in Danish, etc., all showing regular sound shifts from Proto-Germanic, which is reconstructible as proto-Germanic *braiđazbanđan, albeit without this implying that proto-Germanic tribes had the Internet... As such, they are intended to show that calque formation can generate an extraordinary diversity of expressions for an item of technology invented on a single occasion within a very restricted time frame and hence that such expressions do not allow any inferences to be drawn as to whether there was a single invention of an item of technology or multiple inventions (e.g. the French mania for coining their own neologisms, in this case ‘high flow rate’, by no means entails an independent invention). Nor do they tell us anything about the point of origin of this item. They also violate the rule of thumb according to which, the degree of lexical differentiation is a function of the age of the item. All that is required for this process to occur is a network and if anything, it shows that the more extensive the network linking speakers, the more diversity it generates, since the number of routes for dissemination is multiplied. Apply [the] logic on wheel etymologies to the above and you would have [Indo-Europeanist David Anthony] arguing that proto-Germanic couldn’t have broken up before broadband appeared in 2000 and the French and the Slavs each invented their own versions of broadband."