GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE

[Sean Crist]

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

>> At this point in time, THERE IS NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE AT ALL AS TO WHEN
>> GREEK-SPEAKERS APPEARED IN GREECE.  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF A SIGNIFICANT
>> MIGRATION DURING THIS PERIOD (3000BC-1650BC) IS FROM ANATOLIA.
> [snip]

> 	But I imagine there is a postulated date for the breakup of
> Indo-Iranian-Hellenic-Armenian.

Well, no; we believe we know the _relative chronology_ of this breakup
(i.e., we know what _order_ the things happened in), but we don't know
exactly when the particular splits happened.  If, as I've said, the latest
date of PIE unity is in the Ukraine around 4000-3500 BCE, and given that
both Greek and Sanskrit are attested in the second millenium BCE, we can
say that the breakup happened somewhere in that range.  At our current
state of knowledge, we can't fix it much better than that.

> 	And I'd wonder about postulated dates for loanwords from languages
> in the Balkans and the Aegean

Same problem.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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