Dating the final IE unity

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"Richard M. Alderson III" <alderson at netcom.com> wrote:

>On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote:

>> What are the chances that the gap between Hittite and Classic IE languages
>> is actually much older?

>[ than 500 years or so, as stated by several posters, myself included ]

>What are the chances?  Not good.  Not zero, but not good.

>Yes, we have the example of the extreme conservatism of Old Lithuanian, but
>that is so unusual that we *do* make note of it.  Historical linguistics is,
>after all, a *historical* science, and so must make assumptions about such
>things as rates of change based on *historical* obversation of similar occur-
>rences--the development of the Romance languages from Latin, the development
>of modern English from Anglo-Saxon, and so on.

>In order for Hittite (and the other Anatolian languages) to have diverged from
>the rest of the Indo-European languages very much more than 1000 years earlier
>(my own outside estimate), we would have to reject the evidence for rates of
>change provided by all the historical obversations we can make and instead say
>that Old Lithuanian is the expected result, and *every* *single* *other* *IE*
>*language* underwent accelerated development.

Glottochronology, I think we all agree, is baseless, so I'm
afraid this is a matter of Sprachgefuehl, heuristics, and which
languages one knows/speaks well enough to compare (for me, that
would be, as far as speaking goes, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan,
English, Italian, French, German, Portuguese, Russian and
Polish).

Anyway, for what it's worth, 500 years for me is Dutch and
Afrikaans, Spanish and Portuguese, good mutual intelligibilty.  I
think (Vedic) Sanskrit and (Mycenaean) Greek are further apart
than that.  I'd say Vedic Skt. and Gathic Avestan comes close to
about 500 years.  A thousand years or so (slightly more) is in
the neighbourhood of Slavic (e.g. Russian and Polish), reasonable
but far from perfect mutual intellegibility.  Two thousand years
is Spanish and Italian (i.e. the Italian dialects, not std.
Italian!) or French: structurally very similar, marginal mutual
intelligibility.  I'd say that's where Greek and Sanskrit fall.
Hittite and either M.Greek or V.Sanskrit for me is definitely
2000 years or more.  The languages are structurally further
apart, there is no mutual intelligibility to speak of.  Parallels
become more dubious here.  Dutch and Swedish?  Welsh and Irish?
Akkadian and Cl.Arabic?  Is that 2, 3 or 4 millennia?  Impossible
to tell...

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl