Dating the final IE unity

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>But the lack of obvious - jump off the page - reflex doesn't mean that
>Thracian wasn't IE.  But it might mean that it is very old IE.

-- no, it just means that we don't have enough of it to say much about it.
And we probably never will.  So much for the extensive texts...

>The problem is that what little we have can't be read.

-- no, you've got it bass-ackwards again.  We can't read it because we have
so little.

If we had as little Greek writing as we do Thracian, we'd have exactly the
same problems.

So the relevance of the few small fragments of Thracian to the question at
hand -- time-depth -- is... well, zero.  They say nothing.

>It made up of [either 61 or 81 - I can't read it] Greek charcters engraved
>on a golden ring.  The reading of the letters poses no difficulties but
>division of the text into words is uncertain.

-- 60-80 characters is about four to twelve words.  This is not a "text";
this is a _fragment_.

>It contains 51 characters and no acceptible translation has been made.

-- see above.