Dating the final IE unity

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>>Anyway, for what it's worth, 500 years for me is Dutch and Afrikaans

>-- 500 is much too long for that example.

That's OK.  Subjective valorations of differences between
languages/dialects can't be made with a granularity smaller than
500 years or so (even that may be too fine).

>>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.

>-- much closer.  Vedic and Avestan are dialects of the same language for all
>practical purposes; similar to the differences between, say, Yorkshire
>dialect and Texan, or Standard English and Cockney.

I don't know enough Gathic Avestan (or Yorkshire dialect) to
decide (and my Vedic Sanskrit and Texan aren't that much better
either).  Indo-Aryan and Iranian must have lost most contact at
least 500 years before the earliest texts on historical grounds
(not that there's much consensus on the historical trajectories
or even the dating of the earliest texts).  A subjective
assessment of the differences and commonalities between Vedic and
Gathic can't pin it down to anything more exact than "about 500
years" either (which means that it could just as easily be 200
years as it could be 800 years).  Within Proto-Indo-Iranian, the
dialects ancestral to Indo-Aryan may have been diverging from
those ancestral to Iranian for as long as there was a
Proto-Indo-Iranian (which would add another millennium or so to
give 1500 years of divergence), while in other respects
Indo-Aryan and Iranian may have been sharing isoglosses even
after the Indo-Aryans crossed over into the Indian subcontinent
(some amount of contact may have been retained).

Northumbrian was already a distinct dialect in OE times, so here
too in some respects the divergence is almost 1500 years old,
while in others it hasn't started yet.  Dating "dialects" (in the
sense of speech communities speaking languages having a common
origin and which have remained in contact throughout) is almost
impossible.

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