Dating the final IE unity

Dr. John E. McLaughlin mclasutt at brigham.net
Tue Mar 7 17:19:24 UTC 2000


[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote]

> 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).

Actually, it's not.  The earliest known recording of Comanche dates from
1786 in a treaty signed with the governor of New Mexico.  The Comanche names
are recorded there in a Spanish orthography and reveal that, at that time,
Comanche and Eastern Shoshoni had identical phonologies.  There are enough
Comanche names in the document (with Spanish translations of the meaning) to
find nearly all of the diagnostic phonological markers that separate Modern
Comanche from Modern Eastern Shoshoni and see that none of the Comanche
changes had happened yet.  Also present are a number of archaic Shoshoni
morphemes that Modern Comanche has lost or changed.  In a Comanche word list
collected in a French orthography in 1828, a few of the phonological changes
in Comanche had taken effect, and there are fewer archaic words.  In an
extensive Comanche dictionary recorded in a Spanish-based orthography in
1861, all the changes that separate Modern Comanche from Eastern Shoshoni
have taken place and there is much less archaic vocabulary.  There are other
Comanche word lists and documents recorded in the much less adequate English
orthography (all workers in Native America dread working with nineteenth
century English-orthography word lists), but the first list based on a
phonetic alphabet is a body of texts from 1901.  I have found only one
archaic form in that body of texts (for Coyote, of course) and the phonology
is completely modern.  The nature of the evidence is quite good and clearly
shows that Comanche differentiated from Eastern Shoshoni (the two are only
about as mutually intelligible as Spanish and Portuguese) within the 500
year boundary claimed by Miguel.  We can state with confidence that the
distinction is only on the order of about 200 to 250 years (possibly up to
300, but definitely not any more than that).  These two languages are also
not differentiated on a dialect level, but on a full language level--there
are major phonological, morphological, and syntactic differences between the
two.  Comanche speakers generally say that they can understand a little
Shoshoni if they live among them for a couple of months, but the reverse is
not true.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
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