Dating the final IE unity

[Richard M. Alderson III]

On Sat, 04 Mar 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal (mcv at wxs.nl) wrote:

> 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).

Indeed there is not.  At one time, I corresponded for several weeks with a
gentleman working on his dissertation in the area of early Persian history (or
religion, it was never quite clear which), who was arguing that Zarathustra was
a Vedic-period reformer trying to introduce a sense of sin to marauding cattle
thieves/young warriors.  (This was several years ago, on the alt.zoroastrianism
newsgroup.  I doubt that it was archived anywhere.)

I would put the similarities between Vedic and Gathic at much less than 500
years, but then, you knew that.

								Rich Alderson