Dating the final IE unity

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>I don't know enough Gathic Avestan (or Yorkshire dialect) to decide (and my
>Vedic Sanskrit and Texan aren't that much better either).

-- I forge ahead fearlessly on a basis of very limited knowledge... 8-).
Consider, though, that speakers of both groups used the same ethnonym for
themselves.  I think it's plain that there was a dialect continuum across the
Iranian plateau and into Afghanistan and the Punjab.  Avestan itself shows,
of course, differences from Old Persian, a southwestern dialect within the
Indo-Iranian continuum; it was geographically as well as linguistically
closer to Sanskrit.

However, even by about 1000 BCE -- taking a late date for Vedic Sanskrit and
an early one for the Gathas -- lexical similarities must still have been
obvious even to an illiterate speaker of either:

Eg.,

Sanskrit                    Avestan

ajati                       azaiti          drives
bhratar                     bratar          brother
tuvam                       tuvem           thou
hanti                       jainti          strikes
na                          na              man
janu                        zanu            knee

-- and so forth.  Likewise, verbal morphology was still very strongly
similar; yajai/yajai for "I honor".

In a sentence like "I honor the man who strikes thee on the knee" slowly, a
speaker of either would be able to follow someone from the other.
Particularly with a little practice.

This is not the case for most Germanic languages now, for instance; but it
_is_ the case for, say, Dutch and Afrikaans, or the more divergent dialects
of English.  That gives a "200-800" year comparison.

Admittedly I'm not deeply familiar with either language, but it does look as
if one can be fairly easily 'transposed' into the other with an "accent".

>Indo-Aryan and Iranian must have lost most contact at least 500 years before
>the earliest texts on historical grounds

-- not really.  In the late Bronze/early Iron Age the whole area between the
Zagros and the Ganges was inhabited by people who called themselves "Aryans",
worshipped (roughly) the same set of deities, and spoke closely related
dialects.  And they were plainly intrusive in the whole area south of the
Oxus.  The ones who influenced the language of Mitanni were plainly
Indo-Aryans specifically, but of a much more primitive strata than those who
composed the Rig-Veda, which strongly suggests that they preceeded the
Iranians proper on the Iranian plateau.

>From the evidence, I'd place the period of Indo-Iranian linguistic unity
sometime around 2000 BCE with significant differentiation still minor by
about 1500 BCE, and with Proto-Indo-Iranian emerging from "eastern dialects
of PIE" sometime around 2500 BCE, when it was still in close enough contact
with Balto-Slavic for the spread of innovations like satemization.