the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Vidhyanath Rao]

"Gábor Sándi" <g_sandi at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Joat Simeon wrote on 3 March 2000:
>> -- Vedic Sanskrit and Mycenaean Greek are extremely similar;
>> with a knowledge of one language and of the sound-shifts, you
>> can trace the general meaning of a text in the other language.
>>  There are even common elements in things like poetic kennings.
>>  They're more similar than modern standard German and English,
>> comparable to Italian and, say, French.  Though not as similar as
>> the modern Slavic languages, one would admit; however, those
>> are unusually conservative.

> I do not see how what you wrote here is tenable. Mycenean Greek,
> as far as I know, is only known from Linear B texts, which can only
> be read (tentatively in many cases) because of likely cognates in later
> versions of Greek, which is so well known.  [...]
> I know that there are many structural similarities between Homer's
> Greek and Vedic Sanskrit, but even there I doubt that it is possible
> to read continuous text in one, if you only know the other.

> Any Classical scholars or Sanskrit experts out there who could
comment?

I don't claim to be a Sanskrit expert, but I suspect that my experience
would be typical and give a resounding no as the answer. A collegue of
mine, a Classics Faculty member who works on Homer, wouldn't be able to
read Vedic without a refresher course.

What was said, I think, is a bit different: Start with a Vedic form like
bhara:mi. Trace it back to PIE *bhero: and map forward to Greek fero.
This is the kind of similarity that can be claimed.

But not really accepted: Start with s'rn.omi or a:rin.ak; trace it back
to *k'lneumi, (e)linekt; and map forward to Greek to come up with
klanu:mi, (e)line (?). I would be surprised if Homer could have made any
sense of these.

I am doubtful of even the extent of structural similarities: The
difference in the verbal system and case syncretism would cause enough
problems even without the extent of phonological change.