Dating the final IE unity, in particular the word for "horse"

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>And basically you can find a reasonable explanation for why words referring
>to milk and land and horse and cow and yoke and sow and grain and field are
>often common in IE languages - those languages came with farming.

-- but many of those inventions -- the yoke, for instance, and the domestic
horse -- come long, long after the beginnings of agriculture.

So if the words are PIE, then PIE itself must come long, long after the
beginnings of agriculture.

QED.

>Or you can find it more reasonable that all these words were somehow forced
>on a large trans-continental population of 'passive' farmers (already armed
>with copper and bronze axes) by a relatively small group of outsiders

-- since this is precisely what happened in Iran and India, why do you find
it objectionable in Europe?  Do European farmers have some sort of inherent
superiority to Dravidian or Elamite ones?

>- done with such skill it would seem as if they had been speaking PIE all
>along.

-- well, no.  You see, if they'd been speaking PIE all along, the sound
changes would be profoundly different from what we in fact observe.

That's the whole point.  You've been steadfastly trying to ignore the
evidence.