IE, dates, etc.

[Johanna Nichols]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In recent postings Alexander Vovin has asked me to justify the age of
roughly 6000 years for IE and other old families, and Alexis Manaster Ramer
says IE is no paragon and is a young family.
 
The dispersal of PIE is one of the best-dated ancient linguistic events on
earth.  Evidence comes from several sources:
 
(1)  Glottochronology.  This is actually reasonably reliable, provided you
have (a) enough daughter languages to do several different pairings
(glottochronology  uses a binary comparison), (b) an idea of the deepest
branching structure, and (c) an idea of which daughter languages or
branches are most divergent and which are most conservative.  (a) is an
accident of fate and means that glottochronological dates are most reliable
for larger families.  (b) and (c) come from standard comparative method.
The median glottochronological age for the comparisons described in
Tischler's 1973 monograph is around 5500 bp as I recall off the top of my
head.
 
(2)  Linguistic paleontology, etc.  PIE has a set of native terms for
wheeled transport -- 'wheel', 'axle', 'convey', etc.  Wheeled transport
first appears in the archeological record c. 5300 bp, and the realia
probably preceded the first archeological evidence by a few centuries.
David Anthony has made the archeology-linguistics connection in detail
(e.g. in *Antiquity* in 1995).
 
(3)  Closeness of earliest attested forms.  Vedic Sanskrit, Mycenaean
Greek, and oldest Hittite give us a picture of the IE family something like
3000 years ago.  There is an obvious close family resemblance but no mutual
intelligibility to speak of (I mean knowing one of these doesn't enable
even a linguist to read another of them), so the IE family at ca. 3000 bp
must have been a bit deeper than modern Romance or Slavic.
 
(4)  Absolute and relative chronology of branches.  Proto-Iranian (or
pre-Proto-Iranian but probably not Proto-Indo-Iranian) contributes loans to
Proto-Finno-Ugric, and a good archeological candidate in eastern Kazakhstan
dates to about 2000 bp.  This is the incipient breakup of a major initial
branch (Indo-Iranian) of PIE.
 
All this is off the top of my head (these and other references can be found
in my paper 'Modeling ancient population structures and movement in
linguistics', Annual Rev. of Anthropology 26 (1997)), but the point is that
several very different lines of inquiry converge on very similar dates: the
PIE breakup took place around 5500 bp.
 
Johanna Nichols