IE, dates, etc.

[manaster at umich.edu]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
It is a pleasure to be able to agree with something Johanna
Nichols says.  OF COURSE, IE broke up between 5000 or 6000
(give or take, for what's a millennium between friends?)
years before the present.  EVERYBODY knows that, and anybody who
like myself has worked on IE knows the reasons for these
estimates.  They are of course estimates, and the methodology
is by no means well-worked-out, but they seem to be reasonable.
Certainly 3000 would be too young (because attested IE lgs are
older than that!) and 10000 would be too old.  And of course
I never questioned this.
 
What I said was that what counts in figuring
out how "old" a protolg is is not its absolute age but rather
its relative age, relative to the age of the attested lgs on
which it is based.  Since PIE is very largely based on
languages spoken around 4000 before the present (give or take),
PIE is only 2000 years old in any meaningful sense, or less!
Hence, the dgree of divergence we obseve between Hittite,
Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, etc. is much smaller than what
one expects to find in dealing withgenuinely old language
families like Austronesian or Austroasiatic or Sino-Tibetan
or even Uto-Aztecan.   Hence, IE is of no relevance to
the debate about how far back the comparative methods reach
in time.  Surely, we all agree that it is possible to
recover a protolanguage which broke up more than 2000 years
before the attested languages descneded from it.
 
Butthe bigger issue is that the methods for dating IE
imprecise as they are may not work as well for much more
ancient families, and so the date of Proto-Sino-Tibetan
or Proto-Afro-Asiatic
is certainly far less secure than that of PIE. Indeed,
given how relatively little we still know of these two,
any dates for these two seem to me to be pulled out of the
hat.
 
And the BIGGEST issue is that Johanna's claims about
a limit on the time depth reachable by the comparative
method have no intllectual basis at all if she bases
them as she purports to merely on the fact that no
has yet broken those limits.  Justtry to apply this
reasoning to any other science or indeed to any
domain whatever.  Shall we say that whatever the current
land speed record is will never be broken?  That mortality
rates in the world will never decline below where they are
now? That the Dow Jones index can never rise over today's
value? Etc. etc?  Obviously, the ONLY way to justify
a claim of what is in principle IMPOSSIBLE has to be more
than to say that it has not been DONE SO FAR>
 
AMR