IE, dates, etc.

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, Johanna Nichols wrote:
 
> ----------------------------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:
 
This is certainly true, as Larry Trask has also pointed out.  (Although
I have to ask on what basis you characterize glottochronology as
"reasonably reliable"--given the principle which underlies it, it seems
like it should be about as reliable as astrology).
 
But that skirts the real issue which was brought up here, which is
the reliability of dating for other families.  I think, in fact, that
our relatively justified confidence in the dating of PIE is maybe part
of the problem, in that it may lead to the dangerous assumption that
dating in general is reliable, and even easy.  For how many other families
can we assign a date with anything like this degree of confidence--
or with any justified confidence at all?
 
(BTW, Alexis wasn't actually saying that IE "is a young family".  His
comment was not in the context of problems of dating, but of problems
in establishing relationship.  His point--which is quite correct--is that
IE is an inappropriate standard of comparison in discussions of that kind,
because the data from which it is reconstructed are so old.  As we discuss
this, IE has a time depth of 6,000 years, but since we have good
attestation of languages from several different branches from 1.5-3
millenia ago, as a problem in establishing relatedness its time depth is
substantially less than that).
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html