IE "break-up", dates, etc.

[Roger Wright]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
 
On Wed, 25 Feb 1998 manaster at umich.edu wrote:
 
>----------------------------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 ....
 
That's an interesting use of the word "everybody"!
Even if we use it to mean "everybody who has ever studied Indo-European"
we are left with the problem of what "broke up" means. It only makes
much sense if we accept that as the period when several large groups of
IE-speakers travelled in several different directions and thus lost
physical contact with each other. If it does mean that, then the
relevant and conclusive evidence won't be linguistic at all. If it
doesn't mean that, then the dating will be circular, depending on what
we think we mean by "breaking up". After all, even in cases where there
is a great deal of incontrovertible historical data for us to consult,
lack of physical separation between the speakers concerned makes the
salient evidence that can be used in discussion hard to pin down in an
empirical manner. Most noticeably in the case of the Romance languages,
perhaps, for in this field modern datings for when they "broke up" range
from the third century B.C. (Robert de Dardel's view) (no, I'm not
making that up) to the sixteenth century or so (Rebecca Posner's). As
Larry Trask said to us just now, modern appreciation of convergence and
sociolinguistics, etc, means that physically contiguous groups can no
longer seriously seen to be as "broken up" as the lines on a
tree-diagram of mother and daughter languages imply.
                                                        RW