GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

JoatSimeon at aol.com
In a message dated 2/4/00 12:17:35 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

<<>I don't believe that any current theory is that Greek and Sanskrit managed
>to split-off from PIE in the Ukraine and went their separate ways sharing
>innovations that are not found in PIE.

-- that is precisely the current consensus theory.  Both Greek and Sanskrit
(and Armenian and Phyrgian) belonged to an east-central group of dialects
within PIE.  They lost contact sometime in the course of Indo-Iranian's
spread to the east and pre-Greek's movement south.  This accounts
parsimoniously for all the observable linguistic data.>>

Now this is interesting.  And it actually gets back to the subject of the
thread.

So you are saying a proto-language of Greek, Sanskrit, Armenian and Phrygian
was located in the Ukraine?  And this language was not PIE or even narrow PIE.

What dates would you put on that language?  Would you have any notion of how
that group of speakers would correlate with archaeologically?

What shared attributes would you suggest uniquely group those four languages
as opposed to other IE languages?

As far as the consensus goes - where do you find evidence of this consensus?
(I mean apart from Mallory.)  Is there a specific poll that was taken or is
it something that's reflected in a count of recent papers on the subject?

Regards,
Steve Long