GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)

[Carol F. Justus]

>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?
>  Steve Long

On the Greek-Armenian-Indo-Iranian branch, the major evidence is at least
as early as Antoine Meillet (The IE Dialects and an update to the
Introduction) and as late as Gamkrelidze and Ivanov's IE and IEeans (trsl.
1995).

I don't recall major arguments refuting Meillet and G & I, while they give
major linguistic arguments in favor of this branch (but in the Ukraine?).
The problem that I see is that, while people seem to accept this view, they
somehow don't always internalize the implications. As a result, someone who
purports to agree with Meillet will still reconstruct PIE on the basis of
shared features between Greek, Sanskrit, and Avestan that Latin, Anatolian,
and Germanic don't share.

So the consensus may be more by default than by reasoned application. It
would be nice if people would take a position on the basis of the
particular arguments then work with the implications.

Carol Justus

>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?

>Regards,
>Steve Long