Dating the final IE unity

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>This is interesting.   2000yrs from modern Romance language back to Latin?

-- I'm being conservative.  That's the time from Classical Latin (0 CE, say)
to the present.

Or one could say that it's from the breakup of Late Latin/Common Romance (400
CE, roughly) to the emergence of more or less the modern standard forms of
French, Spanish, and Italian -- around 1500-1600.

That would be around 1200 years.  2000 is the upper limit, the maximum
possible.

>2000 yrs from Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what?

-- yup, PIE.

>Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you say?

-- I was referring to Latin, Sanskrit, and Greek.

>And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation'
>between the first attested PIE languages?

-- nothing, since Hittite is universally considered to be a special case; and
you're changing the subject again.

>And of course, the differentiation between the languages above and Tocharian,

-- nope.  Our corpus of Tocharian dates from the 1st millenium _CE_; 1500
years or more after the first attested Mycenaean and Sanskrit, and well after
the breakup of Common Romance.

Do try to keep these dates straight.

In any case, Tocharian is transparently an IE language, with many archaic
features closely similar to those of the earliest attested language.  The
degree of development vs. a vs. PIE is quite similar to that of other IE
languages _of the same period_.

(That is to say, the appropriate comparison would be Tocharian and Old
English or early French.)

>Luwian

-- same-same as Hittite; both Anatolian.

>the undecipherable Thracian, Albanian and Celtiberian should send
>your date of dispersal hurtling back to that magic 7000BC you've mentioned so
>frequently.

-- another bizzare statement.  Would you care to elucidate why the existance
of Celtiberian should affect our datings?  Particularly as we know virtually
nothing about it, or Thracian.

And Albanian?  How, exactly, do you drag that into the issue in question?  We
don't have any Albanian prior to the medieval period!

>Or do all these languages decline <fire> with only a change in the initial
 vowel

-- do try to keep the dates straight.  Comparing languages in 1000 BCE and
1000 CE isn't quite the same thing, for the specific purposes of this
question.

>BTW, would you know if <zeus pater> appears in Mycenaean?  Or when the
>phrase first appears in Greek?

-- actually it's, "Diwos", in Mycenaean; later Greek lost the 'w'.

In Hittite, 'dsius' (with assibilation of the intial dental); same meaning,
"Sky God".

It's 'tatis tiwaz' and 'tiyaz papaz' in Anatolian (Luvian and Palaic,
specifically); same meaning -- "Sky Father" or "Father Sky".

Gemanic has, of course, a reflex of the same term:  tiwaz.