Dating the final IE unity

[Stanley Friesen]

At 01:37 AM 2/11/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>In a message dated 2/8/00 4:20:02 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied:
><<About as different from each other as the Romance languages today... Which
>is to say, with separation somewhere in the 1000 to 2000 years range.>>

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

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

>PIE? Not likely.

Actually, for those three, almost certainly.

Almost all proposed family trees make the most recent common ancestor of
those three languages either PIE itself, or something barely differentiated
from it (even assuming the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, the language ancestral
to all the non-Anatolian members of the family was little different from
the older language).  Indeed, in some ways PIE could is *defined* as the
most recent common ancestor of those three languages (which is why the
Indo-Hittite hypothesis often is considered to exclude Anatolian from the
IE family proper).  After all, it was comparing those three that lead to
the *idea* of PIE.

>And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation'
>between the first attested PIE languages?  If 2000 years separates Latin and
>Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say?

Nope, not even close!  It is about 500 years more differentiated, plus or
minus a few years.  Phonologically, and (with some exceptions)
grammatically, it is quite archaic.  The only reason it *seems* so
different is the relatively few inherited IE words it retains.

>That would put you at (1000BC minus 2000 minus 2000 more) 5000BC.

I get 3500 to 4000, 4300 at the outside.

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

Umm, Luwian is an Anatolian language, for this purpose it is
interchangeable with Hittite.

And Tocharian is only attested from a *very* late date - an AD date in
fact.  It adds nothing to the estimated age of unity.

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

They are only indecipherable due to extreme rarity of written records.
>From what little is know of them, there is no real reason to suppose they
are much more differentiated than Latin and Sanskrit.  Certainl the very
fact they can be *recognized as IE languages at all, given how few words we
actually have of them, shows how conservative they really are.  If we had
as few words of Modern English as we have of Thracian, I doubt we could
tell it was an IE language at all!

>Or do all these languages decline <fire> with only a change in the initial
>vowel and do they all have the same name for their principle god - thus
>justifying a 2000 year separation between all of them.

The phonetic changes we can be sure of in Thracian are at about that level,
or maybe even *less* than that.  As to gods, in most cases we have no way
of telling - but Sky Father is fairly widely attested in place names and
such throughout the area, so it is likely he was known to the Thracians.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com