Renfrew's Celtic Scenario

[Stanley Friesen]

At 02:02 AM 2/11/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:
>I disagree.  Actually, Renfrew's evidence is still rather compelling.
>Although I am willing to reserve judgment until you unveil the amazing "rate
>of differentiation" machine - which I understand will place PIE in a small
>village in the Ukraine about 3000BC,

Look, NOBODY here is making any such claim, or even anything remotely like
it.  Nobody claims to be able to narrow the homeland down that far, and I
can remember nobody here suggesting a divergence as late as 3000 BC.

The point is that *overall* levels of differentiation among the earliest
dialects are much less than among living dialects.  Comparing averages, and
calibrating by observed rates of change in the last 3000 years, we can
place a fairly secure *upper* *limit* on how old the divergence of PIE is.
That upper limit is about 4500 BC.

> where four different words for the wheel
>would be divied up among the departing IEian children, just before they
>marched off to change the language of Europe and half of Asia.

Sigh, the upper limit is not based on any *single* vocabulary item.

It is based on the fact that studying Greek, plus learning a few rules of
thumb, actually makes it possible to understand Sanskrit in a limited way.
Much as knowing English and a few phonetic rules often allows one to piece
together the general meaning of basic German.  (Indeed, perhaps *better*
than that).

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