Dating the final IE unity

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

I wrote:
<<2000yrs from modern Romance language back to Latin?  Then 2000 yrs from
Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what? PIE? Not likely.>>

In a message dated 2/22/00 2:44:46 AM, sarima at friesen.net wrote:
<<Actually, for those three, almost certainly.>>

I'd still like to see your catalogue of the specific differences between
Mycenaean, Sanskrit and Latin.  Then I'd like to see how you assign a date to
those differences.  Until then using "almost certainly" for 2000 years seems
to be uncalled for.  Quite uncalled for.  No rational basis has been
presented for any such claims of certainty about that date.

sarima at friesen.net wrote:
<<Indeed, in some ways PIE could be *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).>>

I think that is the other way around.  The I-H hypothesis I believe has
Hittite < PIE.  In fact I believe there's still an open question whether
Anatolian was the innovator or 'narrow PIE' was.

Which means yes you would still have to account for the Anatolian differences
in dating PIE, accepting the I-H hypothesis.

I wrote:
<<...Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say?>>

sarima at friesen.net replied:
<<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.>>

Really, 500 years.  Kind of Italian (1500AD) to Italian (2000AD) - except of
course for the lack of gender in Hittite - and some other small matters like
that.  Nothing important.

And I see that the rate of loss of "inherited IE words" also does not enter
into the time equation.

I've looked for objective measures of linguistic change in the books and I do
believe that there have been serious efforts in this direction that may yield
results in the future.   And I do respect the considered judgment of
historical linguists in these matters.   I just don't believe we've had the
benefit of such knowledge in this thread - not from the start of it.

This "2000 years" separating Sanskrit, Latin and Mycenaean that's been
repeated in these posts looks more and more like it has very little to do
with linguistics and a lot to do with unsupported assertions about rate of
differentiation.  That time period may be true, but I've seen here nothing to
support it.

sarima at friesen.net wrote:
<<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.... 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!>>

This is simply incorrect.  We have texts in Thracian and the reason we cannot
read them is because they are VERY highly differentiated from Latin and
Sanskrit and every other known IE language.  And it should also be pointed
out that the notion that it took many years and much work to establish
Hittite's relation to IE, despite the fact that many, many texts were found.
There is no necessary correlation here.   On the other hand, if early IE were
as undifferented as being claimed here, many of these problems in
discipherment logically should not have occurred.

Regards,
Steve Long