Dating the final IE unity

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

I wrote:

>> Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you
>> say?  (Please recall how long it took for relationship to even be detected.)

In a message dated 2/22/00 3:08:16 AM, Rich Alderson replied:
>Knudtson published the Tell-el-Amarna letters in 1902, as I remember, and put
>forth the claim that Hittite was Indo-European at that time.  Hrozny' demon-
>strated the IE-ness of Hittite in his 1917 monograph to the satisfaction of
>the general IEist populace.  How long did you think it took?

Did it take 15 years for the similarities to "leap off the page?"  That is
still rather slow leaping.  (And it appears that laryngeals are still more
hesitant about any such acrobatics.)

But more importantly I must point out that mere identification of IE-ness is
NOT what S. M. Stirling was talking about or what I was responding to.

The "leap off the page" quote was made to tell us just how "undifferentiated"
Sanskrit, Latin and Mycenaean are supposed to be.

98 years after Knudtson I do not believe that the similarities between Latin
and Hittite do much leaping at all, even to expert Hittite scholars.  I'm on
the road now, but I hope to grab a random Hittite text and post it and ask
specifically how often these striking similarities with Latin show up.

I wrote:
>> 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?

Rich Alderson replied:
>Absolutely not.  Hittite looks IE enough that I'd say less than 1000 years,
>maybe less than 500, separate it from the Neogrammarian core--which was
>always too close to the classical languages and did not pay enough attention
>to the outliers.

I respect your judgment on this.  But the issue here is really the certainty
that can be attached to any such dating.  What are the chances that the gap
between Hittite and Classic IE languages is actually much older?

There is the tail-end of a thread called  "How weird is Hittite? Not weird
enough :)" on this list's archive and I believe I have some of the
pre-archive posts stashed somewhere back on my system.  One can read those
messages and easily conclude that, while Hittite is not weird enough to be
excluded from IE, it certainly is 'weird' enough to at least reasonably
support much more than 500 years of separation time.  The morphological and
syntactical differences mentioned alone seem to suggest not certainty, but
problems that still need to be worked out before any hard conclusions about
dating can be drawn.

As far as the lexical?/phonological? differentiation between Hittite and the
"Neogrammarian core" (pre-laryngeal?), this turns into an honest question
about how one measures such things.   Perhaps a way of making this
understandable is to ask the following:

If Hittite were separated from Sanskrit-Latin-Mycenaean by an additional 2000
years, how would the comparison be different than it is now?  What would one
expect in the comparison to change if in fact Hittite separated 1500 or 1000
years earlier?  If you wanted to see what Hittite would have been like if its
ancestor were a distinct language in 6000-5500BC, how would it reconstruct
differently?

Does the degree of variance in the reconstructed forms become greater in some
way?  Do the numbers of retentions or innovations increase?  What changes
would one expect to reflect the greater effects of a longer time period?

If I have been successful in posing this question understandably, then one
should see the value in considering what the reconstructed proto-Hittite of
6000-5500BC would look like.  What would it be missing?  What would it have
lost?  What additional signs of age should we expect?  This would give us a
way of saying 'Hittite texts would need to look like this if proto-Hittite
indeed separated from PIE about 7500 years ago.'  And that would seem to me
to be of great value.

>> JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
>> <<the word for "fire" in Sanskrit and Latin:
>> Nom. sing.      agnis           ignis
>> acc. sing.      agnim           ignem
>> dative          agnibhyas       ignibus

I wrote:
>> 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.

Rich Alderson replied:
>Not sure what you mean to say by "only a change in the initial vowel":  In
>Indo-Iranian, PIE *e *o *a all > PII *a, while in Latin e > i/_[+nasal stop].
>Knowing that, we can take one look at the words for "fire" in these two
>languages and *immediately*, without further ado, see them for the cognates
>they are.

>On the other hand, there were two words for "fire", the active *egni- and the
>inactive/neuter *pur-, and the different dialects reflect different choices.

Precisely.  Go back to the original post and you'll see that agnis/ignis was
being used to selectively support the 2000 year separation between those
early IE languages. My point that this was very convenient for Latin and
Sanskrit to be compared this way.  And equally inconvenient not to find
anything like the same similarity in either Greek or Hittite.  If agnis/ignis
prove something about the degree of differentiation over time, then what does
the absence of agnis/ignis in other early IE languages prove about time and
differentiation?

"Different dialects reflecting different choices" would suggest that some
time was involved in those processes too.  I did not use this singular
example.  I simply point out that it does not support the premise it was
meant to support - which was the closeness of not just two languages - but of
all early IE languages.

(As a matter of fact, I'm surprised that the closeness between agnis/ignis in
Sanskrit and Latin does not suggest a much more recent date of commonality
for those words by themselves, without regard to the rest of those two
languages.  If all the words in Latin and Sanskrit matched like this, you
could argue 50 years separated the two languages.  Lehmann tells me that
Sjoberg and Sjoberg showed why words in south Asia like 'sun' should be
eliminated from the "glottochronological core" precisely because they
reflected very early and widely borrowed religious vocabulary.  Forgive me
for asking whether agnis/ignis might not fall into the same category.)

Regards,
Steve Long