Dating the final IE unity

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

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

-- sure.  Hittite shows greater differentiation than other IE languages of
the same date, but not _that_ much more.  Eg, some vocabulary:

PIE            Latin                   Hittite             English

iugom          iugum                   yukan               yoke
neuos          novus                   newas               new
kwis           quis                    kuis                who
kuuon          canis                   kuwan               dog
es             es                      es                  'be' (as in 'to be')
nsos           nos                     anzas               us

And so forth and so on.

>Because it means that your 'leap off the page' test does not work on Hittite
>(@1500BC)

-- I'm afraid it does.  See above.

>or Thracian (@500BC).

-- What on earth do you mean?  We don't _have_ enough Thracian to say more
than it's transparently Indo-European; eg., Thracian 'Dia' from PIE *diuo --
and derivatives from the PIE words for 'horse', 'white', etc., mostly from
place-names and personal names.

Another perfectly standard IE language of the period.

>The fact is all you accounted for with the "leaps off the page" criterion is
>some kind of proto-Mycenaean-Sanskrit-Latin.

-- plus Balto-slavic, Celtic, Germanic and Tocharian, to name a few.

You should note that Latin and Sanskrit aren't considered particularly
closely related.

>But you CAN'T logically use those three ONLY to get back to PIE.

-- see above.

<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?>>

-- more like 500 to 1000, actually.  Anatolian is first attested in written
sources around 2000 BCE or a little later -- personal names in documents from
the Assyrian merchant colonies in what's now eastern Turkey.

>Well, the first encountered IE languages include Hittite, Luwian, Thracian -
>all before Latin.

-- I've dealt with the Anatolian languages above.

The -- very fragmentary -- sources for Thracian are contemporary with out
first Old Latin texts and show about the same degree of development from PIE,
as far as they go, which isn't very far.

>I mean you wouldn't be excluding them because they are DIFFERENTIATED
>ENOUGH to move your date way back - by whatever measure you
>are using - would you?

-- no.  As I've shown above, and as any textbook would tell you, they're not
differentiated enough either.

Do you insist that every example come from every IE language?  That's going
to make things very tedious.

>Let's get back to this proof you offered.  Does Mycenaean decline 'fire' the
>same similar way as Latin and Sanskrit?

-- quite similar inflectional forms in the noun.  The similarities of Greek
and Sanskrit grammar were, you will remember, among the first clues to the
existance of an Indo-European family of languages.  Mycenaean and Sanskrit
are so similar that knowing one, and a few rules for sound-changes, will
enable you to read the other and get the general gist of the meaning.

<<Germanic has, of course, a reflex of the same term:  tiwaz.>>

>Of course.  And where exactly does it have it, by the way?>>

-- it's the proto-Germanic word for "god/Sky God", of course, with the usual
Germanic sound-change of PIE initial *d to 't'.

As in 'diwaz' ==> Germanic 'tiwaz'.

This is one of the best-established words in the lexicon, with derivatives in
Germanic, Hittite/Anatolian, Italic, Greek, Celtic, Indo-Iranian and
Balto-Slavic.

You didn't know?