Dating the final IE unity

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>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.

-- Kind of like Anglo-Saxon (1000 AD) and Early Modern English (1500 AD),
actually.  Massive freight of Romance loan-words, drastic grammatical
simplification, and -- right around 1500 -- an equally drastic set of
sound-shifts.

>And I see that the rate of loss of "inherited IE words"

-- mmmm, in case you hadn't noticed, Hittite (as is well-known) has a massive
freight of borrowed vocabulary from the non-Indo-European language Hattic,
particularly in terms having to do with religious ritual, government and
urban life.

This is, of course, exactly what happens when one language moves into the
territory of another whose speakers are at a higher level of technology and
social organization.  (The Greek word for "bath" is a non-IE loan, as is the
Greek terminology for specifically Mediterranean plants -- hyacinth, for
instance.)

The Hittites (just to add some confusion, they actually called their language
"Neshite") preserved the older Hattic language as a liturgical tongue and
borrowed very extensively from it.

>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.

-- that's odd, since the actual historical linguists in this thread have
simply been repeating the consensus of the field.

>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.

-- no, I'm afraid you're simply incorrect.

The sum total of extant Thracian consists of a small series of short
inscriptions in Greek script, which are difficult to translate because of
problems in word division.  (This is characteristic of _short_ inscriptions.)
 There are some glosses found in Hesychius and Photius which give us about 30
certain Thracian terms.  The rest of our information comes from personal and
place-names.

In sum, we have less than a hundred Thracian words -- most of them names.
Those we do have, are transparently IE, and present no particular difficulty:
 -para, 'settlement', -bria, 'town', for instance.

>On the other hand, if early IE were as undifferented as being claimed here,
>many of these problems in discipherment [of Hittite] logically should not
>have occurred.

-- no, you're simply wrong, again.

The difficulties with Hittite were due to the form of _writing_, not to the
language.  Once the writing forms were thoroughly understood, the language
presented no particular difficulties and indeed bore out some predictions --
the famous laryngeals, for instance.

The writing system was a nightmare, though.

Eg., the extensive use of Sumerograms in the Hittite version of cuneiform
makes a large number of Hittite vocabulary items unrecoverable; and cuneiform
is badly suited to writing Indo-European languages in the first place.  Not
to mention the extensive use of learned terms borrowed from Akkadian for the
written form of Hittite.

It's rather as if our only source for Latin were 7th-century Irish monastic
graffitti.