Dating the final IE unity

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>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.)

-- it took a fair proportion of those 15 years (including the opening years
of WWI, which sort of disrupted scholarly work) to reliably decypher the
highly idiosyncratic Hittite writing system, which is an eccentric form of a
script originally designed for another language; in fact, it's a local
variant of Akkadian cuneiform adapted to write "Hittite", and that had in
turn been designed for Sumerian and adapted to write Akkadian.

Eg., the apparent distinction between b/p, d/t, and g/k in written Hittite is
not real because it represents a phonological difference between Akkadian and
Sumerian -- it has no relevance to spoken Hittite.

Things like this had to be worked out before we could get at the actual shape
of the language.

Add to this the fact that the overwhelming bulk of the Hittite documents were
religous and/or governmental, and it's precisely in those semantic fields
that the non-IE element in the Hittite lexicon is greatest -- from Hattic,
Akkadian, and Sumerian.

To use an analogy,  studying Hittite from the texts we have is rather as if
we had to study English exclusively through works dealing with Greek
architecture and Christian theology, written by a set of medieval copyists
given to dropping into Latin every now and then and sprinkling the page with
Greek words meant to be pronounced as their English equivalents.

The _core_ vocabulary of Hittite is unambiguously Indo-European, and of a
rather archaic form, at that, indicating a short separation.

We were lucky that cuneiform was already known; it took 40 years before
someone could show that Linear B was archaic Greek, a feat requiring
skull-cracking ingenuity.

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

-- that's "are".  Has anyone here disputed their close similarity?

Eg., Homeric Greek "Hieron menos" and Sanskrit "ishiram manas" (both meaning
"mighty and powerful").  NB:  no, the relationship does not depend on that
one pairing. That's just a typical example.

>What are the chances that the gap between Hittite and Classic IE languages
>is actually much older?

-- very little, in the judgement of most in the field.

It's comparable to the difference between Old English and Early Modern
English;  a brusque restructuring of the morphology, and a massive freight of
loan-words in certain semantic fields.

>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.

-- it shouldn't look so close to the PIE you get by comparing the other IE
languages, for starters.  Given a gap of 4000 years, one would expect an
extreme degree of differentiation, similar to that between, say, English and
Proto-Germanic.

>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.

-- oh, there are plenty of similarities.   The word for fire was just one.
eg., that for "field" is, in four fairly early IE languages:

Sanskrit:   ajras
Greek:      agros
Latin:      ager
Gothic:     akrs

Or to use the famous phrase:

Sanskrit:   Devas adadat datas
Latin       Deus dedit dentes
Greek*:     Theos doken ondontas

(*my feeble stab at a Homeric version; Hellenists feel free to correct.
Anyone care to venture a Mycenaean rendering?).

>then what does the absence of agnis/ignis in other early IE languages prove
>about time and differentiation?

-- very little.  You have to consider the whole language, of which that noun
was simply one example.  See above.  You also have to consider the broad
series of examples of the speed of linguistic change which we have records of.

>"Different dialects reflecting different choices" would suggest that some
>time was involved in those processes too.

-- it's concurrent, not sequential.  When one language was "deciding" to use
*egnis or *pur-'  as its word for "fire", it did not have to wait until
another had gone the other way.

All the languages in question were changing _simultaneously_, tho' of course
not at exactly the same speed.

>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.

-- nobody in the field disputes the closeness of the early IE languages, that
I'm aware of.  There's disagreement about the _relative_ closeness, but not
that the languages at first observation are still quite close.

>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.

-- that's because they're cognates.  They both undergo -- here's that phrase
again -- the characteristic Indo-Iranian and Latin sound-shifts from a PIE
form.

Latin           ignis
Lithuanian      ugnis
OC Slavonic     ognis
Sanskrit        agnis

from PIE *egnis.

The _alternative_ term, also of PIE date, is of course

PIE             *pur; which gives

Germanic        furr  (standard *p ==> f)
Umbrian         pir
Czech           pyr (ashes, a semantic shift)
Hittite         pahur
Tocharian       puwar, etc., etc.