Dating the final IE unity

[Richard M. Alderson III]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote:

> 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.

The "Indo-Hittite" hypothesis was put forth most strongly by Edgar Sturtevant
in the 1930s and 1940s.  His view was that since Hittite (and the Anatolian
languages generally) retained in consonantal form reflexes of the "laryngeals"
which had disappeared leaving only vocalic effects (timbre and length) in the
other Indo-European languages, perhaps the entire Anatolian branch should be
seen as a sister to Neogrammarian PIE.

Sixty years later, we know that the laryngeals persisted into several, if not
all, of the daughter languages past the time IE unity, and thus the Anatolian
languages are not especially marked out by this feature.

More important are morphological innovations and retentions in the Anatolian
group, but nothing in all this calls for a 2000 year gap between them and PIE
proper (your "narrow PIE").  More like about 500 years.

In anticipation,

> 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.

How about English (1000CE), which had grammatical gender in nouns, and English
(1500CE), which did not?  French (1200CE), which had a case system in nouns,
and French (1700CE), which did not?

As noted in another thread (or perhaps this one, but very long ago), Comanche
and Shoshone are no longer mutually intelligible, in less than 300 years.  So
why do you have so much difficulty with Hittite (Anatolian) developing away
from the mainstream in that amount of time?  On linguistic grounds, mind you,
not archaeological ones.

> 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.

One would think so, but then, one would have only to look at things like early
Latin inscriptions, some of which have not been satisfactorily deciphered to
this day, to know that logic has nought to do with the question.  After all, we
are supposed to *know* Latin...

								Rich Alderson