Northwest IE attributes

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>I You miss my point.  *IF* satem was innovated among I-Ir speakers and then
>only later 'adopted' by Balto-Slavic speakers, then we can still keep B-S
>out of the "original" satem group and in the original NW group - since satem
>would have been only adopted in B-S after the NW split-off.

-- both Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian are satemized at the earliest recorded
dates for either of those language groupings.  This is one of a number of
innovations shared by Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian and indicates that they
remained in contact after Indo-Iranian had _lost_ contact with the other
western IE dialects.

It would be more accurate to refer to satemization as a process beginning
somewhere in the Indo-Iranian dialect cluster and then spreading from there,
the process "fading out" as it reached Balto-Slavic (and Armenian) and not
carrying over into the next tier of IE dialects -- Germanic and Greek, for
instance.  Hard to date, but not later than, at the extreme, 1500 BCE or so
-- the earliest recorded Mitannian sources (specifically Indo-Aryan) are from
about that date)

Most probably about a thousand years earlier -- say around 2500 BCE.

Shared innovations between Baltic and Germanic indicate continued contact
from a very early date.  The obvious inference is that Baltic formed a
geographical "bridge" for some time between Indo-Iranian and Germanic after
the breakup of PIE, which again indicates a date for the terminus ad quem of
PIE between 3500 and 3000 BCE.

The west-to-east line would go Germanic-Balto-Slavic-Indo-Iranian, and
there's every indication that the relative positions have always been that
way.  (Eg., early Indo-Iranian loans in Proto-Finno-Ugric vs. Proto-Germanic
loans in Finnish proper, which would put proto-Indo-Iranian around the
southern Urals and Proto-Germanic on the southern shore of the Baltic and in
Scandinavia.)

>Greece is certainly northwest of Anatolia and east of the Caucasus.

-- Actually Greece proper is due west of Anatolia.

This says nothing, however, about where the IE dialect antecedent to Greek
was at the time in question.  And Greek and Armenian share some innovations,
as do Greek and Indo-Iranian.  Greek is 'closer' to Indo-Iranian than it is
to, say, Latin or Germanic.  It's generally classified as part of a group of
SE dialects within PIE.

So pre-Greek (and Armenian, and probably Phyrgian) remained in contact with
the developing Indo-Iranian dialect cluster longer than Germanic, Italic or
Celtic; but not quite so long as Balto-Slavic.

Ie., Armenian is a satem language, while Greek isn't, indicating that at the
time of the spread of the 'satem' innovation, Armenian was _between_ Greek
and Indo-Iranian, probably on a northeast-through-southwest vector.

This makes perfect sense, since we know that Armenian is intrusive in its
historically attested location in NE Anatolia; prior to that (in the 2nd
millenium BCE) it was far to the west, in the Balkans -- which is to say,
precisely in the area between Greek and the nearest Indo-Iranian language.