Renfrew and IE Overlords

[Carol F. Justus]

>The quote from the UT Austin web page in my last post should assure
>you that the 3000BC-2200BC dates are still around and quite clearly, even
>with the benefit of the doubt, they were intended to reflect the earliest and
>latest possible dates - and are simply repeating old and dated information.
>This is not an indictment of historical linguistics.  It started as and is
>nothing more than an observation that old ideas die hard.

The coordinator of the UT Austin webpage would like to call attention to
the fact that those dates are from a link and do not represent a position
necessarily held by anyone in Austin! The IE Languages page has, however,
been recently updated, not with any date, but with wording that I hope
makes it clear that information is being pulled together here for further
discussion, not as a claim to truth or even belief. I think that Steve Long
took it in this spirit, but just in case, I have tried to make the new
wording less ambiguous. Kerilyn Cole's elaborate collection of data on IE
languages, particularly modern ones and their relatives, is the fullest
that I know of and represents a perspective that nicely complements the
link to the UPenn project and reference to Gamkrelidze and Ivanov and
theoretical models. A big hole still is any real reference to Wolfgang
Meid's Time - Space hypothesis, among other things.

Other Links, by the way, are quite incomplete, two important Anatolian ones
having been mislaid, for example. The intent is to provide useful
information. In addition to publications lists which we are currently
trying to design an extensible indexing scheme for (and font solutions),
original text corpora, journals indexes, and online materials would be
welcome links. Does anyone know, for example, if Die Sprache's
Indogermanishes Chronik is online in any part?

As Sean Crist pointed out, many useful sources often have copyright
constraints. We are fortunate in being able to scan in Lehmann's 19th
Century Reader because he holds the copyright and has given us permission.
The work has slowed, however, because of the time involved in creating gifs
for the special characters. We have begun experimenting with Adobe Acrobat
files for entire text segments, but I understand that such picture files
take longer to load and may not ultimately be searchable. We have not yet
experimented with Unicode in Austin, because Deborah Anderson is working on
that in California. If anyone out there would like to put up pieces of the
Lehmann Reader that are still missing and let us link to it, please let me
know. Also, if anyone has other useful texts that could be part of the
Documentation Center, please let me know. It is important, though, that the
format be as accessible to all the common platforms as possible and checked
as carefully as possible. Typos and such that readers find would also be
appreciated.

Thanks to Steve Long for the comment,

Carol Justus,
IE Documentation Center Coordinator