Dating the final IE unity

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>But remember both the horse and the wagon are now pretty much "neolithic" in
>Europe.

-- late neolithic, early Copper Age.  After 4000 BCE for the horse,
considerably after that for the spread of horse domestication.

>Is it possible that language did not come along with or follow those
>innovations, but instead made their quick diffusion possible?

-- here we run up against the time-depth problems again.  The technological
vocabulary dates from the period of unity of the PIE language.  There's just
no getting around this.

>Homer's "winged words" outrun traders and armies and chariots and
>bookeepers, so that the idea of wheel (along with maybe those wheeled models
>we call toys) gets to Europe before any physical wheels get there?

-- changing languages in a preliterate setting requires close, prolonged
contact with native speakers of the tongue to be adopted.  There's no way to
transport languages in such a setting except inside heads.

And one language does not replace another easily, or without very good
reason.  For adults to learn another language is _hard_.

>Transferred along various dialects of PIE that maintain their mutual
>intelligibility because they are the language of new ideas and new material
>goods?

-- languages spread over a large area develop dialects and then eventually
split into separate, related languages.  This is one of the fundamentals.
And we are speaking of a time before literacy or "standard" languages, as
well.