Dating the final IE unity

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/25/00 12:42:18 PM Mountain Standard Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

<< Where specifically do you find this?  And I mean in Renfrew. >>

-- Renfrew (in Language and Archaeology) says that the pre-Celtic IE
language reached Ireland with the first farmers -- that's 4000 BCE, roughly
-- and that the Celtic languages developed _in situ_ all across their
historic range, except for some outliers (Italy, Anatolia).

Yet when the Celts are first observed, in the last couple of centuries BCE,
their languages are quite strikingly uniform, all the way from Ireland to the
Danube Valley.

Eg., take the Ogham (early Irish, 4th-7th centuries CE) inscription verstion
of "the women" -- 'indas mnas'.  This is _precisely_ the same as a Gallic
form of 100 CE.  Observers as late as the 4th century CE said that the
Gallic-Celtic of Lyon, in the Rhone valley, was mutually comprehensible with
that of the Galatians of Anatolia (who arrived from the Balkans about 270
BCE).

This requires either no change, or perfectly synchronized change, in
pre-Celtic across thousands of miles, for 4000 years.  Which is in blatant
violation of everything we know about languages and how they develop.

Then the Celtic languages -- once we can "look" at them through literate
observers -- start changing quite rapidly; the restructuring of Insular
Celtic between the 300's CE and early medieval times, for example, which
transformed a perfectly standard early IE language not unlike Latin in its
grammatical structure into something quite different.

The usual explanation for the uniformity of early Celtic is that the Celtic
language(s) had spread recently from a relatively small area.  This fits much
better with the observed data.