Dating the final IE unity

[Richard M. Alderson III]

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote:

> Going back to what all this was supposed to prove, what is supposedly
> "leaping off the page" is NOT IEness.  What is supposed (according to the
> original premise in this thread) to "leap off the page" is the time of
> separation.

I've gone back to the archives, because I couldn't believe what I read above.
The phrase "leap off the page" arose in the following context:

On Tue, 1 Feb 2000, S. M. Stirling (JoatSimeon at aol.com) wrote regarding the
proposal that PIE spread with the Neolithic agriculturalists such that the
(ancestors of the) Celts were in place by 4000BCE:

> The IE languages when first encountered are NOT DIFFERENTIATED ENOUGH to have
> bee separated by that depth of time!

On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, Mr. Long replied:

> Is this differentiation is quantifiable?  Are you sure it works in your
> favor?
> ...
> Following Renfrew, roughly 4000 years separates non-Anatolian PIE from
> Mycenaean (1200BC), Sanskrit (1000BC?) and Latin (500BC).  How
> 'differentiated' are those three languages?  On a scale of 1 to 10?

Now, to me, and apparently to Mr. Stirling, this is a challenge to state how
easily these three languages are recognized as being related to one another.
Nothing in the query stands out as asking for "the time of separation" of these
languages, just "can one look at them and say 'that no philologer could examine
them all 3, without believing them to have sprung from some common source'".
So that's the question we have been answering, and apparently wasting our time
in doing so, because that wasn't the question asked.

To continue, on Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Mr. Stirling responded to the query above:

> -- around 2.  About as different from each other as the Romance languages
> today -- in a stage where the similarities leap off the page and where some
> words and phrases are still mutually comprehensible.

While I might disagree with the numerical score (to me, a 2 would be something
like Vedic Sanskrit and Gathic Avestan), the characterization is about right--
if we remember to include the minor Romance languages and to concern ourselves
with spoken rather than formal written French.

The confusion continued when, on  Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Mr. Long responded in turn:

> This is interesting.   2000yrs from modern Romance language back to Latin?

> 2000 yrs from Myceanaean, Sanskrit and Latin back to what?

> PIE? Not likely.  Because even if Mycenean, Sanskrit and Latin were as
> 'undifferentiated' as is claimed above, this group hardly represents the full
> range of differences that ACTUALLY emerge out of the darkness of 4000 years
> ago, are they?

> Do the similarities between Latin and Hittite 'leap off the page" as you say?
> (Please recall how long it took for relationship to even be detected.)

I cannot say at this point what Mr. Stirling thought, because he declined to
answer the question in a posting made on Mon, 14 Feb 2000.

However, to me, this looks as if I understood the question above correctly,
because the next question is, is Hittite is similar enough to the above three
languages for the relationship to be obvious in the same way.  Stanley Friesen
seems to have thought much the same, based on his posting of Mon, 14 Feb 2000,
in which he answered in much the same fashion as did I.

Only now, in the light of Mr. Long's statement quoted at the start of this post
about what he meant with his question does the following paragraph from Mr.
Long's post of the 11th change how I would have formulated my answer to the
question about Thracian:

> And what does Hittite (for starters) add to the total 'differentiation'
> between the first attested PIE languages?  If 2000 years separates Latin and
> Sanskrit, Hittite should certainly add another 2000 years, wouldn't you say?

I would have said that Thracian provides *nothing* to our thoughts on the time
of separation of the IE languages, precisely because there is too little
material available to us to characterize the language as thoroughly as we have
the major languages.  Nor is Thracian being singled out in this:  For example,
take Albanian, which since it is attested so late and is so changed from the
protolanguage, contributes nothing to the dating of the breakup of PIE, or
Lithuanian, which is attested so late and is so *little* changed in many ways
that we cannot use it as evidence, either.

That is why I was excited by the idea of a *long* text in Thracian.  Behistun,
for example, qualifies as a text to get excited over.  For short texts like
those we have, only a bilingual is going to be of much use in getting things
started.

To quote the comedian Dennis Miller, "Of course, that's just my opinion.  I
could be wrong."

								Rich Alderson