Dating the final IE unity

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>Anyway, for what it's worth, 500 years for me is Dutch and Afrikaans

-- 500 is much too long for that example.

The settlement at the Cape was founded in 1654, and only started receiving
any substantial number of long-term Dutch settlers a generation later.

So until well after 1700, the majority of Dutch-speakers at the Cape were
European-born and hence would be speaking dialects of Dutch direct from the
Low Countries. (In fact, a lot of them were Germans or French, but that's by
the by for present purposes.)

Afrikaans was present as a spoken language in very much the present form by
the middle of the 19th century, and was in use fairly extensively in written
form by the 1870's.

So it's more like 150 years from Dutch to Afrikaans.  No more than 6
successive generations of speakers, in an extremely small population -- and
at that, in a population still using High Dutch as a written and
administrative standard.

>I think (Vedic) Sanskrit and (Mycenaean) Greek are further apart
>than that.  I'd say Vedic Skt. and Gathic Avestan comes close to
>about 500 years.

-- much closer.  Vedic and Avestan are dialects of the same language for all
practical purposes; similar to the differences between, say, Yorkshire
dialect and Texan, or Standard English and Cockney.

>Hittite and either M.Greek or V.Sanskrit for me is definitely
>2000 years or more.  The languages are structurally further
>apart, there is no mutual intelligibility to speak of.

-- Look at the differences between the English of 1000 CE and 1500 CE.