the Wheel and Dating PIE or NW-IE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>I could be wrong, but my own impression is that the Slavic-Iranian contacts
>are relatively recent (much like the Germanic-Celtic ones).  >>

-- there are contacts, and then again contacts.  Some of the Iranian
vocabulary in Slavic -- the word for "god" and the river-names of the Ukraine
-- would seem to be comparatively recent.  And, after all, the breakup of
Proto-Slavic is very recent, relative to that of the other large stocks.

On the other hand, other features -- satemization -- are undoubtedly much
earlier, Bronze Age at the latest.

This would point, I think, to at least intermittent contact between
Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian right from the splitup of the PIE dialect
cluster down to historic times.