Re: [tied] Re: "Will the 'real' linguist please stand up?"

You have already cited Dixon in the past, and I have addressed his objections. There are many reasons why a date around 6000 BP is by far more likely than 10500 BC. The reasoning behind it is not based on estimated rates of change (I agree with Dixon that glottochronological dating is extremely unreliable) but rather on a large corpus of indirect but cumulatively significant evidence (reconstructible elements of PIE culture, contacts with other groups, historically documented distribution of IE languages, correlation between linguistic history and archaeology, etc.).

Proto-Indo-Aryan (= Proto-Indic) and Proto-Indo-Iranian are not the same. The latter was ancestral to the former, and of course older by several centuries. PIIr is the reconstructed most recent common ancestor of the Iranian, Indic and Nuristani languages; PIA is the common ancestor of the Indo-Aryan languages only, in a "sister" relation to Proto-Iranian. Vedic can be regarded as the literary form of a spoken language still rather close to PIA (though not directly ancestral to the whole group).

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: <kalyan97@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 1:33 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: "Will the 'real' linguist please stand up?"


--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:> > If the problem is how to sort out
the chronology of IIr. loans into FU, "real linguist" have been
working on it for a long time with a good deal of success, although
in individual instances the borrowed forms may have too few
distinctive traits to be easily attributable to a concrete stratum
of loans.

Thanks for the clarification. I should clarify at the outset, I have
the highest respect for linguistics as a discipline. I am no
linguist, gLeN, and am trying to learn from experts; I have no
problem saying, 'I don't know'. I have a problem with the use of the
terms by some linguists, such as proto-Indo-Aryan and proto-Indo-
Iranian, as if they are different. But then, see what Dixon has to
say:

"What has always filled me with wonder is the assurance with which
many historical linguists assign a date to their reconstructed proto-
language.We are told that proto-Indo-European was spoken about 6,000
years ago. What is known with a fair degree of certainty is the time
between proto-Indo-Aryan and the modern Indo-Aryan languages -
something in the order of 3,000 years. But how can anyone tell that
the development from proto-Indo-European to proto-Indo-Aryan took
another 3,000 years?.Languages are known to change at different
rates. There is no way of knowing how long it took to go from the
presumed homogeneity of proto-Indo-European to the linguistic
diversity of proto-Indo-Iranian, proto-Celtic, proto-Germanic, etc.
The changes could have been rapid or slow. We simply don't know.Why
couldn't proto-Indo-European have been spoken about 10,500 years ago?
.The received opinion of a date of around 6000 BP for proto-Indo-
European.is an ingrained one. I have found this a difficult matter
to get specialists to even discuss. Yet it does seem to be a house
of cards." (Dixon, R.M.W., 1997, The Rise and Fall of Languages,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 47-49).