10-01-04 21:47, Alexander Stolbov wrote:
> Thus we may expect that the Baltic and Slavic languages separated some
> earlier than in 750 BC. I would not be surprised if this happened between
> 1600 and 1200 BC.
My personal opinion is that Proto-Baltic (not Proto-_East_-Baltic!) and
Proto-Balto-Slavic are practically indistinguishable, which means that,
technically speaking, Slavic _is nested within_ the Baltic clade and the
group traditionally called "Baltic" (= West Baltic + East Baltic) ought
to be considered paraphyletic if it were to exclude Slavic. The real
question about Slavic origins, as far as I'm concerned, is not when
Baltic and Slavic separated, but when a group of Baltic dialects
developed the set of innovations that distinguish Slavic from the rest
of Baltic. The innovations are quite numerous, and given the evidence of
intensive Proto-Slavic (and pre-Slavic) contacts with Iranian (during
both the Old and the Middle Iranian periods), I'd be surprised if the
separate evolution of pre-Slavic had begun later than ca. 500 BC. Of
course what we call Proto-Slavic was a language spoken just before the
various historically known Slavic dialects began to differentiate. This
doesn't necessarily mean that a "Slavic unity" broke up at that time,
since Proto-Slavic may have had any number of close cousins that left no
descendants.
Piotr