Re: Just Joined, got lots of questions -help?

----- Original Message -----

From: Brent Lords

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 9:49 AM

Subject: [cybalist] Just Joined, got lots of questions -help?

In response to Brent's questions about Tocharian, Italo-Celtic/Venetic/Illyrian and the branching order within the IE family tree. I must warn you that my own view of the absolute chronology of IE splits is not quite orthodox, and that the dates I prefer are deeper than assumed by most authorities (though not as deep as Colin Renfrew's, for example). I assume that the first branchings in the IE tree should be dated to ca. 5600 BC (the split into Anatolian and Non-Anatolian), and that the ancestor of Tocharian may have been a distinct dialect already in the fifth millennium BC, if it really arose from an early branching of the Non-Anatolian subfamily. If it could be clustered with Germanic, Italo-Celtic or any other branch, we'd need a shallower, possibly Bronze Age, date. The trouble is that the demonstrations I've seen are not convincing. The oft-cited lexical equations (the Northern SALMON word allegedly corresponding to Tocharian FISH, Germanic NECK having a seeming Tocharian cognate) are doubtful, being both isolated and based on superficial similarity. Morphological affinities connecting Tocharian on the one hand with Anatolian, and on the other with Italo-Celtic represent shared archaisms, not innovations, and as such don't prove anything, though they are very important for the reconstruction of PIE. I'm not aware of any special connectons between Tocharian and Aryan, despite their geographical closeness in historical times. Presumably the Tocharians spent some times in the souther Urals or thereabouts, in the neighbourhood of Altaic-speakers, and reached the Tarym basin and China from the northeast.   My personally preferred dating for the Italo/Celtic split would be some time in the 3rd millennium BC. At the time of the Italic expansion into modern Italy the branch seems to have consisted of a northern group (Venetic), which may have extended far into central and northern Europe, and a southern one (Italic proper). I regard the Illyrian group (insofar as it is a real grouping, rather than the historical linguist's waste-paper basket) as a residual offshoot of the IE movement up the Danube and into central Europe -- the one that produced Italo-Celtic and possibly Germanic. I tend to reject other than areal (Sprachbund) connections between Germanic and Balto-Slavic, though this again is my personal opinion; the genetic unity of Germanic and Balto-Slavic is something many linguists believe in (Alexander Stolbov and I have discussed this on Cybalist about a month ago).   Piotr