Re: Deep Dates.

I wrote:

As Piotr knows, I timidly keep myself within the According-to-Mallory standard model; I mostly parrot the authorities I've been reading. This model, however, best explains all the evidence we presently have. About the only amendment I would make is that the PIEs, at the final point of unity (including Anatolian) would seem to have occupied two distinct habitats, the forest-steppe boundary, and the Northern European forest itself. Geography impels us to look to Kiev as the approximate center of the PIE homeland.

Alexander responds:

According to such a scenario the very first splitting of the IE unity (let it be after Anatolians are off) should be "forest block" vs. "steppe block" division, should not it? If so Balto-Slavic (a typical forest group) and Aryans (a typical steppe group) would be found on the most distant branches of the IE systematical tree. But we know that these two groups are very closely connected in all linguistic aspects. How to reconcile these statements?

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Is it necessary for what becomes Indo-Iranian move out into Central Asia instantaneously, imposing a linguistic cordon sanitaire? No, it is not.

What becomes Indo-Iranian is cheek-by-jowl with what becomes Balto-Slavic for a very long time. For myself, I have doubts that the Yamna culture was monolithically Indo-European speaking; this goes against the historic pattern for Steppe peoples. Not all the Uralics were quaint reindeer-raising Lapps (look at the Magyars). The Samara Bend is an often-mentioned homeland for proto-Uralic; I would nto be suprised if Marija Gimbutas' Volga kurgan-people spoke Uralic.

I don't have concrete answers. I only speak of what I've read, and what I've assimilated so far. The model I have in my head is one where they don't get too far too fast ('shallow dates'). One reasonable scenario, once Anatolian is away, is for Germanic to move away first, to the north, perhaps via Hungary, with the ancestral Germanic group going into isolation, only to later have contact with Celtic and Balto-Slavic. Celtic goes west into Hungary, with Italic and perhaps some proto-Indo-Iranians right behind them, no doubt also with with some groups for which we have no real traces. The Hungary-Transylvania-Serbia region would seem to be the real smelter for the western IE languages.

If Armenian and Greek are to be united, one possibility is to have proto-Greek enter Hungary and make it to Greece via Macedonia and the Vardar, with proto-Armenian entering Anatolia the same way the Anatolians did. What's left is Balto-Slavic: immediately south of them, spread from Kiev to Samara, are the Indo-Iranians (and no doubt a number of other linguistic groups).

Is there is problem seeing the Balto-Slavic homeland as occupying the northern edge of the PIE homeland? Or seeing the Indo-Iranians as long-time stay-at-homes too?

Mark.