Sorry, I was in a hurry today and posted unfinished letter instead of saving
it as a draft.
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Alexander Stolbov" <astolbov@...>
> wrote:
> In all probability Slavs and Balts parted
> > earlier than in the second quarter of the 1st mill. BC.
>
> *****GK: The argument for this position can only be a linguistic one.
> Neither history nor archaeology support it.
What do you mean?
1) History and archeology have any arguments against it. If so please share
them.
or
2) There are no direct historical and archaeological evidences and we must
relay here only on linguistic arguments.
> So what is the linguistic
> argument, and how do you relate it to time and space?*****
I don't know what glottochronology suggest here. Does anybody know?
However there are some thoughts which allow to belive that this
_probability_ is not low.
The degree of similarity of two pairs - Baltic with Slavic and Iranian with
Indic - is approximately the same. Some scolars think that the first pair is
more closely related, other think that the second pair has more similarity.
If so the time of dividing of Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian must be
approximately the same.
We know that in the middle of the 2nd mill. BC existed Srubnaya culture and
a number of cultures of the Andronovo community (Petrovka, Alexeevka,
Fedorovo cultures). All of them are confidently classified either as Iranian
or as Indo-Aryan. Thus we can think that since the Late Bronze Age (c. 1600
BC) the Indo-Iranian community didn't exist anymore. The terms from the
Mitanny texts are recognized as Indo-Aryan (not Indo-Iranian) that we can be
sure that by 1400 BC the Indic languages had separated from the Iranian
ones.
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.
As to the region of Balto-Slavic disintegration I'm not ready now to defend
the precise localisation. Perhaps somewhere between Volga and Dnieper.
Alexander