David Steel:
> As I recall from Mallory's "In Search of the Indo-Europeans" there is
> a different linguistic consensus, that Proto-Indo-European fragmented
> later, perhaps between 6000 and 5000 bp. My question is, what do you
> think is the correct date for Indo-European fragmentation and why?
Do you want the easy answer? ... Of course you don't. Easy answers
are for people who think CNN informs them :P
There are a number of issues that come into play in order to answer
this question. For one thing, there is "Indo-European without Anatolian"
and "Indo-European with Anatolian". The latter was originally called
"Indo-Hittite" or "Indo-Anatolian" but really, nowdays, it's more
typical to refer to this Anatolian-inclusive stage as "Indo-European"
proper. This in itself pushes back the date of this "split" and so
you should keep aware of the date of publishing of the sources you read.
However, "split" is a misnomer in the end. It's not like a language
just decided one day to branch off into a thousand dialects. There was
a long, imperceptible process of change in various regions of the area
where the language was spoken. After some while, it eventually got to
the point where mutual intelligibility was not possible between
different dialects. However, when was that "point"? How "mutually
unintelligible" does a dialect have to be before we call it a language
in its own right? Well, we have to make an arbitrary decision in the
end. So some may say 4000 BCE and others 6000 BCE.
Regardless of what date you think makes the most sense, the "splitting"
surely took centuries to accomplish.
= gLeN