Re: time-depth of language families

daniel andreasson wrote:

> Um, excuse this natlangy question, but the Arda-Lang thingy
> and a discussion on another list got me thinking on the
> time-frame of language families. Do we know -- or at least
> have a good clue -- as to when the different families split
> up?
A lot of this is little more than guesswork.  Even very well
researched language families involve a lot of presuppositions and
hypotheses in their statements about differentiation.  The
non-Italianate dialects of Sardinia, for example, are guessed to
have broken off from Latin anywhere between the first century
BC and about the 4th Century AD, a span of about four hundred
years.

> When did Bantu split off?  When did PIE and Uralic take
> different paths? Etc, etc.
With protolanguages like PIE, the effect of all the guesswork and
manipulation of variables is even more severe.  Reasonable,
scholarly guesses as to when PIE broke up have ranged anywhere
from 2000 BC to about 7000 BC, and even though most estimates
cluster closer to more recent figure, there are still thousands of years
of in-between time.   Such problems make many linguists, like my
professor Mark Southern at the University of Texas, feel that there
is no real way to establish a date short of direct, physical samples of
writing in the subject language.  Anything else would be sheer
hand-waving.

That of course all assumes that there is a protolanguage to date.
You suggest that Uralic and PIE are related, and I am not at all
certain that most experts on the matter (of which I am not one)
would agree with that assessment.  My personal research on
the Urheimat of the Indo-Europeans led me to think that there
are closer links to some Caucasian languages, and at that only
as areal features and not as relations.

So, to get back to the subject matter at hand, if we were to create
a language family as we have planned, I would say that the level of
controversy over many language families is great enough that we could
essentially assert whatever chronology we wish, and outside assessment
would say that that is reasonable. (All depending, of course, on the
internal coherency of that chronology.)

===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos