First, according to your view, why couldn't Hittite be
much, much older than the dating of those tablets in
Anatolia? Aren't you just relying on the
archaeological records here and the creation of
writing, which happened about the same time that we
first see Hittite written down? WHY do you date
Hittite to 4000 BC?
Did you look at the response by Atkinson and Gray?
Because they did the same thing you just did - they
used historical and archaeological data to help them
date the various IE branches - Hittite at 3800 years
ago, Old Norse at 800, Archaic Irish at 1500, Latin at
2000 years ago, etc. For instance, the dates for
Tocharian are based on the earliest texts from the
later half of the first millennia AD. No texts after
750 AD by which time Tocharians are thought to have
been assimiliated with Turkish invaders. The
information you have been relying on is the very same
info that Atkinson feed into computer, along with
nonlexical characters such as grammatical and
phonological features, and shared cognates. Oh yeah,
and they eliminated the borrowed features which you
are concerned about - these borrowed words have been
identifiable by traditional linguistic methods for a
very, very long time. So they don't influence these
results either.
Finally, John, you have noted that linguistics is not
just a field of humanistic study, but it is also a
science. It is also based on scientific principles,
just like the other fields of science. It has been by
using these various principles that linguists in the
past have dated PIE, but now Atkinson has feed those
vary same scientific principles into a computer
program and has come up with some different numbers.
Some of these "principles" include:
1. Sound change is robust.
2. Sound change always targets phonological features.
3. Voiced stops become voiceless stops.
These are just a few of rules of linguistics out
there. Many were discovered by Jacob Grimm, a scholar
who lived back in the early 1800's and was a famous
folk tale collector. Here is another: descentants of
PIE tend to be progressively less inflected, using
preposititonal phrases and word order rather than
endings to show function. There are many, many more.
These are pretty consistent, just like rule of DNA
mututation charge, but there are always exceptions.
If linguists didn't have any rules, then there
wouldn't be any since here.
In addition, linguists look to the archaeological
record for clues, as well as comparitive studies. For
instance, when looking at the Romance languages
(French, Spanish, Portuguese, and all the extinct
forms), the reconstructed common ancestor language
come out rather similar to Latin. The comparitive
method is particularly useful in helping linguists
reconstruct language for which no written records
exist.
Gray and Atkinson didn't come up with a different set
of relationships as suggested by John because there
weren't any scientifically based alternative sets to
use. Why? Because they followed the scientific
principles used by linguists for centuries, as well as
the historical and archaeological method. They used
the multi-disiplinary approach that linguists have
used and that I have been recommending to the list in
examining DNA results. If fact, when they varied some
of these principles for the sake of unbiased results -
like the length of the branches from each other - they
still came up with the same dates.
