A Reminder Why, as Young Earth Creationist, I am Wary of Proto-Indo-European Unity

Toward a phylogenetic chronology of ancient Gaulish, Celtic, and Indo-European
Peter Forster and Alfred Toth | PNAS July 22, 2003 100 (15) 9079-9084;
https://www.pnas.org/content/100/15/9079

Citing:

The rooted lexeme tree of Fig. 4, which normalizes the six dead and living language branch lengths to AD 2000, yields a date for Indo-European fragmentation in Europe at 8100 BC ± 1,900 years. Note that the standard deviation of 1,900 years does not include uncertainty in the calibration, but it does express the uncertainty caused by mutation rate fluctuation (both in items and in languages), unlike “pairwise” glottochronology as advanced by Swadesh (16). For the fragmentation of Gaulish, Goidelic, and Brythonic from their most recent common ancestor, the lexeme tree yields a date of 3200 BC ± 1,500 years, but this date should be regarded as exploratory because it is based on only three estimators, i.e., three descendent branches. The date of 3200 BC ± 1,500 years would represent an oldest feasible estimate for the arrival of Celtic in the British Isles, and indeed is expected to be close to the actual date if the phylogenetic split between Gaulish and Insular Celtic was caused by the migration of the Celtic language to Britain and subsequent independent development in Britain.

Obviously, the idea of glottochronology is not quite as regular as they think, but ... it's not totally off either.

Within one "branch of Indo-European," you can have two languages sharing c. 50 % vocabulary, like this is what I heard of Swedish and German within Germanic. Note too that the shared words are more numerous due to Low German loans into Swedish.

But "between branches" we have definitely less vocabulary identity.

This poses the question whether it would have taken more time to have all branches evolve from a common ancestor and change so much vocabulary, or whether it would have taken more time for originally unrelated languages to borrow from each other.

When the alternatives are different languages shedding more or acquiring less than 50 % of vocabulary from a common source (including possibly commonality of neighbouring languages), it would seem acquiring less than 50 % would take less time.

Whether the language of Crete before Greek was or was not Aryan, it would seem the language of the Mitanni was Aryan. This means you have a neat geographic lineup, West to East represented by left to right:

Greek - Luwian - Phrygian - Nesili (or Hittite) - Aryan - Armenian.

And Aryan and Greek would involve the full scale of "Classic" Indo-European verb tenses. If we go to finite forms, I think Latin has 143 simple ones and Greek over 340. Sanskrit version of Aryan over 900. Now, verb tenses are not all equally Classic all over the "branches" but some references to this Classic system is found in many other places. Especially in personal endings. Which can be borrowed, as some linguists would consider some Finnish personal endings to be from Indo-European.

Now, Swadesh lists are supposed to be about very "core" vocabulary which is hardly ever replaced by loans ... but precisely the core nature may have provoked mutual loans in an attempt of facilitating communications. And there are words on the actual or at least any reasonable Swadesh list for which we have no clear Indo-European gloss. Would "hand" be "hand", "cheir", "manus", "ranka"? Would "head" be "head" (perhaps same as "caput"), "kephale" (probably same as "galva"), "ceann/penn", "gluch" (that's Armenian, previous two were Irish and Welsh), "mastakam" or "Ḍōkē" (Sanskrit and Marathi)? Would "mouth" be "mouth", "os", "bucca", "genoù", "stoma", "burna", "usta" (which could be related to "os"?), "berani" (which could be related to "burna"?), "dev" ....?

For that matter, is "father" "father" or "atta"? Is "one" "one" or "heis"? While the "pater" gloss is more prevalent than the "atta" gloss, oldest known IE language, Hittite, has "attas" and oldest Germanic language with full texts, Gothic, has "atta" while using "fadar" for "daddy". Similarily, the "oinos" gloss is prevalent, but second oldest language, Greek, has the "sems" gloss for it. Not sure at all what Hittite has.

Obviously, you see a lot of "branches" of Indo-European missing from my lineup. Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Slavonic, Baltic, they are also Indo-European, and so was arguably Liguric. However, I think Celtic and Hittite both represent Gomerite, and may have been similar before mutual loans, then you have Illyrian, Thracian, Dacian just above Greek and Luwian, meaning, there are bridges to later Sprachbünder. Diverse Fenno-Ugrian may have on occasion been involved in some of them, explaining why Phrygian and Germanic share Grimm's law with Hungarian and Etruscan, explaining why Finnish has so close endings to Indo-European in the conjugation, explaining why Germanic has a tense system closer to Finnish than to Greek ...

So this is the hunch on which I think Indo-European languages or branches can have :

• become Indo-Europeanised though originally diverse;
• in a shorter time than the one one would expect for a common ancestor language to diversify even more, since common vocabulary is less than 50 % for any language.

I have written more on it elsewhere, here was a short one, where the dates given are one supplementary indication:

• 3200 BC is before the Flood except in Syncellus, a date when everyone still spoke some version of Hebrew;
• 8100 BC is before Creation, a date not existing.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Pope St. Marcellus
16.I.2019

PS, hat tip to Florian Blaschke for linking to an article which linked to above mentioned./HGL

PPS, as I mentioned 50 % identic vocabulary Swedish / German, the percent is much higher between Romance languages, at least those of the West (perhaps a bit lower between these and Romanian). French - Portuguese seem to have lexical similarity coefficient 0.75, same as with French - Romanian, while Portuguese Romanian is down at 0.72. Swedish isn't listed. German / English is at 0.60, while, across "branches" German / French is 0.29, English / French is 0.27, English / Russian is 0.24. All this according to item Indo-European Languages on article Lexical similarity.

Wikipedia : Lexical similarity : Indo-European languages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity#Indo-European_languages

Note that for German and French, English and French, and therefore probably also for Russian and English, the lexical similarity is not restricted to common inheritance from Indo-European. English has been Frenchified after Norman Conquest, English has not so much influenced French, but French and German have mutually done so "across the Rhine" meaning that some of the English French similarity is not just due to French loan words into English but also German ones into French having English cognates. As for Russian and English, part is probably due to both accepting lots of loans from French./HGL