Johanna,
Common Indo-European generally refers, as you suggest, to a the stage right before the "European explosion," that is, the sudden differentiation into Baltic, Slavic, Italic, Armenian, Greek, Albanian, Celtic, and Germanic, after Anatolian had split off. Whether Tokharian split off before this stage or as part of it isn't clear. There is, though, some very interesting computational cladistic work by Don Ringe at Penn that suggests that Tokharian split off shortly after Anatolian and before the rest. You can find one of the papers at http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/Papers/NWREpaper.pdf.
There is general agreement that this was the order of the splitting. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, in some groundbreaking work in the 70s and in their Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, translated from Russian by Johanna Nichols around 1995, propose a homeland near the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, which would work nicely for Anatolian and for a lot of early IE borrowings from non-IE languages. Then the rest of PIE moved up to the steppe and became what is now called the Kurgan culture, before it broke up into the European dialects. Indo-Iranian probably split off from the steppe culture too, although it might have bee earlier. Malory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans has an excellent review of the problems and hypotheses.
The idea is not so much that Anatolian had a different parent but rather that Anatolian simply split off earliest. The sound correspondence and sound change evidence is really pretty strong, and it would account for the fact that while Anatolian preserves segmental reflexes of the PIE laryngeals, the rest of IE has lost them, except for traces in their efects on neighboring segments.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Johanna Rubba
Sent: Sun 9/17/2006 12:28 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Textbook for My History of the English Language Course
Herb,
I've noticed that recently people have started referring to "Common
Indo-European" instead of "Proto-Indo-European". Apparently, there's a
theory around that the Anatolian branch of IE had a different parent
language than most of the other IE families; I've also read about a
proposal of "primary" vs. "secondary" homelands, with one likely in
roughly the place that the original IE homeland was proposed, in Europe
somewhere rather than in Anatolia or the Caucusus. Do you know anything
about this? (I'm sure you read up on this in your spare time -- ;-) )
Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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