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These cases indicate that a sufficiently early split shows up along more than one trajectory, and it follows that any development within the PIE locu… - Johanna Nichols
" "These cases indicate that a sufficiently early split shows up along more than one trajectory, and it follows that any development within the PIE locus should be evident along all three trajectories. This is precisely what happens with the centum-satem division.... In view of its attestation along all three trajectories, the centum-satem split must have arisen in the eastern part of the range, in or near the locus. ... Since in the west the satem languages are the later entrants wherever the chronology is clear, and the frontier languages are centum, the satem side of the isogloss must have been to the east. Since satem languages are most numerous in the south, while centum languages predominate in the north and the centum language Tocharian appears far to the east of the locus as well as somewhat to the north, the satem side of the isogloss must have lain not just to the east but specifically to the southeast.... Since the centum-satem division is visible along all three trajectories, it arose in or near the locus after the spread began and spread outward after the centum languages had begun to spread.
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About Johanna Nichols
Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is a linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her PhD in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 with a dissertation entitled, "The Balto-Slavic predicate instrumental: a problem in diachronic syntax."
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Prior to the Iranian expansion, in the early Bronze Age, IE spread to cover the entire steppe and the Danube plain (and subsequently all of Europe), with substantial speech communities also in Anatolia (Hittite and congeners) and northern Mesopotamia (surviving in Armenian) and, in all probability, coverage of much or all of western central Asia (probably by ancestral Indo-Iranian). What is historically attested of the IE spread fits closely the pattern followed later by Iranian, Turkic, and Mongolian.
Prior to the Turkic expansion, at the beginning of the Iron Age, Iranian spread from somewhere in the vicinity of Bactria, Sogdiana, and the eastern steppe to cover most or all of western central Asia and the entire steppe, much of the Near East at least to eastern Anatolia, and, at least intermittently, the Danube plain, where Slavic vocabulary and ethnonyms attest to a major Iranianization at about the fifth century AD, and where there is good archaeological evidence of a Scythian presence in the mid-first millennium BC...
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The vast interior of Eurasia is a linguistic spread zone—a genetic and typological bottleneck where many genetic lines go extinct, structural types tend to converge, a single language or language family spreads out over a broad territorial range, and one language family replaces another over a large range every few millennia. The linguistic geography of the central and western grasslands, from at least the Neolithic until early modern times, has consisted of an overall westward trajectory of language spreads... The central Eurasian spread zone... was part of a standing pattern whereby languages were drawn into the spread zone, spread westward, and were eventually succeeded by the next spreading family.
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