Breaking the Circular Dating Loop: Proto-Indo-European as a Field Invariant and the Structural Dating of Sanskrit

Indo-European linguistics has long relied on a circular dating loop: Proto-Indo-European (PIE)dates anchor Indo-Iranian split estimates, which in turn date Sanskrit, which then validates PIEreconstruction. This paper demonstrates that this circularity is logically invalid and methodologicallyunsound. By reclassifying PIE as a field invariant—a constraint set abstractedfrom preserved structure rather than a temporally prior spoken language—the cycle is broken.Sanskrit’s dating becomes structurally determined by its role as an anchor register, independentof genealogical splits. This resolution eliminates circularity, provides a logically consistentframework for Indo-European chronology, and reveals that conventional Sanskrit dating (∼1500BCE) is methodologically invalid