Revisiting Indo-European as Sprachbund

Question: Is there any evidence of linguistic contact between Sanskrit and Latin?
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-evidence-of-linguistic-contact-between-Sanskrit-and-Latin/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl-2

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Studied Latin (language) at Lund University

20.VIII.2026

You are asking about areal phenomenon, no?

Sanskrit may well have started around the first areal connection in Indo-European linguistics, namely the one with Hittite (and other Anatolian) with Mitanni-”Sanskrit” to the East and Mycenaean Greek to the West. Note that in Mycenean Greek, “tis” was still “quis” as we later see it in Latin. And “pente” was “penque” which is close to Latin “quinque”.

THEN there is another areal connection, around the Terramare culture, where Mycenaean Greek actually is involved in the North of Italy, not very far from where later Latin emerged in writing.

So, supposing we take linguistic contact instead of common origin, it would look like this:

• Mycenaean Greek, Hittite / Palaic / Luwian, Mitanni-Aryan are the original Sprachbund, West and East of the Aegean
  
  
  • Mitanni-Aryan moves East and becomes Old Persian and Sanskrit
  • Mycenaean Greek partly moves West and influences Latin to the South and Germanic and Celtic languages to the North
  
  
  
• Balto-Slavic and Armenian are influenced by Persian from the East and Celto-Germanic from the West.

PS, I actually forgot, but a daughter language of Mycenaean Greek, namely koiné, was present in both Bactria and India before our earliest written texts in Sanskrit. Probably not too much of an influence in linguistics, but Greek epics may have influenced the Mahabharata as we have it.