----- Original Message
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Sent: Friday, August
30, 2002 1:10 PM
Subject: [tied] Re:
Bangani
>> Indo-Aryan was the dominant
language of the area; a relatively small Centum-speaking population was absorbed
and so was some of its vocabulary.
> This fits the Out of India Theory (OIT) nicely ...
I don't think it fits the OIT more than it
fits any other homeland theory. What we know (provided that the
Bangani substrate does not turn out to be an illusion) is that an isolated
Centum language was probably spoken in that area until rather recently (note
that this substrate is a local phenomenon, and that languages closely related to
Bangani show no Centum loans; the Aryanisation of the Western Himalayas began, I
think, about the eleventh century, and was a long process). The survival of
relict languages in the Himalayas and the adjacent highlands is scarcely
surprising, given the local conditions. Burushaski and the Nuristani languages
are extant examples, and there were certainly more of them before the Tibetan
and Indo-Aryan languages wiped them out (one example is Kusunda, an isolate of
the Central Himalayas, which became extinct very recently).
My opinion is that as the Satem innovation
spread in the eastern part of "Indo-Europia", it left a residue of isolated
Centum dialects in the east: the "Hellenoid" languages (Greek, Macedonian,
Phrygian) close to the Euxine, the Tocharian languages on the easternmost
fringe, plus God knows what else.
> The Germanic invaders of France
switched to Romance, which was the dominant language of the area. But
don't we regard the Germanic stratum in French as a superstrate rather than a
substrate? ... <snip> ... These examples made me wonder whether the Centum
element in Bangani was a superstrate or a substrate, or perhaps
neither.
I used the word "substrate"
in its OED sense:
[Substratum 5.] Linguistics. Elements or
features of a language which are identified by linguists as being relics of, or
due to the influence of, an earlier extinct language, usually of the same
region.
But the terms "substrate" and "superstrate"
are often used in a rather different meaning in discussions of the relative
social status of languages in contact situations. I regret this confusion - we
are still badly in want of precise terminology.
Piotr