From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 17078
Date: 2002-12-09
----- Original Message -----
From: "Juha Savolainen" <juhavs@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, December 08, 2002 10:19 PM
Subject: [tied] Does Koenraad Elst Meet Hock´s Challenge?
> Hi everybody (and apologies for the lenght of my
> post),
...
> Now, my questions to all Indo-Europeanists are as
> follows: (a) has Elst succeeded in meeting Hock´s
> challenge and (b) what are the chances for an
> indigenist/out-of-India resolution for the problem of
> Indo-European dispersal, as far as the linguistic
> evidence is concerned?
Hi, Juha and everybody,
My opinion is that, although Elst raises some very reasonable questions about areal convergence versus shared inheritance, his own argument doesn't hold water. In other words, either Hock's objections fully apply, ruling out an Indian homeland, or Elst's model of relationships within IE is correct, but that rules out India as well, and here's why:-
If we accept that some of the shared traits of IE branches (in particular some of those discussed by Hock) are inherited common innovations rather than areally diffused features (and I would argue that some of them, including the Satem shift, are real synapomorphies), Indic must be treated as a rather highly "derived" taxon within IE. In plainer English, it is nested in Indo-Iranian, which is nested in Satem (there might be one or two intermediate nodes as well), which is nested in non-Anatolian IE, which is nested in IE. This holds if the orthodox version of the IE family tree is properly rooted; but as far as I can see Elst agrees that it is, and that an alternative rooting hypothesis such as Misra's, with Sanskrit as the most basal member of the family, is untenable.
If so, we have the following alternative: either there was a single migration of Indic-speakers into India, or there were many migrations out of India along roughly the same Central Asian trail, each of them but the last (Iranian) followed by the development of fresh linguistic innovations in the Indian homeland, to be carried away by the next migration. No fewer than four of those waves -- Italo-Celto-Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian (+ Thracian and Getic?), and Greek -- ended up in Europe, making it in effect more thoroughly IEised than India has ever been!
Elst does not explain why the IEs found Europe, of all places, so irresistibly attractive; or why they did not migrate into southeast Asia, Arabia or anywhere else except along the route usually believed to have been followed by the Aryas travelling in the opposite direction. Wave after wave of IE migrants supposedly went down that road over the centuries to a secondary dispersal centre (somewhere in the Pontic steppes?), and thence in various directions, but mostly westwards. This unaccounted-for migrational conspiracy is implausible and flaws the whole scenario independently of any further linguistic arguments.
I discussed the problematic aspects of such a wave-after-wave scenario on Cybalist some time ago, but the relevant postings may be difficult to recover unless the archive becomes searchable again. Suffice it to say that those who object to an Indo-Aryan migration into India on the grounds that it left few archaeological traces should a fortiori object to _numerous_ archaeologically invisible migrations out of India.
I want to emphasise that what militates against an Indian homeland India is the internal structure of IE and the historically attested geographical configuration of related branches -- _not_ the location of India, which would not be an obstacle per se. It can't be demanded a priori that the protolanguage homeland should be located near to the "centre of gravity" of the family in question. A peripherally located homeland is what we have in the case of Austronesian, for example. But there it was a number of _basal_ branches (the "Formosan" groups) that remained at home, while speakers of a single subbranch (or rather an infrasubbranch) of one of them, Malayo-Polynesian, migrated out of the island and their language eventually expanded into a vast linguistic clade. There's no conspiracy or mysteriously concerted movement in that case -- just a single successful glottogenetic event.
Piotr