From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 17095
Date: 2002-12-10
----- Original Message -----
From: <richard.wordingham@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2002 1:57 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Does Koenraad Elst Meet Hock´s Challenge?
> Why does the hypothesis of an Indian homeland require multiple waves
> of emigrants?
That's Elst's scenario. One wave leaves the homeland, innovations take place, another wave leaves, etc.
> On purely linguistic grounds, why can't what we see
> just be a reflection of how a vast dialect continuum broke up?
How vast? I don't believe in a dialect continnum extending from India to Western Europe, unless the growth of IE was really explosive (let's call it "the superinflatory model"). But what would the mechanism have been? A massive Indian conquest, "Aryanising" half of Eurasia in no time at all? Where's the archaeological evidence of _that_? Judging from the distribution of diffused areal features, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Armenian and perhaps even Albanian must have been close to one another at a certain point. Judging from shared developments like the Satem shift and the RUKI rule, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian separated relatively late (whereupon Indo-Iranian became a member of the Sprachbund mentioned above). All this is _much_ easier to imagine with Proto-Indo-Iranian in the steppes; such a scenario requires only a small number of plausible moves.
Piotr