--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>
> ----- 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.
I appreciate that. At least he does not appear (maybe I've missed it)
to be defending the high chronology of the Rgveda, which Witzel goes
to town on. It's just that the hypothesis of multiple waves strikes
me as an unnecessary complication of a simple notion, so I wonder
whether he has had a good reason for it or whether the idea ultimately
comes from the same way of thinking as sees successive waves of
Q-Celtic and P-Celtic coming into the British Isles.
> > 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_?
I agree, this doesn't seem to be supported by the archaeological
evidence. But I was thinking of the purely linguistic arguments.
Even under the conventional AIT theories, with a non-Anatolian
dispersion centre somewhere in the Balkans or the Ukraine, why
couldn't there once have been a dialect continuum extending from India
to Western Europe?
Incidentally, why do the Anatolians need to have 'stayed behind in the
Balkans', rather than having stayed behind in Western Anatolia? I
presume there are arguments other than membership of gLeN's Steppe
family, but I don't know what they are.
> 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).
Geographically, it would help to have Getic/Dacian, possibly even
Thracian, in the Greek-Indo-Iranian-Armenian Sprachbund. Does this
sprachbund have a shorter name?
Slovenian and Bulgarian are in the South Slavic dialect continuum, but
Slovenian is not in the Balkan Sprachbund.
> 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.
How far East would you allow pre-Indic Proto-Indo-Iranian to go before
the sprachbund broke up? (No, I don't hope for a precise answer.)
Richard.