From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 17102
Date: 2002-12-10
----- Original Message -----
From: <richard.wordingham@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2002 9:14 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Does Koenraad Elst Meet Hock´s Challenge?
> 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?
With "Graeco-Aryan" innovations managing to spread along a belt of dialects from the Balkans through the Pontic steppes, Armenia and Central Asia all the way into India? With Proto-Indo-Iranian covering a vast area from Russia to India and developing a bundle of shared innovations all over it? With the RUKI change occurring over an even wider range? The scale just doesn't feel right. Extralinguistic factors cannot be ignored here, since pure linguistics tells us nothing about dialect geography in the real world.
> 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.
Overall parsimony, and a better-constrained model. The expansion of the LBK carriers into Central and Norhern Europe about 5500 BC produced a relatively homogeneous area that was increasingly different from any stay-behind LBK groups and their descendants. That corresponds rather nicely to the primary linguistic split into (Proto-)Anatolian and "the Rest" (there's no accepted name for such an important taxon!). We don't have to go beyond LBK to account for the initial dispersal of IE.
> 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?
I don't think it has a name, but what about "the (North) Pontic Sprachbund"? Its original range may have been just that, roughly from the Danube delta and the northeastern Carpathians to the Pontic steppes.
> 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.)
Nor can I give one. I think it finally broke up towards the end of the third millennium BC, and the eastward expansion of the Indo-Iranian component towards the Central Asian steppes and the west Sibarian Plain was one of the reasons why the areal links were severed.
Piotr