[tied] Re: "Will the 'real' linguist please stand up?"

From: S.Kalyanaraman
Message: 18977
Date: 2003-02-21

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:> They don't. "Proto-Indo-Aryan" =
the common ancestor of all Indo-Aryan languages (including Vedic,
Sanskrit and all the Prakrits). "Pre-Vedic Indic" = any stage in the
development of Indo-Aryan more ancient than Vedic. "Pre-Indo-Aryan
substrate" = any ancient NON-Indo-Aryan language of India replaced
or absorbed by Indo-Aryan...> PIE is accessible indirectly via its
(very numerous and well-documented) offspring. The old pre-Aryan
languages of India have died out leaving only substratal traces in
Indo-Aryan. They cannot be reconstructed from such data, though some
useful information about their structure and vocabulary can be
extracted from loanword studies. That's all until somebody cracks
the Indus Valley writing system.

Thanks, again, Piotr. The air is clearing.

I assume that the type of work done by FBJ Kuiper (1991, Aryans in
the Rigveda, Amsterdam, Rodopi) is an attempt at identifying what
you call substratal traces. He suggests that about 6 to 9 percent of
Rigvedic words are loans from non-Indo-aryan languages. Ain't they a
lot? If such words have also been found in some of the Prakrit
lexicons (say, Hemacandra des'ina_mama_la_), treating them as
offspring from Pre-Indo-Aryan substrate -- PIAS), can't some
progress be made?

How to deal with the isolates such as Nahali and Burushaski? How
about Baluchi and other Bal dialects?

Are you suggesting that linguistic studies on PIAS are at a dead-end
without cracking the IV writing system?