Re: The Pontic Indics

From: George Hinge
Message: 37207
Date: 2005-04-15

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:
> And while we're talking about Iranians and Thrakoids
> in the Scythian bow area, let's not forget those
> always forgotten Pontic Indo-Aryans, who were
> scattered about from the southern Boh(g) /Hypanis/ to
> the Don and Kuban, and in the Crimea too. What's the
> story with their "a" developments? My sources tend to
> ignore them, and I don't have Trubachov at hand.
>

Trubachevs Indo-Aryan hypothesis (cf. Indoarica v Severnom
Pric^ernomor'e, Moscow 1999) is interesting, but I am not convinced,
sice the etymologies proposed for different Scythian names are
arbitrary. This is a permanent methodological problem in the
discussions of etymologies of toponyms in prehistoric languages.
Since, say, a rivername may mean anything, anything goes.

Even if we accept that certain toponyms retain Indo-European s (=
Iranian h), it need not be specifically Indic, since it is an
archaism, and shared archaisms cannot be used as evidence in
cladistics.
One possible scenario is that the Indo-Iranian diealcts formed a
continuum in the 2nd millennium BC, and that the Iranian subbranch is
a phenomenon of the 1st millennium. The peculiar linguistic
innovations of Iranian (e.g. *s > *h; *bh, *dh, *gh > *b, *d, *g)
were diffused throughout that continuum as the marker of a new
identity, but there may very well have been linguistic pockets of
imperfect Iranisation, especially at the edges.