--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:
> [I had written:]
>
> > I am personally among those who think that the Rigvedic Aryans
> > were not familiar with the ocean because their settlement areas
> > (the Greater Panjab, including parts of Afghanistan) were very
> > far from the nearest seashore.
>
> A legitimate consideration. But do you believe PIE originated in
> Turkey? If it did, oceans would have been familiar from the earliest
> times.
No, Patrick, I don't believe PIE originated in Turkey. The best
solution to the problem of the PIE homeland is, in my layman's
opinion, to place it in the Pontic-Caspian region.
I don't believe that the speakers of Proto-Indo-Iranian were familiar
with the sea. Maybe the Caspian shores, or the Sea of Aral, but
certainly not oceans. By the way, I didn't know that Turkey is
surrounded by an ocean! :^)
Varun.a is attested only in the Indo-Aryan sub-branch of Indo-Iranian,
whose ancestral speakers, I assume, lived in the land-locked regions
of Central Asia (the steppe lands of the Andronovo cultural horizon).
They knew of no sea-god, and Varun.a, indeed, isn't originally a sea-
god.
Regards,
Francesco