Re: dating of aryans

On 2008-04-09 11:50, Kishore patnaik wrote:

> The contradictory proposals that IE were wandering nomads and yet were
> held to have originated from a specific abode,

Who claims the speakers of PIE were "wandering nomads"? Judging from
their vocabulary, they had a mixed economy: some were sedentary farmers,
others were transhumant pastoralists, and they all were probably capable
of adjusting their mode of subsistence to various local conditions.
Classic nomadic pastoralism (as practised by the Scythians or more
recently by various Turkic and Mongolic ethnic groups) is a fairly late
development.

> and that they were primitive tribesmen

Another straw man. What's a "primitive tribesman" and who claims that
the IE-speakers belonged to this category?

> and yet were able to formulate and utilize a
> language as intricate and complex as Indo European is a fallacy at
> best.

People don't "formulate" their language. They simply inherit it from the
previous generations. They don't make it complex deliberately.
Linguistic complexity evolved spontaneously long before PIE, presumably
scores of millennia ago. The languages of the mesolithic societies that
have survived into modern times are as complex as anything, and any
child who doesn't suffer from a mental deficiency is able to acquire any
human language, no matter how complex it is grammatically.

> In India, they could rise to an Identification system that
> very scientifically prohibits endogamy, proving that the population
> available is quite large and does not indicate a small tribe. Kosambi
> and others clearly derived that Gotra is pre varna. In other words,
> the migrations if any should have left a large trial of
> archaeological finds . What is more fantastic that in every case,
> the IE was the substratum totally eradicating the ethnic culture
> almost without a trace.

I simply don't follow your argument. Could you please develop it a little?

> While the major branches of the main trunk of proto IE gathered
> strength , looked healthy and spread far and wide, the latter , at
> the same time, withered, shriveled and failed to show any indication
> of life and vitality and disappeared from sight and was lost for ever
> without leaving any trace or mark that might lead to its
> identification, nor could any fossil remains of it be detected or
> found out , so that it could be inferred that such a society in such a
> stage of development existed at one time, on the surface of the earth.

What "main trunk" withered and shrivelled? The first groups to branch
off were in all likelihood Anatolian and Tocharian -- both dead for a
long time now; then the remaining "trunk" split into several branches,
most of which are still very much alive. There was no "main trunk" left
after those splits.

> The old Romantists have given rise to the racial theories as well as
> the diffusion of Aryans from one specific area, other than India.
> While the racial theories that have been developed from these old
> beliefs were effectively refuted, since they do not fit into the
> western beliefs- especially since hold these theories in terror , post
> world wars, the linguistic theories giving rise to the AIT has been
> kept alive.

A straw man once again. Language is one thing, "race" is another. IE is
a linguistic concept, not a biological one. There are no IE genes.

> The liturgical, archaeological or proof from the traditions do not
> support such diffusion. The only proof that is there is the
> linguistics. But how this is reliable>?

Very reliable, especially when compared with "liturgical" or
"traditional" evidence.

> In fact, there is evidence to prove that the laws of linguistics tree
> and borrowings were formulated mostly based on Rg Vedic geography.

What? Why this parochial obsession with the Rgveda and its geography? IE
is much more than Indo-Aryan. *Much* more. The history of the
Indo-Aryans is just one small episode in the much larger and longer
history of Indo-European dispersal and differentiation. You would
probably think that I'm a nut case if all my arguments revolved round
Poland, the Polish language and the autochthony of the Poles, as if my
country were the centre of the Universe.

> The Europeans have believed that , post Indus valley, the Aryans have
> migrated from West to East. Thus, the language in the books
> pertaining to East is thought to be more modern than those involving
> the Western area geography.(such as Punjab)
>
> These beliefs are incorporated into linguistics- the language of the
> books of west is archaic compared to that in the books of east.
> Accordingly, the three laws of linguistics are framed and based on
> this, the AIT is kept alive till today.

I've been a linguist for about twenty years, but I've never heard of
"the three laws of linguistics". What are they?

> In other words, if Europeans believed that there was no AIT and the
> diffusions of Aryans is from east to west, then the stratification
> of RV books would have acquired an exact reverse order. Thus, the
> laws of linguistics which have followed these beliefs would have
> exactly the results opposite what they are giving today. There is
> not one single proof or method which can condemn this statement and
> can give an objective tree of linguistic follow up.

Again, I can't make any sense of what you are saying. Could you please
rephrase it?

> In any case, it is weird that the Europeans still blindly follow the
> Biblical chronology and the philological remnants of Romantics.

The final straw man. Do you mean Europeans still believe that the word
was created in a week some 6000 years ago, that there was a fresh start
even more recently, after Noah's Flood, and that languages began to
differentiate as a result of the Tower of Babel incident? If not, what
the heck do you mean by "Biblical chronology"?

Piotr