Re: dating of aryans

From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
Message: 57091
Date: 2008-04-09

On Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:54:07 +0200, Piotr Gasiorowski
<gpiotr@...> wrote:

>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

For an example of phonological complexity in a "Bushman"
language, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ju%C7%80%CA%BChoan_language

Note that the grammar of most Khoisan languages is as
intricate and complex as the phonology.

Kishore, your notion that "primitive tribesmen" should not
be capable of speaking "intricate and complex" languages is
sooooo 1800's...

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
miguelc@...