--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "kishore patnaik"
<kishorepatnaik09@...> wrote:
> >
> > Several decades ago an Indo-Aryan group was found to have
> > settled in the kingdom of the Mitanni, roughly the upper
> > regions of the Euphrates now within the borders of Syria.
>
> No such settlement was found.
It doesn't say that a settlement was found, only that they
were "found to have settled", which you seem not to dispute
yourself on any other occasion that you write about Mitanni.
Do you now claim that no Indo-Aryans ever entered Mitanni?
> > The key point is that the linguistic clues suggested an
> > Indo-Aryan association, not an Iranian one.
I've seen you insisting on this same point yourself several
times now, though, with cybalist, unnecessarily, since none
on this list, to my awareness, claims that the traces left
in Mitanni were Iranian or Proto-Indo-Iranian.
> > When you explain this to a lay audience often the first
> > response is that someone how a group of Aryans traversed
> > Persia from their homeland in the upper Indus valley and
> > settled in Syria. But there are problems with this
> > hypothesis, because the linguistic fragments show no evidence
> > of familiarity with terms that are distinctive to Indo-Aryan
> > due to the encountering of objects and creatures local to
> > India. To top it off, the Mitanni dialect exhibits archaisms
> > that suggest it predates the Sanskrit variant of Indo-Aryan
> > found in the Rig Veda. This is plausible since the Mitanni
> > tablets date from 1600-1500 BCE, and at this point the Indo-
> > Aryan dialect was likely used for ritual or formalistic
> > purposes and so preserved a more ancient manner of speech.2
> > The Rig Veda was certainly fixed after 1500 BCE, though before
> > 1000 BCE, and its language was a living tongue which was still
> > evolving.
>
> The circular logic is clear in this article.
No, the problem is that you don't correctly understand the
article, which isn't intended as an argument for P.I.E. or
for Indo-Aryan originating outside of India, as you seem
to imagine it is. Rather, it takes those items as fact and
proceeds from there to try to explain them to lay readers,
as well as to make a point of its own about an incongruity
in the received nomenclature.
> The key problem is that the Aryan elements found in Mitanni are
> purely Indic with no traces of Iranian or proto IIr found in them.
You don't understand the term 'Indo-Iranian'. We neither
need nor expect to find traces of Iranian in an Indo-Aryan
language in order for it to be Indo-Iranian.
Anything Indo-Aryan is, by definition, also Indo-Iranian.
Indo-Iranian is an overarching category that encompasses
Indo-Aryan and Iranian both.
> ie a distinct Indian Aryan language was formed before the
> historians would agree that Indic aryans entered India.
No, an Indo-Aryan language was formed, not an Indian one.
The fact that the received nomenclature can lead to just
such confusion as yours is one of the very points of the
article.
> This would go against the theory that there is a proto IIr
> branching off to Iranian and Indic paths before the Aryans
> entered the subcontinent.
Only if one misunderstands the actual basis of the term
'Indo-Aryan', as you have done yourself.
We don't call the Indo-Iranian language that left traces
in Mitanni 'Indo-Aryan' because we believe it came from
India, but only because it belongs to the same family as
Sanskrit, Vedic, the Prakrits, etc., as is shown by its
actual linguistic features, and that family had already
been given the name 'Indo-Aryan' when Indo-Iranian loans
in Mitanni were first noticed.
If we had noticed the traces in Mitanni first, or at the
same time we began categorizing Sanskrit and its relatives,
we might never have given the family the name 'Indo-Aryan'
in the first place, and I wonder myself if it wouldn't be
a good idea to change that name now, along with much of the
rest of the received terminology.
> in fact, the very thesis that there is a proto language has
> emanated because of the similarities of languages and even
> today, the only evidence that points to the common origin is
> purely linguistic.
Which is the only kind of evidence that matters and the
only kind needed for such a determination.
If we found evidence for Sanskrit nowhere else besides
the Planet Mars, and evidence for Avestan nowhere besides
Venus, we would still conclude that they'd split from a
common ancestor, we would _have_ to say so, because that
is what the languages themselves tell us. It has nothing
at all to do with geography and it never has.
> With the above paragraph, even this evidence seems to be
> destroyed and there is no common language called IIr. The
> following solution is nonsense anyway and just trying to
> fit the circumstances, so as to keep the common origin
> theory of all IE' alive. Frankly, i think PIE is finished.
Frankly, such statements show how profoundly uninformed
you are about the whole topic.
At this point in time the existence of P.I.E. is proven
beyond all doubt, and that would be so even if Sanskrit
and Avestan themselves were unknown, not to mention the
far less important traces left in Mitanni. Indo-European
encompasses more than just Indo-Iranian, and would still
stand as a valid category even if your claims here about
Indo-Iranian were to be accepted, Kishore.
> However, the last point (no 4) is interesting The IA were
> autochthonous to the entire subcontinent including Iran.
The subcontinent doesn't include Iran, though the article
doesn't actually say that Aryans were autochthonous there
either. What it says is that the earliest trace of Aryans
is likely the Andronovo archaeological complex, which was
not found in Iran or the subcontinent either one.
What the mainstream theory says is that the Aryans divided,
naturally, into sub-branches, of which the Iranian, Indo-
Aryan, and Kafiri are the only to survive, with members of
the Indo-Aryan branch being the first to expand out of the
homeland in Central Asia onto the Iranian plateau, while
other Indo-Aryans moved in the direction of Afghanistan and
India. Later another wave of Aryans from the homeland in
Central Asia, this time of the Iranian branch, is supposed
to have arrived on the plateau, and eventually completely
absorbed or displaced the Indo-Aryans already there. Some
time after Indo-Aryans reached the Iranian plateau, members
of another branch of Indo-Aryan arrived in the subcontinent.
> Rajesh Kochchar gets confused
You haven't proven that Kochchar was confused, have you?
> only because of this and tries to fix the homeland of RV vedics
> at Afghanistan . The persians (Iranian speaking) have come to
> Iran at a later time, super stratifying the ethnic Indo Aryans,
> who are as attested by Mitanis , daiva worshipers.. t This is
> supported by two factors:
It's supported, and I hope widely accepted, that there were
Indo-Aryans on the Iranian plateau before the Iranian Aryans
came, but it's not supported by your two factors, but rather
by sound scholarship of a sort you haven't yet read yourself.
However, again, by 'Indo-Aryan' we don't mean to imply that
the Indo-Aryan traces found on the plateau were brought by
people from India.
> 1. The Iranians talk of an Original Home land. The Indic aryans
> have no such concept . For all practical purposes, they are
> autochthonous to the subcontinent. Hence, the Iranians are
> immigrants whereas the Indo Aryans are not. The similarities are
> mostly borrowings.
You're not qualified to say to what the similarities are
due, Kishore, and they most definitely cannot be due to
borrowing. They go right down, in fact, to the "bones"
of the languages, including their pronouns, inflectional
endings and paradigms, including which roots belong to
which paradigm, phonological systems, etc., which are the
last features to be borrowed by one language from another.
The first features to be borrowed are usually nouns, and
naturally just those names of new items for which the
borrowers don't already have words of their own, and the
number of words that can be shown to have been borrowed
by Indo-Aryan from Iranian, or vice versa, isn't all that
large, so there's just no justification to claim as you do.
It's clear, from actual _linguistic_ analysis of Avestan
and Vedic that they are closely related and hence split
from a common ancestor not too not many centuries before
they were first attested.
> 2.the iranians were superstratem in the area - converting or
> killing all the Daiva worshippers. all over Iran and Afganistan.
No, Iranians on the plateau had already absorbed or displaced
the Indo-Aryans they found there, or at least the majority of
them, before Zoroaster's religion began to spread among them.
The earliest Iranians were daiva-worshippers no less than the
first Indo-Aryans.
> > The "solution" to this mystery is rather simple, it seems
> > likely that both the Iranian and Indian Aryans derived from
> > what is termed the Andronovo Cultural Complex
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andronovo_culture, which existed
> > in the late Bronze Age around the Caspian steppe and further
> > east into northern Central Asia. When the original Indo-
> > Iranians dispersed from this region it is likely that they
> > spread out in multiple directions, and there was already some
> > differentiation between the "Indo"-Aryan and Iranian tribes
> > prior to this dispersal.3 Some of the Indo-Aryan groups settled
> > in India, and gave rise to the languages spoke by 3/4 of modern
> > Indians. Others seem to have become absorbed into the milieu
> > of the Middle Eastern cultures, disappearing from history. The
> > Iranian speaking groups eventually dominated the Persia plateau
> > as well as the Central Asian river valleys, but, some of them
> > also migrated to the steppes to the north of the Black Sea and
> > further west.
- edit -
The article you found online and quoted is, at long last,
a very good and accurate one, and with all the nonsensical
stuff that you've come across online and been swayed by,
Kishore, it's ironic that an article like this is what you
choose to dispute.
> Please correct the terminology in my post.
Well you seem not to be aware of the subcategorization of
'Indo-Aryan' under 'Indo-Iranian', but which I hope I've
made clear now, and you also seem to think it necessary
to stress that the Indo-Iranian traces in Mitanni weren't
brought by Iranians, but which nobody on cybalist, to my
knowledge, has ever claimed.
David