Re: beyond langauges

> Indo-Aryan' refers to a *family* of languages. Of course
> > this family has representatives from different periods.
>
> That is not how the family tree model works. Every stage is given a
> new name. For example, IIr branches into Indo-Aryan and Ir. If there
> was an earlier stage of IA it must be given a different name.
>
> If an argument is advanced that aika>eka then they BOTH cannot be from
> the same language or even the same family of langauges.
>

That's true. Strictly speaking we must either assume either

1) that the Proto-IIr word was *aika and assume that Iranian replaced
that with aiwa, or

2) we must interject a common ancestor to Indo-Aryan and the Mitanni
glosses, in which the word was aika, as you point out

Mostly for practical reasons, linguist have chose option 1), since it
seems like a lot of terminological trouble to define a new stage to
accommodate a few few words in Mitanni. It's true that that entails
elevating aika to the status of proto-IIr, although we have no way of
determining whether that's true, whether it was PIIr *aika or *aiwa.


Torsten