On 2008-10-09 19:13, kishore patnaik wrote:
> why should he be present in Non IIr at all? in fact, why should be
> present in non Indic scenario? If OIT is the truth, then he has no
> business to be present anywhere except in India.
Well, why do Dyaus and Ushas have external cognates, then? And don't
tell me about buses. For very good formal reasons, Lat. auro:ra or Gk.
eo:s can't be loans from India, and Skt. us.as- can't be a loan from the
west.
> To start with, try to condemn my arguments that a) Varuna is old b)
> he had prominence and then a decline
You _assume_ (a) and (b) rather than prove it.
> c) he is not present anywhere
> except india (and of course, Mitanni)
He _might_ be present in Iranian and Greek. If he is present _just_ in
Indic, he's a local god, not present in the distant common ancestor of
Indic and the rest of IE.
> On the other hand, you have not given any proof (atleast give the
> basics why it is assumed, since I agree I am ignorant) to your
> instict that wider distribution in PIE means an older word.
>
> After 5000 years, if they look at the languages, word " Bus" (there
> is no Indian equivalent word for this) may be more widely
> publicised than Varuna By your theorem, bus becomes older than Varuna.
We can, in principle, distinguish true cognates (independent descendants
of a common ancestors) from loans and "travelling words" (like <bus>).
You can only connect, say, Lat. auro:ra with Skt. us.as- if you start
with a PIE word and apply two different sequences of changes to it --
one reflecting the history Latin; the other, the independent history of
Sanskrit.
Words like <bus> behave differently. For example, <bus> has an initial
/b/ in English, but no initial /f/ in French, which would be the case if
Eng. bus and Fr. bus had a distant common ancestor, because Eng. b- can
only reflect PIE *bH-, which in turn yields Skt. bH-, Gk. pH-, Latin and
Romance f-, etc. This regular correspondence (not obeyed by <bus>) can
be seen e.g. in Eng. brother : Fr. frère (< Lat. fra:ter) : Skt. bHra:tar-.
Varuna _could_ of course be extremely old (and, say, lost in all
branches of IE except IIr. or even the Indic subbranch alone), but there
is no compelling reason to believe that. As far as the available
_evidence_ goes, there's nothing to guarantee its PIE status. Varuna
could also be _locally_ old, and added to the Proto-Indic pantheon as an
originally foreign deity, but if anything, that speaks against OIT, not
in favour of it.
Piotr