Thank you, Torsten,
I take back It was the mention of von
Däniken and of that alarmed me. It's true I haven't read Oppenheimer's
book, though I know it from reviews. I gather it does have a "New Agey" flavour,
with its romantic narratives, references to Noah, Atlantis and the wisdom of
village elders -- the kind of stuff calculated to satisfy the emotional needs of
the popular reader. The author's desire to arrive at a one-shot universal
explanation for about everything is also more characteristic of a popular
publication than of an objective scientific study. My impression is that
there isn't much of a case in the book. Why should we need "civilising
heroes" or other external impulses to explain the development of Middle Eastern
cultures? Its coincidence in time with the flooding of Sundaland is hardly
puzzling -- both events have to do with the global climatic changes at the end
of the last glacial stage. There is no proof that Sundaland was inhabited by
carriers of a superior culture older than those of the Middle East; besides,
there are remains of cultivated plants and domesticated sheep from Northern Iraq
dated to ca. 9000 BC, i.e. before the Sunda Shelf was
submerged.
The chronology is all wrong. Very few
linguists would agree that the dispersal of IE can be dated at 8000 BC
(Renfrew's followers would, but they ignore linguistic evidence, by and large),
and only a handful of eccentrics still insist on an out-of-India scenario with
no matter what time-depth. The initial dispersal of the Austronesians was much
more recent, too (about 3000 BC), and is supposed to have begun in and around
Taiwan via the Philippines and the Moluccas. Malayo-Polynesian sailors began
their long-distance exploits ca. 1500 BC -- a long time after
Sundaland!
While it's certain that the complex
network of cultural contacts that has always conected the various language
families of SE Asia has caused numerous "wandering words" to diffuse
across the area (also from Austronesian to Indic or back, even without
direct contact), I can see no good evidence for anything like the one-way flow
suggested by Oppenheimer. Isidore Dyen's list of 78 IE/AA "matches" was meant as
an instructive estimate of the background noise level in distant comparison.
R.L. Trask has more recently compiled an impressive list of matches between
(Dolgopolsky's) Nostratic and Basque, with the following comment:
"Now, I certainly do not want to be known
as the person who introduced Basque into the Nostratic hypothesis: I am doing no
such thing. But this amusing little exercise does suggest to me that chance
resemblances between arbitrary languages are by no means so difficult to find as
is sometimes suggested."
Your own "phonetic comparison" is purely
impressionistic. Rather than investigate the established etymology of
individual items, you freely bracket together words from unrelated
sets (e.g. Old Indic gna:- and janas-). If you had read the beginner's
introduction to the historical phonology of Greek and checked up the derivation
of ne:sos ans ne:sis, it would not have occurred to you to connect them with
each other or fantasise about their possible connection with Austronesian *nusa.
Sorry, but it's all hopelessly amateurish. You don't even compare PIE with PAA
but selected words from a variety of daughter languages. It is only in this way
that some "cognates" can be suggested (e.g. the numeral 4). I don't want to go
into technical details now; you've given the link to your page and all
interested Cybalist members make check it on their own.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2001 12:05 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: *dan-
What a commotion! "von Däniken-like" was meant as
short-hand
for "trying to explain the cross-cultral phenomena von Däniken
was
puzzled by but unfortunately tried to explain by positing
intervention
by extraterrestrials, by ascribing these phenomena to exiles
from
Sundaland". I didn't even say Atlantis! Or Noah's Ark! Besides
everyone knows extraterrestrials speak Klingon, which is not related
to
Austronesian ( ;-) ;-) *joke* ;-) ;-) ). A better short-hand
expression
would be "Discovery Channel-like" (wonder what outrage
this expression will
cause).
Before discussing synchronicity, proper science, new age (vs.
"old
age"?) etc try this:
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/austric.html
This
is basically Manansala's two lists: Sanskrit-Austric and
Sumerian-Austric
plus what I could find of other correspondences
within IE.
Calling a
400-page book you haven't read which was favourably
reviewed in (I think it
was) Nature "new age" is not deep science
(It has also been similarly
mentioned in cybalist).
Here's another link. It's a theory I made up
myself:
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html
Torsten