Re: East of Satem [was: The Tocharians]

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 10507
Date: 2001-10-21

The Tocharians are not the only "lost tribe" of centum-speakers in the east, and it's easy to see how such groups could originate. The "Satem shift" was an innovation that did not necessarily take place at the eastern periphery of Indoeuropia, even if it spread from an eccentrically located core area. The innovation split the outgroups that did not participate in it, leaving a large continuous area unaffected in the west (with Anatolian having remained in the south long before), and isolating several conservative languages in the east. Hellenic is another centum branch that went astray (I'd include Phrygian as a not-very-distant cousin of Greek, and Ancient Macedonian as Greek's sister). The recently discovered and still controversial centum substrate (apparently neither Tocharian nor Hellenoid) in Bangani, a Western Pahari Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Indian Himalayas, may represent another extinct branch in those parts. Here are links to pages describing the Bangani scandal:
 
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/bangani.html
 
http://www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/MIND/zoller/Bangani.html
 
As for the Tocharians, I think it would be premature to connect them with concrete archaeological stuff or reconstruct their prehistoric migration routes until the derivation of the Afanasievo culture and other related units of southwestern Siberia and Kazachstan becomes clearer; however, given the evidently archaic character of Tocharian, a separation date about 4000 BC (say, in an early Funnel Beaker cultural context) would make sense to me. The Tocharians certainly had "wheels" -- that's what they called their wagons (kukAl, kokale < *kWekWlo-) and shared the (non-Anatolian?) IE word for "horse" (yuk, yakwe < *ek^wos).
 
Piotr
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: markodegard@...
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2001 8:11 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: The Tokharians

Outliers are outliers. If you can't explain them, you just live with them -- while making full use of their testimony for IE studies.

Look at Romany, an Indic language found in Europe, clear to Ireland; imagine how we would be scratching our heads if the Indo-Iranian branch were a tiny, and now otherwise extinct branch of IE. We are similarly at a loss to explain how Armenian got to Armenia.