--- Sergejus Tarasovas <
S.Tarasovas@...>
wrote:
> --- In cybalist@..., george knysh <gknysh@...>
> wrote:
>
> > ****GK: "Not particularly serious". An "amateur".
> (He
> > was one of the Soviet Union's leading specialists
> in
> > comparative Indo-European linguistics).
>
> Are you serious, George? He was not even a
> scpecialist, much
> less 'leading'. And what was his contribution? The
> theory that
> Scythians were proto-Balts?
*****GK: As to the first point. What can I say? His
book "Slavic Ethnogenesis" was approved for
publication on 15 February 1972 by the "Learned
Council [Vchena Rada] of the Institute of Archaeology
of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic" and in the
Preface he was described as "one of the leading
specialists [odnym z providnykh fakhivtsiv] in
comparative Indo-European linguistics in Ukraine, as
well as a known [znanyj]researcher on Early Slavic
archaeology". His conclusions seemed moderate enough,
and were accompanied by a technical apparatus that
looked every bit as impressive as anything Piotr or
others have come up with on this list ,with constant
references to authorities every linguist (I suppose)
would accept as genuine. The historical and
archaeological stuff I could evaluate without
intermediaries and it was quite impressive if not
always correct (to my way of thinking). I gather that
the book was not very well known. Not because it came
out in only 3000 exemplaries but because of other
factors, endemic to Ukrainian science at that time.===
As to the second question. No that wasn't his point at
all. He had a very evolutionary concept of language
and language groups. He contended that "Slavic" was
not fully constituted until nearly historical times,
that in previous ages the populations that became its
eventual carriers formed part of a vaster family (for
which he had no specific name) some groups of which
(the Balts) retained many archaisms lost in others. He
viewed the Scythians (the complex of Herodotus
including the recently arrived Iranic and assimilating
(in his view) Royals) as a component of this larger
family. It wasn't a question of the Scythians (or
Slavs) being proto-Balts but of their once having
shared a nearly common language with the proto-Balts,
out of which the "Slavs" "innovated" so to speak,
along with those Scythians who did not outmigrate.
This view seemed far less questionable to me than that
of the Rybakov school.*****
>
> Sergei
>
>
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