--- In cybalist@..., "michael_donne" <michael_donne@...> wrote:
> Thanks for the interesting discussion of this issue. I've asked
> someone to send me a copy of Hock's paper where he refutes Misra.
I'm
> putting my money on Hock. :-)
A safe bet, if there is one :))
>
> Some questions:
>
> 1) Isn't it true that the relation between Iranian and Vedic
Sanskrit
> is somewhat anomalous since they both have qualities that make them
> appear younger and yet older than each other?
Far from being anomalous, this is what we normally find in any pair
of related languages. Each of them has innovated in its own way,
while preserving inherited archaisms lost in the other language.
Laymen like to think that, say, Lithuanian is an "old" language while
English is a "modern" one. In reality they are both modern and both
are equally old, since they derive from a common protolanguage (in
terms of historical attestation, English is actually older by many
centuries). Lithuanian preserves a greater number of archaic features
than English, but there are respects in which English is more archaic.
>
> 2) Mishra mentioned that Romany and other languages reversed
> the 'a,e,o' > 'a' direction when they left India. Is this true?
What
> are some of the other examples?
They did not revert to the old distribution of *a, *o and *e, of
course. Such things are irreversible. It is only true that some
Romany dialects have developed a larger vowel system by splitting *a
into three phonemes. There is nothing unusual about that. In English,
the vowels of man, men and salt, now different, go back to PGmc *a.
> 3) Does the Centum/Satem split argue against an Indian homeland? Is
> it even conceivably possible that Centum split off from an original
> Satem?
It argues neither against nor in favour of _any_ homeland. But note
that "the Satem/centum split" is a misnomer. The Satem innovation
took place relatively late, and by that time the IE languages were
already strongly differentiated. The "Centum" languages are
a "paraphyletic" group, which means that it does not include all the
descendants of their common ancestor (which is simply PIE). In other
words, the Centum languages did not split from anything -- they are
the remainder of the family, left after the Satem block had split off.
> 4) What is a good source for the original Mitanni/Kassite/Hittite
> documents with a discussion -- in transliteration please. I don't
> want to have to learn cuneiform!
If an informal online source will satisfy you, Cyril Babaev has
collected some examples:
http://indoeuro.bizland.com/archive/article17.html
I you'd rather read a learned discussion, I can provide some
references later on.
Piotr