1) > 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.
When they say that Sanskrit is more archaic than Iranian in some ways
is this based solely on things like endings -zdh > -edh but not the
other direction or are there other reasons?
2)> They did not revert to the old distribution of *a, *o and *e, of
> course. Such things are irreversible.
That web page you pointed me to says:
"both Bopp and Schleicher were sure Indo-European had had three
vowels: *a, *i, *u. This was proven completely incorrect already when
in 1876 Karl Brugmann discovered and proved that the Celtic, Italic
and Greek distinction between a, e, o existed in Proto-Indo-
European. "
From this quote it is not clear to me how these are exclusive since
Sanskrit has all of the vowels mentioned in both categories.
Both of these points remind me to ask: do you know of a good book on
the HISTORY of IE linguistics, especially with regard to Indo-
Iranian? All of the books I have on IE talk about the principles but
not in a historical sense and all of the books I have seen on the
History of Linguistics spend very little time on Indo-Aryan except as
it relates to Europeans.
> > 3) The Satem innovation
> took place relatively late, and by that time the IE languages were
> already strongly differentiated.
It seems to me that this would be a strong argument against Sanskrit
being PIE since it is a Satem language. But Masica seems to feel that
Indo-Iranian may have been one of the first languages to branch off
(and it's possible that Nichols would support this too.)
> > 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!....
> I you'd rather read a learned discussion, I can provide some
> references later on.
Thanks! That web site was a good introduction but I'd also appreciate
more learned discussions also as I get deeper into this.