Re: [tied] Re: Likely IE home: India

----- Original Message -----

From: michael_donne

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2002 3:09 AM

Subject: [tied] Re: Likely IE home: India

> 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?

The directionality of sound change (-azdH- > -aidH- > -e:dH- is definitely much more likely than a change in the opposite direction) is particularly helpful in reconstructing the ancestral state of things. It is clear that Sanskrit has innovated in this case and Iranian shows more primitive forms. What does it mean that two languages of roughly the same age are unequally archaic? You could say that the one that has fewer innovations and a greater number of retentions can be considered more archaic. In practice, however, the judgement depends on your choice of features to be compared (since nobody is able to analyse every detail of a linguistic systems), and is accordingly intuitive rather than objective. You won't get the same results if you compare phonological, morphological, syntactic or lexical features. What can be said with certainty is that _both_ Iranian and Indo-Aryan have innovated with respect to Proto-Indo-Iranian (and so has Nuristani, the little-discussed third subbranch, which, unsurprisingly, is in some respects more archaic than either Indo-Aryan or Iranian).

 

Anyway, as somebody (Jens, I think) pointed out a while ago, the location of the most archaic-looking family member need not be the homeland. Archaisms often have a better chance of survival in peripheral areas -- a fact well known to dialectologists. Modern Icelandic and Faroese look considerably more archaic than the other Scandinavian languages, but they are also the ones that are spoken far from the ancestral area of North Germanic.

> "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.

 

But Sanskrit /e:/ and /o:/ (long vowels, though the length is conventionally left unmarked) are secondary. They do not correspond to the *e and *o of Greek, Latin, Celtic etc., but arose from late monophthongisation in Indo-Aryan (e: < *ai < *ei, *oi, *ai, whereas o: < *au < *eu, *ou, *au). Even ancient Indian grammarians were aware of that. The attested old Iranian languages kept the diphthongs /ai/ and /au/ (another case of retention in that subbranch).

> 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.

 

A good question. There are few good books on the history of the discipline. I wonder if you are familiar with Winfred P. Lehmann's (1967) _Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) -- an instructive survey of the most influential works of the 19th c., from Sir William Jones and Friedrich von Schlegel to the Neogrammarians, with Lehmann's introductions.

> 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.)

 

People who study Anatolian, Tocharian or Greek will tell you the same about _their_ favourite branches. Some consider Germanic or Armenian "especially" archaic. What does "one of the first" mean? One of how many first? Avestan and Sanskrit are both very old (so are Hittite and Mycenaean Greek), so they _look_ archaic when compared with the modern languages. But that kind of comparison -- between language stages that are remote in time -- is hardly fair. Nobody knows what Proto-Germanic, Proto-Baltic-Slavic or Proto-Italic looked like in the second millennium BC. For all I know they may have been much more "archaic" than Sanskrit.

> Thanks! That web site [on Mitanni Aryan] was a good introduction but I'd also appreciate more learned discussions also as I get deeper into this.

 

Kammenhuber, Annelies. 1968. _Die Arier im Vorderen Orient_. Heidelberg: Winter.

 

Diakonoff (D'jakonov), I.M. 1971. _Hurrisch and Urartäisch_. Munich: Kitzinger.

 

Mayrhofer, Manfred. 1974. _Die Arier im Vorderen Orient -- ein Mythos?_ Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

 

Piotr