Re: [tied] MIA and Vedic

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

From: kalyan97

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, February 15, 2002 12:28 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] MIA and Vedic

> Piotr, have you seen this recent URL?

 

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~sanskrit/images/C._ASIA_.pdf

 

> Early Loan Words in Western Central Asia: Substrates, Migrations and Trade In the examples cited, I find little or no references to PIE or IE languages...

 

Many thanks for the reference. I knew the article was to appear and I was looking forward to see it. I haven't had the time yet to read it carefully, but from earlier adumbrations I gather Witzel argues for a pervasive non-IE substrate in West-Central Asia, absorbed by the Indo-Iranians (together, unlike the later [Para]-Munda and Dravidian loans, restricted to Indo-Aryan). Of course the article does not deal with PIE at large, since the substratal vocabulary in question does not occur in the remaining branches.

 

> J. Nichols seemed to see Sogdian as the Urheimat; is the search for the epicentre moving southeastwards?

 

That's Johanna Nichols' opinion, based on her own use of the areal distribution of typological patterns to detect hypothetical distant relationships even at time depths that make standard comparative reconstruction run aground. I am not convinced that this (responsible and interesting but controversial) application of areal typology produces valid results, or, more generally, that genetic filiation based on non-reconstructive methods will ever establish anything "beyond reasonable doubt". I certainly haven't seen IEists rushing to move their little flags southeast across the map of Eurasia as a result of reading Nichols.

 

Piotr