--- In cybalist@..., "michael_donne" <michael_donne@...> wrote:
> In response to some comments on this list about Misra being suspect
of Hindu nationalist sympathies, I ran across these quotes in Edwin
Bryant's excellent new book.
> ... Misra replies to Hock: "Hock has himself invented... the
Sanskrit-origin hypothesis, with which he has associated me... but my
work shows no hint for such an assumption. I have never claimed that
Sanskrit was the original language, nor have I said that Sanskrit was
identical with proto Indo-European. I have only presented additional
evidence... that Sanksrit presents the oldest literary evidence in
the form of the Rigveda...".
Oh, really, ONLY that? So who's been advocating the reversal of
virtually all the standard PIE > Indo-Aryan changes? While Misra's
PIE may not be entirely identical with Vedic, it differs from it only
minimally, being as nearly Sanskrit-like as makes no difference. If
one regards *kWekWlom as derived and *cakram as primitive, the
complaint that Hock has been inventing things sounds inconvincing.
It's Misra who's trying to evade the issue above.
> I do not understand why Hock has paid less attention to the Uralic
evidence, which covers many pages of the book (Misra 1992, p. 16-34)
and which is more significant for the dates of Rigveda, from a
linguistic point of view... On the other hand he has chosen a much
less significant part of the book viz. The peacock evidence... quoted
by me as complementary to my linguistic evidence."
What the Uralic evidence shows is that there were early contacts
between the Indo-Iranians and the Finno-Ugric speakers. Misra fails
to see (being selectively blind to inconvenient data) that the
evidence also points to even older contacts between a pre-stage of
Proto-Indo-Iranian (before the collapse of the vowel system!) and
Proto-Finno-Ugric. The apparent contemporaneity of PIIr. and PFU is
used by Misra as indicating a very deep date of Rigveda. But PFU can
only be dated much _less_ confdently than IIr. If anything, it would
make sense to use IIr for dating PFU, but not the other way round.
Dates like 5000 BC for PFU, even if offered by some Uralicists, are
based on romantic speculation -- there's not a scintilla of
scientific evidence for them. Nevertheless, Misra accepts them
uncriticaly because they suit his purpose.
> Bryant continues: "As an aside, Misra, whom I have known for many
years, has nothing to do with Hindu right-wing attitudes and actually
happens to be very concerned that his views not be co-opted by
nationalist or agenda-driven discourses."
But if he insists at no matter what cost, rejecting all criticism and
flaunting in the face of sound scholarship, that PIE was Sanskrit-
like (and the cost in this case is the extreme unnaturalness of the
processes he has to postulate in order to reverse _directional_ sound
changes), what motive is strong enough to make him cling to his idee
fixe? Isn't it something ideological ;)?
Piotr