>Executed for decades and centuries? Poor scholars!
Watch out buddy, or you'll be next! ;-)
>what Hock offered as counter-evidence for the
>hypothetical claim that PIE existed and was spoken in India,
>and that the rest of IE had emigrated from there, was that IE
>Sprachbunds existed outside of India and had for a long time,
>evidence that somehow didn't quite convince me;
I don't think Hock was really trying very hard.
>could I ask someone to explain what
>are the remaining reasons why PIE wasn't spoken in India
Most of Hock's arguments weren't conclusive. All he did was provide
examples where PIE *might* have been outside of India.
EXCEPT:
1) The vowels -- see the thread "Sanskrit e, a, u"
2) The law of palatals
These are very strong reasons and would need some serious linguistic
arguments to refute them. I'd love to see someone try to enter that
minefield. :-) It would be entertaining if nothing else.
> Well, the "parent" in question would not be anything more distant
from Sanskrit than Proto-Indo-Iranian after the Law of Palatals (to
use mainstream nomenclature), which is precisely why I said that it
was close enough Sanskrit to make no difference.<
If it were going to be PIE, it would *have* to be more distant and go
farther back than PIIranian. Perhaps, I should have said "great-
grandparent."
>Accept that, and even the equation PIE = Sanskrit is no
longer "essentially impossible", since the critical difficulties have
already been ignored!
Not ignored -- they would have to be addressed. But I've never seen
anyone do that persuasively.
> I agree with the rest of your posting and want to emphasise once
again that I reject Misra's rewriting of IE linguistics for purely
formal reasons (discussed by Hock and partly re-discussed here). If
anything I said distracted the discussion from the real topic, I
regret it and promise to be even more puristic about not mixing
science with ideology than I already am :)
>
Hehe. Thank you. ;) Actually, you didn't distract from the real
topic -- THAT WAS the real topic. It's one of those "consciousness-
raising" things.
Actually some Indologists are very sensitive about this because we
are in the midst of a major crisis now that almost all the South
Asian archaeologists (Indian and Western both) are abandoning the
Aryan Migration Theory (except maybe for Meadow) and emphasizing
indigenous origins.