Many things can have indigenous origins,
but a language family can't have originated in many far-flung places at the
same time. We would have a major crisis indeed if all the IE branches
claimed indigenousness :). It's so hard to please everybody ...
The discussion of any homeland hypothesis
("PIE was spoken in X") should begin with the question "why X?" rather than "why
not X?". I haven't yet seen a cogent argument pointing to India as the PIE
homeland. The discussion usually revolves round the question of the Aryan
migration and its archaeological documentation, as if the lack (or rather
weakness) of such documentation were tantamount to the demonstration of the
indigenousness of the Indo-Aryan _languages_ (beginning with
Vedic).
Indologists naturally focus on
India, but in a wider Indo-European perspective, in which Indo-Iranian is
just one of about a dozen branches, the migration problem is by no
means unique. Languages seem to be able to migrate without leaving clear traces
in the archaeological record, as their speakers penetrate new areas and become
integrated into their cultural environments. Where, for example, is
the unambiguous evidence of a Hitto-Luwian conquest of Anatolia? Or of a
Tocharian migration to Xinjiang? Or of the colonisation of Armenia by the
Armenians? Or of a Goidelic conquest of Ireland? In fact, most of the
proposals connecting the various IE languages with identifiable archaeological
cultures are tentative and highly insecure.
Deriving PIE from India without turning PIE
linguistics upside down would require an acrobatic historical scenario. Since
there's no linguistic evidence of a primary split into Indo-Aryan and
non-Indo-Aryan (whereafter the latter would have moved to a "secondary
homeland" to split into more branches), the only solution that respects the
structure of the IE family tree (barring the possibility of pre-Indo-Aryan first
migrating out of India and then coming back home to the subcontinent, which
would satisfy neither the indigenists nor the migrationists) is to have
several successive IE migration waves leave India and populate Europe and parts
of Asia over the millennia. That would require a number of really massive but
archaeologically unsubstantiated exoduses -- a high price to pay for abandoning
a model that requires a single movement in the opposite
direction.
Areal and substrate studies don't favour an
Indian homeland. Evidence of contact with the language families of South Asia is
(unsurprisingly) rich in Indo-Aryan but tapers out before it reaches Central
Asia. Even Iranian is different in this respect. One node deeper, there are
uniquely Indo-Iranian words that have not diffused to the other branches. One
would have to assume that after each split and out-of-India migration a
completely new substrate was absorbed by the stay-at-home group. Then,
there are several historical layers of borrowings -- including those from
pre-Proto-Indo-Iraniana and Proto-Indo-Iranian proper -- in Finno-Ugric.
What's also suspect is the genetic homogeneity of the IE languages in India. All
of them belong to the same subbranch of IE, and there is no evidence of former
differentiation -- an unlikely situation for a homeland area.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 6:34 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Misra, Bryant and Indigenous-Nationalist
Conflation
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.