Re: [tied] Re: Misra, Bryant and Indigenous-Nationalist Conflation

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 12993
Date: 2002-04-02

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 -----
From: Dean_Anderson
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
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.