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

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

From: tgpedersen

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2002 2:31 PM

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

> One argument (cogent or otherwise) would be the Austric(?)-Sumerian-AfroAsiatic-PIE extended Manansala list

http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/austric.html

> but we are not many believers in that.

 

No, you aren't ;).

>> ... 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.

> A-hem. Didn't you just say that migrations rarely leave archaeological traces? How high is the price then?

I didn't say they rarely do. I said they often don't, which is not quite the same assertion. Anyway, it's easier to accept a model that assumes _one_ migration wave leaving disputable archaeological traces (there are quite good candidate cultures one could associate with common Indo-Iranian, and it's just the actual entry into India that causes still unsolved archaeological problems) than a model that has to propose several such waves (some kind of periodic branch-generator) leaving India quite invisibly.

> The contact has always been assumed to be from west to east.

 

Has it? There's little doubt that early Indo-Aryan absorbed more than one non-IE substrate, including languages related to modern Munda.

 

> How do we know that the loaning (and of course there are clear west-to-east examples) wasn't in the other direction? Eg. the snake-naga word?

 

The snake : na:ga connection is fanciful. Since when do non-IE loans show the mobile *s-? OE snaca and ON snákr are probably 'crawlers', connected with OHG snahhan 'crawl', while the Indo-Aryan word, if not a non-IE loan, may represent *nogWo- 'naked creature' > 'snake; elephant'.

 

> As to heterogeneity in the supposed center of origin - yes, I believe in that too, but where is the heterogeneity of dialects around the city of Rome? Perhaps after the last non-IA migration some pre-proto-As^oka came along and spread one language in India?

 

There's _a lot_ of dialectal variation in Italy, and some of it still reflects dialectal splits within early Romance (rather than purely inner-Italian divisions). Even if we assume that IA spread at the expense of other IE languages in India, it's funny that the latter should have left no substratal, toponymic or any other traces, while numerous non-IE languages have. The only possible exception known to me is the putative centum substrate in Bangani, but that's in the Western Himalayas (north of Dehra Du:n), on the northern fringe of the Indian linguistic area, where a single minor "lost tribe" (like the Tocharians) may have ended up at an unknown time in the past, coming from Central Asia. The Nuristani languages (not to mention Burushaski) found refuge not far from there.

 

Piotr