----- Original Message
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Sent: Sunday, April
07, 2002 8:54 PM
Subject: [tied] Re:
Misra, Bryant and Indigenous-Nationalist Conflation
> ... Some will say Anatolian is
explained by mixing with other languages. Obviously any Indian homeland will
have to go with the anti-Indo-Hittite school of thinking, cf. Beekes "its
simplicity need not suggest antiquity, but could rather be owing to
loss."
"Antiquity" is not the issue. Hittite and
Luwian are approximately as "ancient" (close to PIE) as Mycenaean Greek,
Rigvedic or Old Avestan. What's disputed is which particular differences between
Anatolian and the Rest result from common innovations in the latter rather than
loss in the former, but few linguists doubt the validity of regarding Anatolian
as a first-order branch in the IE family tree (I certainly don't), even if they
don't like the term "Indo-Hittite".
> After PIE left India and settled in
Central Asia, the first branch of it would have split off to go south to evolve
into the languages above. I think the way its proposed is: Aryo-Greco-Armenian
went south of the Caspian into Anatolia and beyond. Balto-Slavo-Germanic and
Italo-Celtic went north of the Caspian and Black Sea into the Balkans. Greek and
Italo-Celtic may have met in the Balkans although this is beyond his concern
right now.
"Aryo-Graeco-Armenian" and
"Balto-Slavo-Germanic" are areal, not genetic groupings, unless you accept
August Schleicher's "Stammbaum" of 1871 without any refinements. But note
that Indo-Aryan is descended from Proto-Indo-Iranian (= Schleicher's "Aryan",
which you seem to accept), so you'd have to make the ancestors of the
Indo-Aryans move into Central Asia, then south of the Caspian Sea and ...
erh ... back to India? You can correct yourself and say, "Oops, forget Aryan, I
mean Graeco-Armenian", but then how will you account for the areal affinities
between Graeco-Armenian and Indo-Aryan? And if Greek moved to Europe through
Anatolia, how come that the Anatolian branch is not a member of that
convergence area? I also wonder how many Greek experts would buy the idea that
the Greeks came to Greece from Anatolia.
> This is an important concept to understand about the theory:
there is NO "cluster of distinct dialects miraculously preserving their
geographical configuration." There is only ONE migration of PIE and it is very
similar to the existing PIE except that it is
differentiated from
Indo-Iranian. This ONE dialect then proceeds to diverge from the BMAC or
someplace farther west according to the accepted theories. Well, OK only ONE
major migration. Iranian is a second but since its "within the family" its not
emphasized. After all, if you can locate even IIr in India, then getting Iranian
out isn't going to bother anyone after they've accepted the big
one.
You contradict yourself quite a lot. You
say that it isn't necessary to insist on an early separation of Indo-Iranian
from the rest of IE, then you keep returning to the idea that there was only one
"major" IE migration out of India before the fragmentation of Indo-Iranian. But
that means _precisely_ that the primary branching within the family tree is
between the stay-at-home group (which developed into Indo-Iranian) and the group
that left India (which you call variably "PIE" or "very similar to the existing
PIE" [?]). Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it. If the migrating group
was differentiated from Indo-Iranian, this also means that Indo-Iranian was
differentiated from the migrating group. At this point I have the right to ask:
can you propose _any_ plausible common innovations defining non-Indo-Iranian IE
in opposition to Indo-Iranian? Without such a demonstration you can't claim that
the differentiation proposed above ever took place.
>> I really can't see how one could plausibly derive the IE
languages from a homeland in India without proposing _at least_ five or six
separate movements.
> I hope I explained this above. If not, let me
know where the problem is. The movements happen after PrePIE leaves India and
PrePIE is NOT Vedic Sanskrit but an isogloss probably with centum
forms.
What do you mean by "an isogloss"
above? A language can't _be_ an isogloss; there may be isoglosses
(shared features) between languages. Shall I take it to mean that the first
migration out of India was by speakers of "Proto-Centum"? But then you need
further movements to get the non-Indo-Iranian Satem branches out of India.
Balto-Slavic shares both the Satem innovation and the RUKI rule with Indo-Aryan.
These changes are too uncommon to be attributed to independent parallel
development. This would mean that Balto-Slavic stayed in India long enough to
participate in the Satem and RUKI innovations and was the last branch to leave
before the separation of Iranian (and Nuristani). But then how do you explain
the fact that Indo-Iranian, Greek and Armenian share a number of typological
traits not found in Slavic?
> Why are five or six movements required
in this scenario?
(1) The "basal" branch (Anatolian)
leaves India.
(2) Proto-Italian, Proto-Celtic and
Proto-Germanic (perhaps also Proto-Tocharian, if not a separate migration) leave
India.
(3) Proto-Greek (accompanied by
Proto-Phrygian?) leaves India, but remains mysteriously connected with
Indo-Iranian and Armenian. The connection is somehow maintained though the
Greeks have to pass through Anatolia, which is already occupied by the
Anatolians.
(4) The remaining languages undergo the
Satem innovation, whereupon Proto-Armenian and Proto-Albanian leave India, not
waiting for the RUKI rule. They follow the Proto-Greeks closely so as not to
break their areal ties with Greek.
(5) Balto-Slavic undergoes RUKI and leaves
India in extreme haste: it's a long way to go and they have to catch up with
Proto-Germanic and become areally associated with it.
(6) Last but not least, Proto-Iranian
leaves India, and Indo-Aryan is left alone (but wait a minute: what about those
Indo-Iranian/Finno-Ugric contacts?).
> 1) "split" is based on idea of
divergence from PIE in C Asia -- this is a dialect that has the features of PIIr
but didn't really split from IA into two but rather split from Indo or prePIE
some time back and retained the IIr features. So instead of going: PIE > IIr
> IndoAryan and Iranian it goes prePIE > IIr and IndoAryan >
Iranian
But the characteristicaly IIr features are
innovations, not retentions (unless you go with Misra all the way), so you'd
really need an independently developed "Doppelgänger" of Proto-Indo-Iranian
in eastern Europe -- the most remarkable case of parallel development ever seen
-- to account for what people regard as evidence of PIIr/PFU
contacts.
> 2) OK so maybe there were two (or
three -- see below) waves. Actually, you just clarified something that I didn't
understand: he said something like: "now I just have to figure out if IIr went W
or NW". I thought he was talking about Scythians but it turns out he feels that
the IIr left South Asia via one of two routes: E through the Helmand into
Central Afghanistan and onto the Iranian Plateau or NW through the Khyber into
the BMAC and then into Iran. Some of them would also migrate further NW to
interact with the Uralic family. And they would separate Tocharian from its
centum roots. This is all
quite a bit later than the PIE migration. At this
time he prefers the Helmand route for the Iranians. OK, I guess there is also a
third migration -- but again one within the family like the Iranians -- at some
point the Indo-Aryans who were probably also the BMAC (Sergent and Parpola agree
that BMAC is Indo-Aryan) invaded to create the Kassite and Mitanni regimes --
again this is late compared to PIE.
Now you're beginning to see the light. If
you're ready to admit that there were some Proto-Indo-Iranian communities in the
BMAC and sufficiently farther north to interact with Proto-Finno-Ugric, why not
take the next step and hypothesise that there were no _other_
Proto-Indo-Iranians anywhere? :)
>> The loans (very likely all of them) are distinctly
Indo-Iranian and many of them can't be dated to the post-split period,
since the most archaic of them show features like unpalatalised velars before
front *e (still retained!), and satem stops still reflected as
affricates.
> This would be the character of
this so-called IIr but is really the Iranian split.
Untenable. The stage in question is
ancestral both to Iranian and to Indo-Aryan. By the time the two
subbranches separated, some characteristic changes (like the palatalisation of
velars before front vowels, and *e > *a) had already taken
place.
> There is very little consensus on which of these words are IE
and which are not. Kuiper will say they are not IE, Mayrhofer will say they are,
Masica will question both of them. The few that are clearly not IE can be
explained by adstrate and especially through trade.
"The few"? I should think the majority of
them are uncontroversially non-IE. The debate concerns individual items, not the
bulk of them. I don't always agree with Witzel, but his article "Substrate
Languages in Old Indo-Aryan" is definitely worth reading. It includes a
discussion of what characterises a non-IE word.
>> Just for the record, I personally
do not place PIE in Central Asia.
> Where do you place
it?
On the Middle Danube, more or
less.
>> As for homogeneity or
heterogeneity indicating the homeland, it would be naive to formulate any hard
and fast rules, but homogeneity tends to indicate relatively recent
expansion.
> Nichols disagrees.
I have to disagree with anyone who claims
that homeland areas are characterised by lower-than-normal heterogeneity. Such a
claim is falsified by real-life examples.
> It would be hard to find a culture that is more antithetical
to IndoIranian linguistic conservatism than the US. Innovation is a matter of
pride there and gives rise to lots of heterogeneity.
The degree of dialectal fragmentation in
the US has little to do with the national character of the Americans but
all to do with the history of their expansion in America. dialectal differences
were levelled out in the vast and rapidly colonised areas of the West. New
dialectal boundaries are on the rise there, but the oldest and deepest divisions
are found where they originally existed -- in the eastern states.
>> J. Koivulehto's conference paper "Varhaiset
indoeurooppalaiskontaktit: aika ja paikka lainasanojen valossa" (The early IE
contacts: time and place in the light of loanwords. Lammi, 1997), which I know
only from an English-language summary.<
> Do you have a reference
for this english summary?
Raimo Anttila. 2000. "The Indo-European and
Baltic-Finnic Interface: Time Against the Ice". In April McMahon and Larry
Trask (eds.). _Time Depth in Historical Linguistics_, Vol.2 (Ch.21). The
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
>> Koivulehto, Jorma. 2000.
"Finno-Ugric reflexes of North-West Indo-European and early stages of
Indo-Iranian". In: _Proceedings of the 11th Annual UCLA IE Conference_, pp.
21-43.
> Who is the editor for this? These journal articles are nearly
impossible to find -- even after you track down the rare library that has them
on the shelves.
Sorry for the omission. The editor of the
volume is Karlene
Jones-Bley.
Piotr