Re: Why India?

Piotr wrote:
<<Now it's time for the real question: Why India? Needless to say, the answer
"Why not?" is not satisfactory. In order to be worth considering, a homeland
hypothesis should offer something constructive.>>

"michael_donne" <michael_donne@...>
<<I believe it was Renfrew who said: It's hard to see what's not Vedic about
the Indus Valley Civilization. There is a huge amount of evidence that points
to continuity in Vedic and Hindu practices beginning from 5000 BC until
today. Most of the evidence to show a migation into India can just as easily
show a migration out.>>

As someone who is more interested in how it happened than where it started,
I'd like to offer a few suggestions here.

One is that the spread of the Indo-European languages seems to have been a
rather singular event in history. (If not singular, then an event with few
analogies in recorded history.) One thing that makes this event seem so
unusual, I think, is the reconstruction of proto-indo-european. The
comparative method and internal reconstruction has given us a hypothetical
ancestral language that appears to be an "isolate," in the sense that we
can't identify any close relatives. Putting aside Nostratic and
paleolinguistics for now, strict application of the comparative method does
not suggest (I believe) that *PIE was closely related to any other
proto-language we can reconstruct from other recorded language groups.

This becomes a bit of a problem for good, sound historical analysis, because
it makes *PIE appear to practically fall out of the sky. There is no context
for *PIE, making it almost seem like an Adam and Eve story, with no evidence
of millions of years of hominids before it.

So, do we consider this perhaps a limitation on how much the comparative
method can tell us about the origins of IE languages? Can we then postulate
- based on everything else we know about languages - that in fact *PIE did
have close relatives? Should we assume that they all disappeared without a
trace, without leaving behind anything in later languages? Is there ever a
point in distant time where "areal" influence and consolidation and early
borrowings by closely related languages would not show up on the radar of the
comparative method?

Another corollary question: what could have made *PIE so much more attractive
or effective than those other relatives that it alone survived and prospered?

This singular nature of *PIE also creates another problem from my
perspective. The original location of PIE would be of less interest to most
of us here if its descendants were restricted to a corner of northeastern
Asia. (And whatever the homeland, none of us living today had anything to do
with it.) A much deeper question about indo-european languages is how they
spread to the extent they did. What advantage did speaking an indo-european
language have over whatever it is that those languages replaced (assuming, as
I think we can, that IE was not spread by mere expansion of population.)

On the other hand, is it correct to assume that the advantage was always the
same or did it vary from place to place, region to region, even village to
village?

Now, my current theory (I think) is that IE often supplied a common language
to different groups of speakers who spoke other mutually incomprehensible
languages. That it mainly spread as a second language that was a compromise
for speakers of different languages, and eventually became a first language.
(Maybe like Hansa today in Africa.)

So, Renfrew's statement about India always being Vedic in culture doesn't say
much to me. The Indo-Aryans could have brought IE as an afterthought and it
might have just caught on as a good idea in an area with lots of diverse
languages, without changing the culture too much. (Or as a fad, like Disco -
except we weren't stuck with Disco thankfully.) Or they may have "brought it
back" in a new form that was preferred for whatever reason over some
indigenous forms of pre-PIE.

What's important here is that either of these explanations only explains why
and how IE was spoken in India. It doesn't tell me a darn thing regarding
the meat of this story.

Neither of those explanations explain to me why IE went to so many other
places besides India. Which is again the real question, isn't it? Or isn't
it?

Does this put a new angle on this discussion for anyone? Or have I just
pissed everyone off?

Steve Long