From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 13231
Date: 2002-04-13
----- Original Message -----From: Dean_AndersonSent: Friday, April 12, 2002 11:28 PMSubject: [tied] Re: Proving India is the Indian Homeland
> [Dean:] Of course, it might be fruitful to re-examine the old theories to see if Misra got the general idea correct but was wrong on certain, rather crucial, details. But this would involve a complete re-evaluation of the fundamentals of IE linguistics which would involve quite a bit more time than I have available right now. :-)
[Piotr:] Sorry, but Misra was _fundamentally_ wrong in failing to respect some very basic assumptions of general historical linguistics -- not just _IE_ linguistics, since the reconstructive principles are not family-specific and have been tested a zillion times outside IE. He _evaded_ all theoretic difficulties rather than propose a solution.
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>> [Steve:] And what specifically do they [Indologists, archaeologists and anthropologists] have to say about Vedic's linguistic relation to the other IE languages?
> [Dean:] Not much at this point. Where we stand now is the recognition that something is wrong but no one is really clear what has to change.
[Piotr:] I see. So they all agree that it's the linguists who must be wrong ;). Actually, linguistics as such does not identify homelands, but it imposes objective constraints on homeland hypotheses -- any such hypothesis must account for the observed distribution of the linguistic family and for the demonstrable genetic relations within it. You have a right to ask if this or that linguistic proposition is confidently established or merely tentative, but you can hardly ask the linguists to re-evaluate all their methods and findings just because the linguistic evidence doesn't square well with your extralinguistic scenario. Another point worth keeping in mind: there are only contingent correlations between archaeological cultures and linguistic groupings.
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> [Dean:] ... But many of the signifiers of an IE material culture are borrowed from the Vedas or the Avestan texts because they are so old. The journal articles refer to them quite freqently.
[Piotr:] Whatever you reconstruct comparatively on the basis of the Vedic and Avestan corpora is not per se valid outside Indo-Iranian. The texts are old but still a few millennia younger than PIE. No "signifier" derived from them is restituable for PIE without external support -- preferably from genetically and geographically distant branches.
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> [Dean:] Does Danish culture show a clear pattern of IE material culture back to neolithic times?
[Piotr:] Of course it does, at least beginning with the Funnel Beakers stage (ca. 4100 BC), when all the necessary material components are present -- a Neolithic farming culture with the right settlement type and regional organisation, the right domesticates, the right wild animals and plants all about, and even with some tangible evidence of wheeled transport. I don't propose that Denmark is the PIE homeland, but the material culture found there is definitely compatible with what a linguistic palaeontologist could reasonably expect.
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>> [Steve:] Kept all their practices? What, they stayed in the stone age?
> [Dean:] Fire sacrifice, horses, rathas (chariots), the IE pantheon, tripartite division of society, etc.
[Piotr:] I haven't seen any Harappan chariots as yet; the presence or absence of horses is really irrelevant inasmuch as horses don't speak Indo-Aryan or PIE, and the evidence of "Vedic" fire altars in the Indus Valley materials is debatable, quite apart from the fact that fire has been worshipped in innumerable cultures since _Homo erectus_. Tripartite aspects of social stratification (can you really demonstrate them for the IVC?) are by no means uniquely IE, as Renfrew eloquently points out (Chapter 10 of _Archaeology and Language_). What do you understand by "the IE pantheon", and where do you see it in the Indus Valley Civilisation?
Piotr