Hi everybody (and apologies for the lenght of my
post),
Indo-European studies have always invited a
substantial amount of heated controversy. Indeed,
recently much of the vehement polemic has been devoted
to a singular issue within this much larger field of
inquiry: the appearance of Vedic Aryans in the Indian
subcontinent. Usually Indo-Europeanists tend to think
that Indo-Aryan speaking people were immigrants from
Central Asia to India and that the history of Vedic
Aryans in India begins around 1500 BCE. However, at
the other extreme we have �out-of-India� indigenists
who claim that India was the �home country� of all
languages belonging to the Indo-European language
family and that consequently the Indo-European
dispersal began from India. Crucial to this latter
position is the claim that the (Vedic) Indo-Aryan
language is indigenous to India and that its history
in India goes back to times that are considered
impossible by the defenders of the mainstream
scenario.
One of the biggest perceived stumbling blocks for the
indigenist and/or �out-of-India� view has precisely
been the language. The history and the distribution
of Indo-European languages are impossible to explain
adequately from the indigenist viewpoint, or so the
mainstream view seems to say. Most indigenist have
simply refused to take up the challenge. But there are
some exceptions. One of the most foremost is Dr.
Koenraad Elst. He has written several articles on the
topic, easily available in the net, see for instance:
�Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory�
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles.html
However, I shall cite here another article by Elst:
�The official pro-invasionist argument at last - A
review of the Aryan invasion arguments in J.
Bronkhorst and M.M. Deshpande: Aryan and Non-Aryan in
South Asia� at
http://pws.the-ecorp.com/~chbrugmans/articles/hock.html
http://pws.the-ecorp.com/~chbrugmans/articles.html
In particular, Elst is at pains to meet what we can
call here �Hock�s challenge�, an argument by H.H. Hock
against the indigenist/out-of-India views. I shall
cite here Elst on this very issue:
�6.2. Dialectal distribution of the IE proto-languages
Even when I learned about findings which indicate that
something is wrong with the AIT, one nagging doubt
which has always kept me from simply declaring the AIT
wrong was the geographical distribution of the
branches of the IE family. This argument has been
developed in some detail by Prof. Hock, who shows his
mastery by skipping obsolete arguments like
glottochronology and linguistic paleontology (still
brought up by too many scholars in this debate) and
going straight to this crucial point. He explains that
"the early Indo-European languages exhibit linguistic
alignments which cannot be captured by a tree diagram,
but which require a dialectological approach that maps
out a set of intersecting 'isoglosses' which define
areas with shared features (...) While there may be
disagreements on some of the details,
Indo-Europeanists agree that these relationships
reflect a stage at which the different Indo-European
languages were still just dialects of the ancestral
language and as such interacted with each other in the
same way as the dialects of modern languages." (p.13)
Isoglosses, linguistic changes which are common to
several languages, indicate either that the change was
imparted by one language to its sisters, or that the
languages have jointly inherited it from a common
ancestor-language. Within the IE family, we find
isoglosses in languages which take or took
geographically neighbouring positions, e.g. in a
straight Greece-to-India belt, the Greek, Armenian,
Iranian and some Indo-Aryan languages, we see the
shift s > h (e.g. Latin septem corresponding to Greek
hepta, Iranian hafta). In the same group, plus the
remaining Indo-Aryan languages, we see the "preterital
augment" (Greek e-phere, Sanskrit a-bharat, "he/she/it
carried"). Does this mean that the said languages
formed a single branch after the disintegration of PIE
unity for some time, before fragmenting into the
presently distinct languages?
No, for this group is itself divided by separate
developments which the member languages have in common
with non-member languages. Best known is the
kentum/satem divide: Greek belongs to the Kentum
group, along with Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Anatolian
and Tocharian, while Armenian and Indo-Iranian share
with Baltic and Slavic the Satem isogloss (as well as
the "ruki rule", changing s to sh after r, u, k, i).
So, like between the dialects of any modern language,
the IE languages share one isogloss with this
neighbour, another isogloss with another neighbour,
who in turn shares isoglosses with yet other
neighbours.
The key concept in Hock's argument is neighbour: the
remarkable phenomenon which should ultimately support
the AIT is that isoglosses are shared by neighbouring
branches of IE. Thus, the Kentum languages form a
continuous belt from Anatolia through southern to
western and northern Europe, and the Satem isogloss
likewise covers a continuous territory (only later
fragmented by the intrusion of Turkic) from central
Europe to India. To be sure, there are serious
exceptions here, e.g. there are Kentum languages far
removed from Europe, viz. Tocharian in Xinjiang and
proto-Bangani in the western Himalaya; and there is a
later satemizing tendency within the Kentum group,
viz. in the Romance languages (none of which
pronounces its word derived from Latin centum with a k
sound), Swedish and English (where wicca became
witch). But we get the idea, especially after studying
the map which Prof. Hock provides in Figure 2 on p.15.
There, we see ten isoglosses in their distribution
over the geographically placed IE language groups, all
showing the geographical contiguity of languages
sharing an isogloss.
Why is this important? "What is interesting, and
significant for present purposes, is the close
correspondence between the dialectological arrangement
in Figure 2 (based on the evidence of shared
innovations) and the actual geographical arrangement
of the Indo-European languages in their earliest
attested stages. (...) the relative positions of the
dialects can be mapped straightforwardly into the
actual geographical arrangement if (...) the relative
positions were generally maintained as the languages
fanned out over larger territory." (p.16) In other
words: the geographical distribution of IE languages
which actually exists happens to be the one which
would, at the stage when the proto-languages were
dialects of PIE, be best able to produce the actual
distibution of isoglosses over the languages.
6.3. Dialectal distribution: compatible with Indian
Homeland?
So, the relative location of the ancestor-languages in
the PIE homeland was about the same as their location
at the dawn of history. This, Hock proposes, is
compatible with a non-Indian homeland. Thus, if the
Homeland was in the North-Caspian region, the dialect
communities spread out radially, with the northwestern
proto-Germanic tribe moving further northwest through
what is now Poland, the northern proto-Baltic tribe
moving further north through Belarus, the western
proto-Celtic tribe moving further west through
Slovakia, likewise the Italic tribe through Hungary,
the southwestern proto-Greek and proto-Albanian tribes
moving further southwest through the Balkans, the
southeastern proto-Indo-Iranians moving further
southeast through Kazakhastan, etc. (One reason given
by the early Indo-Europeanists for assuming such
radial expansion is that there is little
inter-borrowing between IE language groups, indicating
little mutual contact. However, plenty of Iranian
loans are found in Slavic, Celtic loans are found in
Germanic, etc.) This way, while the distances grew
bigger, the relative location of the daughters of PIE
vis-�-vis one another remained the same.
If this is a bit too neat to match the well-known
twists and turns of history, it is at least more
likely than an Indocentric variant of Hock's scenario
would be: "To be able to account for these
dialectological relationships, the 'Out-of-India'
approach would have to assume, first, that these
relationships reflect a stage of dialectal diversity
in a Proto-Indo-European ancestor language located
within India. While this assumption is not in itself
improbable, it has consequences which, to put it
mildly, border on the improbable and certainly would
violate basic principles of simplicity. What would
have to be assumed is that the various Indo-European
languages moved out of India in such a manner that
they maintained their relative position to each other
during and after the migration. However, given the
bottle-neck nature of the route(s) out of India, it
would be immensely difficult to do so." (p.16-17,
emphasis Hock's)
I believe there is a plausible and entirely logical
alternative. It remains possible that the isoglosses
match a twofold scenario, part areal effect and part
genealogical tree, as follows. In part, they reflect
successive migrations from the heartland where new
linguistic trends developed and affected only the
dialects staying behind or developing later (vide e.g.
T. Gamkrelidze and V. Ivanov's outlining in their
magnum opus the successive waves of emigration from
Homeland X, leading to groupings like Celtic and
Italic, or Germanic and Balto-Slavic). Thus, PIE in
its Homeland was a kentum language, and its first
emigrants retained the Kentum form: Anatolian (the
oldest judging from its retaining the laryngeals),
Tocharian, Celtic, Italic, Germanic. Later emigrants
developed Satem features: Baltic, Slavic. Along with
the stay-behind Homeland language, Indo-Aryan, the
last emigrants had been completely satemized:
Armenian, Iranian.�
The second part is that the isoglosses not explainable
by the former scenario are post-PIE areal effects,
which is why they affect historically neighbouring
languages. Archaeologists (mostly assuming a
North-Caspian homeland) have said that the
North-Central-European Corded Ware culture of ca. 3000
BC was a kind of secondary Homeland from which the
Western branches of PIE spread, again more or less
radially, to their respective historical locations. Be
that as it may, that or a similar culture may well
have comprised a juxtaposition of IE-speaking
communities before their further dispersal, living in
close proximity to the next (though not to all), close
enough to allow for the transmission of linguistic
innovations.
Hock himself unwittingly gives at least one example
which doesn't easily admit of a different explanation:
"The same group of dialects [Germanic, Baltic, Slavic]
also has merged the genitive and ablative cases into a
single 'genitive' case. But within the group, Germanic
and Old Prussian agree on generalizing the old
genitive form (...) while Lithu-Latvian and Slavic
favor the old ablative". (p.14) Clearly, Old Prussian
and Lithu-Latvian lived in close proximity and
separate from Germanic and Slavic for centuries, as
dialects of proto-Baltic, else they wouldn't have
jointly developed into the Baltic group, distinct in
many lexical and grammatical features from its
neighbours. So, if the Baltic language bordering on
the Germanic territory happens to share the Germanic
form, while the languages bordering on Slavic happen
to share the Slavic form, we are clearly faced with an
areal effect and not a heirloom from PIE days. The
conflation of cases or case endings has continued to
take place in many IE languages in the historical
period, so the example under consideration may well
date to long after the fragmentation of PIE.
A second example mentioned by Hock may be the split
within the Anatolian group, with Luwian retaining a
distinction between velar and palatal but Hittite
merging the two, just like its Greek neighbour. But
not knowing that corner of the IE spectrum too well, I
will not press the point.
As far as I can see from Prof. Hock's presentation,
the twofold scenario outlined above is compatible with
all the linguistic developments mentioned by him. The
one difficult case is Greek, which shares a number of
innovations with Indo-Iranian, yet has also missed out
on others just like its Western neighbours (non-merged
a/e/o vowels, Kentum). Perhaps Greek was late to leave
yet had retained its Kentum forms even when surrounded
by increasingly satemized dialects, just as the
Indian-but-Kentum language proto-Bangani seems to have
managed until some time within living memory. Some
dialects just happen to be more conservative than
others, e.g. Greek is usually reckoned as the most
conservative regarding the PIE vowels, more faithful
to the old vowel distinctions than any of its
neighbours at any time.
I leave it to more technically inclined linguists to
look into this more closely. For now, I must confess
that after reading Prof. Hock's presentation, the
linguistic problem which I have always considered the
most damaging to an Indocentric hypothesis, doesn't
look all that threatening anymore. I do not believe
that the isoglosses discussed by him necessitate the
near-identity of the geographical distribution of the
PIE dialects with the geographical distribution of
their present-day daughter languages, which
near-identity would indeed be hard to reconcile with
an out-of-India hypothesis. Maybe other linguists, or
a challenged Prof. Hock, could sharpen this line of
argument and make it tougher to reconcile the
distribution of isoglosses with an Indian homeland
hypothesis.�
Now, my questions to all Indo-Europeanists are as
follows: (a) has Elst succeeded in meeting Hock�s
challenge and (b) what are the chances for an
indigenist/out-of-India resolution for the problem of
Indo-European dispersal, as far as the linguistic
evidence is concerned?
Best regards, Juha Savolainen
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com