--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
> If so, we have the following alternative: either there was a single
migration of Indic-speakers into India, or there were many migrations
out of India along roughly the same Central Asian trail, each of them
but the last (Iranian) followed by the development of fresh linguistic
innovations in the Indian homeland, to be carried away by the next
migration. No fewer than four of those waves -- Italo-Celto-Germanic,
Balto-Slavic, Albanian (+ Thracian and Getic?), and Greek -- ended up
in Europe, making it in effect more thoroughly IEised than India has
ever been!
Why does the hypothesis of an Indian homeland require multiple waves
of emigrants? On purely linguistic grounds, why can't what we see
just be a reflection of how a vast dialect continuum broke up?
Richard.