Re: [tied] Non-moving Indo-Aryans, organically cohesive Vedic

Yawn... No offence, but we've already discussed it ad nauseam. Burrow's remark, whatever the author's stature, is questionable and indeed has been question (also on this forum, more than once). Kazanas is misrepresenting the common opinion of IEists, perhaps without intending to do so, since he isn't a linguist. Vedic is archaic in many respects but innovative in others. It isn't "less altered" with respect to PIE than other stratigraphically comparable languages, such as Avestan, Ancient Greek or even Latin. It owns its conservative features to its early attestation (it had less time to lose them than modern German or Albanian), not to its privileged position in the IE family tree.

Let's take any simple lexical set, e.g. the numerals:

*dwoh1(u) > Lat. duo:, Gk. duo:, OInd. dva:
*trejes > Lat. tre:s, Gk. treis, OInd. trayah.
*kwetwo:r/*kWetwores > Lat. quattuor, Gk. tettares, OInd. catva:rah.
*penkWe > Lat. quinque, Gk. penta, OInd. panca
...
*dek^m. > Lat. decem, Gk. deka, OInd. das'a
...
*(d)k^mtom > Lat. centum, Gk. (he)katon, OInd. s'ata

What's so archaic about the Old Indic forms? Phonologically, they appear to be less conservative than the latin and Greek ones.

Vedic had a complex system of tenses, voices and moods -- so did ancient Greek.

Vedic had eight cases -- true, but Polish still has seven of them, three thousand years later.

I doubt if any linguist speaking without a sentimental bias would support the idea of the inherent "superiority" of Vedic (or of any other language). Kazanas' attempt to disguise his prejudice as a "Principle" is an infantile method of arguing, even more pathetic than his argumentum ad auctoritatem.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: <kalyan97@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, February 14, 2003 3:53 PM
Subject: [tied] Non-moving Indo-Aryans, organically cohesive Vedic


I had posted earlier a note on Preservation Principle enunciated by
Kazanas in the context of autochthonous Indo-Aryans.

I am citing from Kazanas' article in the Journal of Indo-European
Studies, Vol. 30, Number 3 and 4, Fall/Winter, 2002, p. 27:

[quote] Burrow, whose The Sanskrit Language (1973) is still the
authority in this field, says: "Vedic is a language which in most
respects is more archaic and less altered from original Indo-
European than any other member of the family"(34); he also states
that root nouns, "very much in decline in the earliest recorded Indo-
European languages", are preserved better in Sanskrit, and later
adds, "Chiefly owing to its antiquity the Sanskrit language is more
readily analyzable, and its roots more easily separable from
accretionary elements than. any other IE language" (123, 289).
Nobody, as far as I know, has even attempted to dispute this and the
presence of dialectal variants and innovations or erosions and
losses in Vedic (and Sanskrit) does not invalidate Burrow's
judgement. Vedic is superior also in respect of its inner organic
cohesion: from roots dha_tu by simple and fairly regular processes
are generated primary (kr.t-) and secondary (taddhita-) derivatives
in nominal and verbal forms. This organic cohesion of Sanskrit is
another example of the Preservation Principle, confirming that the
Indo-Aryans moved very little or not at all.[unquote]

Can Vedic be accepted as one of the more archaic forms of PIE?