On Fri, 21 Feb 2003 15:39:55 -0000, "S.Kalyanaraman
<
kalyan97@...>" <
kalyan97@...> wrote:
>Is there a ban on referring to Mallory's quote? The question raised
>by him has not been answered so far, I think, in my never humble
>opinion.
If I may paraphrase Mallory's words, what he says is:
"Dolgopolsky says somewhere in a different context (IE ~ Semitic) that
linguistic evidence (especially that of loanwords) is not liable to
conflicting interpretations and therefore superior to archaeological
evidence. But now take the set of words borrowed by Finno-Ugric (boar
[*(v)oras'], slave [*orya], pig [*porsás], bee [*meks^e], honey
[*meti], seven [*säptä:], etc.): some linguists say these are
borrowings from (Proto-)Indo-Iranian (Dolgopolsky), some say from
early Iranian (Gamqrelidze & Ivanov), some say from Indo-Aryan
(Misra), and some say from (para-)Tocharian (Napol'skix). Will the
"real" linguist please stand up?"
What Mallory (an archaeologist!) is saying is that linguists shouldn't
be so arrogant as to claim superiority ("the cold logic of linguists")
over the other historical sciences. "The conclusion here is that
linguistics _alone_ [read: without archaeology] is unable to determine
the prehistoric location of the PIE language"
If, leaving aside the mild irritation of an archaeologist at the
opinions of a linguist touching upon his field, we look at the actual
words in question, we see that the existing confusion is not without
reason. The data _is_ liable to conflicting interpretations, no
matter what Dolgopolski says. Take *pors'as "pig" (Finn. porsas).
The PIE form was *pork^os, the Proto-Satem form *pors'os, the
Proto-Indo-Iranian form *pars'as (attested in Saka and Kurdish). The
Finnic form fits none exactly. A linguist inclined to see these words
as borrowings from Proto-Satem would emphasize the preservation of *o
in the first syllable and downplay the development *o > *a in the
second one. On the other hand, a linguist inclined to see them as
borrowings from Indo-Iranian would try to explain away the first *o
(e.g. rounding [in Finnic] due to /p/, or [Gamqrelidze & Ivanov] a
special development [in Finnic] of a putative Iranian *pr.k^ós). If
we take the word for "honey" Finnic *meti, we have PIE/PSatem *medhu,
PII *madhu. The alternatives here are: a loan from PIE/Proto-Satem
*medh-, a loan from (pre-/para-)Tocharian (ToB <mit> "honey"), or a
special development of *madhu in Iranian (Gamqrelidze & Ivanov try
this alternative in some cases, such as *meks^e "bee", Avestan
maxs^i:- "fly", but Kurdish mês^ "fly, bee", but in the case of
"honey" no Kurdish or Ossetic forms with /e/ or /ae/ (from
Proto-Iranian */a/) are available, so they opt for the Tocharian
variant here).
The truth is probably that Uralic/Finno-Ugric and Indo-European have
been in contact for millennia, and that judging by their basic grammar
(personal pronouns, case forms) they probably also share a common
ancestor. The problem that linguistics alone _might_ solve (although
not in all cases thsi will prove possible) is to disentangle which
words are (Proto-Nostratic) cognates, and which ones were borrowed
from PIE (or something close to it), and which ones from Proto-Satem,
Proto-Iranian, Pre-/Para-Tocharian, Proto-Baltic, Western Iranian,
Germanic, Slavic, etc.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...