mkelkar2003 wrote:
> http://www.continuitas.com/interdisciplinary.pdf>
>
>
> "If IE or Iranian people had been the first horse riders, as
> maintained by the traditional theory, we would expect to find a large
> number of IE or Iranian words also in neighboring areas, instead of
> this conspicous seris of Turkic loandwords (Alinei 2003, page 17)."
We do find a large number of demonstrably old Iranian loans in areas
around the steppe zone, in Slavic, Armenian, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, etc.
-- including even a few in Germanic. Of course there has been no
shortage of Turkic-speakers in Central Asia and SE Europe in historical
times, and Turkic loans have had enough time to circulate widely.
Anyway, the whole argument is directed at a man of straw: who says that
widespread loans could only be taken from horse-riders, let alone the
_first_ horse-riders? As for me, I don't even subscribe to the view that
horse domestication was the exclusive speciality of the IEs or the
Indo-Iranians (whatever the contribution of the latter to the
dissemination of the art of horse-training in some parts). Horses were
most likely domesticated in many places within the range where their
wild progenitors occurred, by people speaking all kinds of local languages.
Piotr