--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr GÄ
siorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> mkelkar2003 wrote:
>
> > This is evident in the reconstructed PIE. This endeavor has no doubt
> > been a great intellectual achaivement but from a practical standpoint
> > it assumes that an airtight compartment called PIE was dropped
> > somewhere at A point in time from outer space. The compartment opened
> > and people with some unique physical characteristics that no one
> > wants to talk about today, fanned out in a CENTRIFUGAL manner. The
> > presumed centrifugality of expansion puts India at a disadvantage
> > because of its geographical location.
>
> What do physical characteristics have to do with the model? Leaving
that
> aside, we all realise that the family tree model and areal convergence
> models complement, not exclude, each other. Language families are
> recognisable entities not because the respective protolanguages, at the
> time of their existence, were sealed off from their linguistic
> environment, but because their close relatives have become extinct. In
> the same way, the Germanic languages form a well-defined group
reducible
> to a common ancestor because the various "para-Germanic" dialects once
> filling the gap between Germanic proper and the other IE branches have
> died out. But if you want to divide e.g. the West Germanic subbranch
> into smaller gementic units, you run into trouble because the languages
> in question are still too closely connected; they continue to influence
> each other areally, and in some cases form a dialectal continuum.
>
> The systematic correspondences on which the reconstruction of PIE is
> based guarantee that many (not all!) of the affinities between the IE
> languages are due to common descent from a single proto-language,
not to
> convergence. This is the "family tree" component of the model. It
> follows from it that the inherited linguistic traits that make those
> languages members of the same family originated in an area of relative
> linguistic homogeneity, which (in the Neolithic conditions) means a
> geographically restricted protolanguage. The spread of IE from that
> hypothetical centre of expansion need not have been centrifugal, but
the
> scenario of such a spread should at least be realistic, and of all the
> imaginable scenarios the "Out of India" one scores badly in that
respect.
>
> Piotr
>
âMany of the language groups of Europe, i.e. Celtic, Germanic, Baltic,
and Slavic, may possibly be traced back to the Corded Ware horizon of
northern, central, and eastern Europe that flourished c. 3200-2300 BC.
Some would say that iron age culture of Italy might also be derived
from this cultural tradition. For this reason the Corded Ware Culture
is frequently discussed as a prime candidate for early Indo-European;
in the past it was even suggested as the Proto-Indo-European culture.
However, the Corded Ware cannot even remotely explain the
Indo-European groups of the Balkans, Greece, Anatolia, nor those of
Asia. For the steppeland regions of Eurasia, the retrospective method
takes us back through the Bronze Age Andronovo and Timber-grave
cultures of the Eurasian steppe to the underlying Yamna culture of c.
3600-2200 BC. This method can supply us with an archaeological proxy
for the Eastern Iranians but that is about all the retrospective
method gets us. We may argue that the Yamna culture should minimally
reflect the proto-Indo-Iranians if not more; however, we cannot do
this by the retrospective method since there is no ancestral culture
that territorially underlies the Iranians or Indo-Aryans, i.e. there
is no specific culture X that both embraces the historical seats of
the Indo-Iranians and can also be traced back to the Yamna culture.
Similarly, there is no solid evidence in the retrospective method in
Greece that takes us anywhere that we can confidently tit to one of
the other two âancestral cultures,â nor Anatolia. Sooner or later the
retrospective method leads us to a series is what seem to appear to be
independent cultural phenomena that somehow must be associate with one
another. In that lies most of the archaeological debate concerning
Indo-European origins (Mallory and Adams 2006, p. 452).â
âAlthough the difference between the Wave of Advance and Kurgan
theories is quite marked, they both share the same explanation for the
expansion of the Indo-Iranians in Asia (and there are no fundamental
differences in either of their difficulties in explaining the
Tocharians), i.e. the expansion of mobile pastoralist eastwards and
then southwards into Iran and India. Moreover, there is recognition
by supporter of the Neolithic theory that the âwave of advanceâ did
not reach the peripheries of Europe (central and western
Mediterranean, Atlantic and northern Europe) but that these regions
adopted agriculture from their neighbours rather than being replaced
by them.
In short, there is no easy to locating the Indo-European homeland;
there is no certain solution (Mallory and Adams 2006, p. 453,).â
Mallory, J. P., and Adams, D. Q. (2006). The Oxford Introduction to
Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Given this situation the Indian Homeland Theory (IHT) remains a very
viable candidate.
M. Kelkar