[tied] Re: Grimm's Law is about to expire (Collinge 1985, p. 267, T

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gąsiorowski <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
> >
>
>
> “Many 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 “ancestral cultures,” 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).”
> “Although 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 “wave of advance” 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,).”
>
> 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
>

Another quote; same source.


"As both theories explain the Asian Indo-Europeans in the same manner,
there is no dispute there although it does militate against one of the
most attractive aspects of the `wave of advance'. The archaeological
evidence for an expansion from the steppelands across historical Iran
and India varies from meager to total absence: both the Anatolian and
the Kurgan theory find it extraordinarily difficult to explain the
expansion of Indo-European languages over a vast area of urbanized
Asia populations, approximately the same area as that of Europe. To
assert, as some supporters of the `Wave of Advance' theory do, that
only a major change such as agriculture could explain the distribution
of Indo-European languages does seem to be contradicted by their own
models. In terms of the Europeans west of the Black Sea, the
Neolithic model provides a larger area for Indo-Europeanization, i.e.
both south-east and central Europe. The steppe model is not nearly so
secure for explaining central Europe. As for the peripheries of
Europe, both confront analogous problems of language shift (Mallory
and Adams 2006, pp. 462-3)."


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.

M. Kelkar