--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
>
> Would you mind posting this information from Johanna
> Nichols you refer to? I assume J. is for Johanna not
> for Jocser, right?
>
>
> ____Here is review of Nichols' work by Talageri (2000).
"Nichols determines the location of �the epicentre of the
Indo-European linguistic spread� primarily on the basis of an
examination of loan-words from Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent of
West Asia.
As she points out, loan-words from this region must have spread out
via three trajectories (or routes):
�To Central Europe via the Bosporus and the Balkans, to the western
steppe via the Caucasus... and eastward via Iran to western Central
Asia��100
�The first step in specifying a locus for the IE homeland is to narrow
it down to one of these three trajectories, and that can be done by
comparing areal Wanderw�rter in the IE cultural vocabulary to those of
other language families that can be located relative to one or another
trajectory in ancient times.�101
Therefore, Nichols examines loan-words from West Asia (Semitic and
Sumerian) found in Indo-European and in other families like Caucasian
(separately Kartvelian, Abkhaz-Circassian and Nakh-Daghestanian), and
the mode and form of transmission of these loan-words into the
Indo-European family as a whole as well as into particular branches;
and combines this with the evidence of the spread of Uralic and its
connections with Indo-European.
After a detailed examination, her final conclusions about the locus or
epicentre of the Indo-European linguistic spread are as follows:
�Several kinds of evidence for the PIE locus have been presented here.
Ancient loanwords point to a locus along the desert trajectory, not
particularly close to Mesopotamia and probably far out in the eastern
hinterlands. The structure of the family tree, the accumulation of
genetic diversity at the western periphery of the range, the location
of Tocharian and its implications for early dialect geography, the
early attestation of Anatolian in Asia Minor, and the geography of the
centum-satem split all point in the same direction: a locus in western
central Asia. Evidence presented in Volume II supports the same
conclusion: the long-standing westward trajectories of languages point
to an eastward locus, and the spread of IE along all three
trajectories points to a locus well to the east of the Caspian Sea.
The satem shift also spread from a locus to the south-east of the
Caspian, with satem languages showing up as later entrants along all
three trajectory terminals. (The satem shift is a post-PIE but very
early IE development). The locus of the IE spread was therefore
somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana.�102
This linguistic evidence thus fits in perfectly with the literary and
other evidence examined by us in this book, and with the theory
outlined by us.
Nichols� analysis lovers three concepts:
1. The Spread Zone: �The vast interior of Eurasia is a linguistic
spread zone - a genetic and typological bottleneck where many genetic
lines go extinct, structural types tend to converge, a single language
or language family spreads out over a broad territorial range, and one
language family replaces another over a large range every few
millennia��103
2. The Locus: �The locus is a smallish part of the range which
functions in the same way as a dialect-geographical centre: an
epicentre of sorts from which innovations spread to other regions and
dialects, and a catchpoint at which cultural borrowings and linguistic
loanwords entered from prestigious or economically important foreign
societies to spread (along with native linguistic innovations) to the
distant dialects. If an innovation arose in the vicinity of the
locus, or a loanword entered, it spread to all or most of the family;
otherwise, it remained a regionalism. Diversification of daughter
dialects in a spread zone takes place far from the locus at the
periphery, giving the family tree a distinctive shape with many major
early branches, and creating a distinctive dialect map where genetic
diversity piles up at the periphery. These principles make it possible
to pinpoint the locus in space more or less accurately even for a
language family as old as IE. Here it will be shown that the locus
accounting for the distribution of loanwords, internal innovations and
genetic diversity within IE could only have lain well to the east of
the Caspian Sea.�104
As we have already seen, the specific location is �in the vicinity of
Bactria-Sogdiana�.105
�The central Eurasian spread zone (Figure 8.4), as described in Volume
II, was part of a standing pattern whereby languages were drawn into
the spread zone, spread westward, and were eventually succeeded by the
next spreading family. The dispersal for each entering family
occurred after entry into the spread zone. The point of dispersal for
each family is the locus of its proto-homeland, and this locus
eventually is engulfed by the next entering language. Hence in a
spread zone the locus cannot, by definition, be the point of present
greatest diversity (except possibly for the most recent family to
enter the spread zone). On the contrary, the locus is one of the
earliest points to be overtaken by the next spread.�106
Further, �the Caspian Sea divides westward spreads into steppe versus
desert trajectories quite close to the locus and hence quite early in
the spread.�107
3. The Original Homeland: �Central Eurasia is a linguistic bottleneck,
spread zone, and extinction chamber, but its languages had to come
from somewhere. The locus of the IE spread is a theoretical point
representing a linguistic epicentre, not a literal place of ethnic or
linguistic origin, so the ultimate origin of PIE need not be in the
same place as the locus. There are several linguistically plausible
possibilities for the origin of Pre-PIE. It could have spread
eastward from the Black Sea steppe (as proposed by Mallory 1989 and by
Anthony 1991, 1995), so that the locus formed only after this spread
but still very early in the history of disintegrating PIE� It could
have come into the spread zone from the east as Mongolian, Turkic, and
probably Indo-Iranian did. Or it could have been a language of the
early urban oases of southern central Asia.�108
Thus, the linguistic evidence fully confirms our theory of an original
homeland in India, an exit-point in Afghanistan, and two streams of
westward emigration or expansion.
"________________________________________________________________________________
> Be a better friend, newshound, and
> know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.
http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ
>