--- 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?
Also see a summary of Nichols 1997 from Elst 2000.
"More promising though far more complicated is the analysis by Nichols
(1997) of the transmission of loans in and around Mesopota�mia, also
taking the three Caucasian families into account. Of the latter, the
two northern ones show little lexical exchange with IE, which pleads
against a Pontic homeland. On the basis of these "loanword
trajectories" through different languages, esp. of Mesopotamian
cultural terms including those discussed above, Nichols (1997:1�27)
finds that in the 4th millennium BC, "Abkhaz-Circassian and
Nakh-Daghes�tanian are in approximately their modern locations, and
Kartvelian and IE are to the east". More precisely, Kartvelian is
"likely to have emanated from somewhere to the south-east of the
Caspian" while the "locus of IE was farther east and farther north"
(1997:128),-- which can only be Bactria.
Whether Bactria was the homeland in its own right or merely a
launching-pad for Indians trekking west remains to be seen. But if
Nichols' findings, as yet based on a limited corpus of data, could be
corroborated further, it would generally help the OIT."
M. Kelkar
>
>
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