--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
>
> So, you're saying Johanna Nichols claims that IE
> originated in India? Then why does she have an on-line
> article that claims otherwise? Post what Johanna
> Nichols says, not what your buddu claims she says.
>
That was a direct quote from Nichols I had posted. Here is another
nice review:
"Linguist Johanna Nichols of the University of California, Berkeley,
says the key to Indo-
European's ascent was the periodic movement of ancestral tongues
across central Eurasia,
beginning around 7,000 years ago. Every few thousand years, a new
language would expand
westward across the arid grasslands of central Eurasia what Nichols
calls a "spread zone."
These linguistic expansions, unaccompanied by any large population
migration, altered the
way people communicated across much of the continent.
Reconstructed family trees of various branches of Indo-European show
that these ancestral
tongues split immediately into a dozen or more "daughter" languages,
the Berkeley researcher
says. This trait signals the rapid formation of regional dialects from
an original form of speech
and is a hallmark of spread zones.
Linguistic evidence much of it derived from reconstructions of
extinct tongues points
to the spread across central Eurasia of a language family ancestral to
proto-Indo-European,
Nichols contends. Four successive spreads of Indo-European language
families followed: proto-
Indo-European around 5,500 years ago, Iranian about 4,000 years ago,
Turkic nearly 2,000
years ago, and Mongolian between 1,500 and 1,000 years ago.
Nichols places the proto-Indo-European homeland about 2,000 miles
southeast of the homeland
Anthony proposes. Various regional branchings of Indo-European
accompanied the four
major spreads, which began at different eastern points in central
Eurasia, Nichols maintains.
Eurasian peoples living to the east and toward the center of the
continent inhabited sparse,
dry landscapes that promoted nomadic animal herding and clan-based
societies, she notes.
Clans were dispersed clusters of people belonging to kinship groups
presided over by a hierarchy
of male rulers. Clan members were not necessarily biologically
related, but they claimed a
link to an ancient, often mythical ancestor.
Clans on the eastern edge of the spread zone had a military or
economic edge on their
neighbors, who spoke different languages, and these eastern clans
fomented the major linguistic
diffusions, Nichols argues.
Historical accounts, such as those describing the shift from Turkic to
Mongol, indicate that
these clan rulers often arranged alliances with their counterparts to
the west. These agreements
included a voluntary embrace by western rulers of the spreading
language, she contends.
A mixture of economic opportunism and military intimidation probably
motivated clan
leaders to accept an advancing language and its speakers' culture,
Nichols suggests.
Thus, the original Indo-Europeans may have made their linguistic mark
without any of the
cultural innovations often ascribed to them.
"They did not bring agriculture to Europe, tame the horse, invent
patriarchy and warrior
cults, or initiate the Bronze Age," Nichols asserts. "They likely had
a small competitive edge on
other steppe societies, but the main reason why their language spread
was that they happened
to be in the right place at the right time."
http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/pdfs/data/1995/147-08/14708-11.pdf
M. Kelkar
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