From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 53310
Date: 2008-02-15
----- Original Message -----
From: "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 10:41 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Meaning of Aryan: now, "white people"?
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@...>
wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@>
> wrote:
>
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > 1. the early habitat of Proto-Indo-Iranians was in an area
close
> > > to the Central Asian steppe-taiga interface, e.g., near the
> > > Urals;
> > >
> > > 2. these Proto-Indo-Iranians called themselves *arya-.
> >
> > "Indo-Iranian" is a linguistic idea. It does not refer to any
> > actual people who can be traced back into history. See Lamberg-
> > Karlovsky 2005.pdf and Proto-Indo-European Reality and
> > reconstruction.pdf
>
>
> I've read for the nth timesince 2005 the conclusions of LK's paper
> linked to above, and this is, in short, what I think of his
> arguments:
>
> 1) The BMAC and the cultures of the Andronovo archaeol. horizon may
> have shared common ancestors: NO.
>
> 2) The BMAC people(s) may have been Indo-Iranian speakers: NO --
the
> languages of the BMAC, at least some of them, may have belonged to
> the Macro-Caucasian super-phylum as the present-day Burushos of
> Northern Pakistan.
>
> 3) Absence of Andronovo-type artifacts in Iran and NW South Asia
> versus presence of BMAC-type artifacts in the same areas (2nd mill.
> BCE): this can be explained if one accepts Mallory's Kulturkugel
> model.
>
> 4) The Andronovans and/or the BMAC folks may have spoken Dravidian
> and/or Altaic and/or Uralic languages: HARDLY SO!!
>
> 5) Trubetskoy's and Dixon's "innovative" models based on linguistic
> convergence, linguistic areas, and equilibrium versus the "old-
> fashioned" comparativist model based on linguistic divergence,
> family trees, and migrations: BULLSHIT!
>
> 5) "Anti-migrationist" comparison between Henning's attempt to
> identify the Guti of ancient Mesopotamia with the Yuezhi of Chinese
> chronicles and the ongoing scholarly attempts to identify the
> Andronovans with the Indo-Iranians: MORE BULLSHIT!
>
> The truth is that, in spite of his claims, LK largely neglects
> linguistic evidence from 2nd mill. BCE Central Asia and the
> steppe/taiga belt of Eurasia. He, for instance, doesn't see the
> layering and distribution of the oldest Indo-Iranian languages and
> their overlap with Uralic, insisting on the idea that "language and
> archaeology do not corrlate" insted.
>
> Rehards,
> Francesco
Either you really don't get it or you are being willfully ignorant.
The layering of the oldest IIr languages, the relative dates of those
layers and their presumed overalp with Uralic in Central Asia is
itself based on the archaeological idenfitcation of certain cultures
as IIr which he is DENYING.
The borrowings from Uralic to IE are quite compatible with an Indian
homeland scenerio.
"Imagine the first waves of emigrants from India, taking most of the
ancestor-dialects of the various branches of the IE family with them,
through the Oxus valley to the Wolga plain and beyond. With the
exception of Tokharic which remained in the area, they did not come
in contact with Uralic, or when they did, they linguistically
swallowed this marginal Uralic-speaking population without allowing
it much substratal influence. Only the Slavic branch of IE shows
some substratal influence from Uralic (and even this is disputed), a
fact which is neatly compatible with an India-to-Europe migration: an
Uralic-speaking tribe in the peri-Caspian region got assimilated in
the westwardly expanding IE-speaking population.
It was the Iranians who came in contact with Uralic on a large scale,
partly because they filled up the whole of Central Asia and (in the
Scythian expansion) even Eastern Europe as far as Western Ukraine and
Belarus, where an older Slavic population subsisted and adopted a lot
of Iranian vocabulary, just as the Uralic population to its northeast
did; and partly because the Uralic-speaking people were moving
westward through the Urals region in a movement parallel to the
Iranian westward expansion. At any rate, the Iranian influence is
uncontroversial and easily compatible with any IE Urheimat scenario.
But how do the seemingly indo-Aryan words fit in? One possibility is
that these words were imparted to Uralic by non-Iranian, Indo-Aryan-
speaking emigrants from India at the time of the great catastrophe in
about 2000 BC, when the Saraswati river dried up and many of the
Harappan cities were abandoned. This catastrophe triggered
migrations in all directions: to the Malabar coast, to India�s
interior and east, to West Asia by sea (the Kassite dynasty in
Babylon in ca. 1600 BC venerated some of the Vedic gods)21, and to
Central Asia. The Sanskrit terms in the Mitannic language attested
in Kurdistan in the 15th century BC seem to be a leftover of an Indo-
Aryan presence in West Asia, which presupposes an earlier Indo-Aryan
migration through (an already predominantly Iranian-speaking) Central
Asia. A similar emigrant group may have ended up in an Uralic-
speaking environment, imparting some of its own terminology but
getting assimilated over time, just like their Mitannic cousins. The
Uralic term orya, �slave�, from either Iranian airya or
Sanskrit
Arya, may indicate that their position was not as dignified as that
of the Mitannic horse trainers.
An alternative possibility is that the linguistic exchange between
Proto-Uralic and Iranian took place at a much earlier stage, before
Iranian had grown distinct from Indo-Aryan. It is by no means a new
suggestion that these seemingly Indo-Aryan words are in fact Indo-
Iranian, i.e. dating back to before the separation of Iranian from
Indo-Aryan, or in effect, before the development of typical
iranianisms such as the softening of [s] to [h]. This would mean
that the vanguard of the Iranian emigration from India had not yet
changed asura and sapta into ahura and hafta, and that Iranian
developed its typical features (some of which it shares with Armenian
and Greek, most notably the said [s]>[h] shift) outside India. This
tallies with the fact (admittedly only an argument e silentio) that
the Vedic reports on struggles with Iranian tribes such as the Dasas
and the Panis (attested in Greco-Roman sources as the East-Iranian
tribes Dahae and Parnoi), the Pakthas (Pathans?), Parshus
(Persians?), Prthus (Parthians?) and Bhalanas (Baluchis?) never
mention any term or phrase or name with typically features.22
Even the stage before Indo-Iranian unity, viz. when Indo-Iranian had
not yet replaced the PIE kentum forms with its own satem forms, may
already have witnessed some lexical exchanges with Uralic: as, Asko
Parpola has pointed out, among the IE loans m Uralic, we find a few
terms in kentum form which are exclusively attested in the Indo-
Iranian branch of IE, e.g. Finnish kehrä, �spindle�, from PIE
*kettra, attested in Sanskrit as cattra.23 It is of course also
possible that words like *kettra once did exist in branches other
than Indo-Iranian but disappeared in the intervening period along
with so many other original PIE words which were replaced by non-IE
loans or new IE formations. If kettra was indeed transmitted to
Uralic by early Indo-Iranian, it may have been as a result of trade
instead of migration, for the Indus basin was an advanced
manufacturing centre which exported goods deep into Central Asia.
This leads us to a third possibility, viz. that the seemingly Indo-
Aryan words in Uralic were transmitted by long-distance traders,
regardless of migrations, possibly even at a fairly late date. They
may have been pure Indo-Aryan, as distinct from Iranian, normally
spoken only in India itself, but brought to the Uralic people by
means of long-distance trade, regardless of which languages were
spoken in the territory in between, somewhat like the entry of Arabic
and Persian words in European languages during the Middle Ages (e.g.
tariff, cheque, bazar, douane, chess). If we see India in the 3rd
millennium BC as the mighty metropolis whose influence radiated deep
into Central Asia (as archaeology suggests)24, this cannot be ruled
out. At any rate, I believe I have shown enough possible ways to
reasonably reconcile the lexical exchange between the eastern IE
languages and Uralic with an Indian Urheimat scenario (Elst 2000)."
M. Kelkar
>