--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "fournet.arnaud"
<fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:
>
>
> This suggestion that Mordvin could have got its Indo-Iranian
lexical
> adstrate from India is complete nonsense.
>
There's no answer to "arguments" like that. Except that there are
many languages with adstrates originating far away. Thus, most
European languages have a few dozen Arabic words (cheque, tariff,
zenith, azimuth, Betelgeuze, Aldebaran) though never bordering on the
Arabic speech area. And then we have the language that started this
whole debate, Mitanni-Hurrian, with clear Indo-Aryan inputs
originating in distant Mordvinistan according to some, distant India
according to others.
> > And it will always crash on the obvious problem that there is no
> reason why
> > IE should have only expanded toward the north-west.
> >
>
> >So what? Arabic expanded only to the northwest and west.
> ======
>
> Arabic caused Urdu to be a different language from Hindi (East)
> Arabic has given considerable LWs to Turcic (North).<
I repeat, exactly like IE, Arabic expanded from its heartland to the
northwest. In other directions it had an influence (Urdu, Swahili),
but Arabic itself only had a future in countries to Arabia's
northwest. Spanish only expanded to the southwest from Spain. It
once had a presence elsewhere and left some traces (Filipino family
names) but as a language, it only survived in countries to Spain's
southwest. This was due to a complex of contingent factors. And the
same is the case with the expansion of IE to some, and its non-
expansion to other countries.
> You are obviously trying to make things weaker than they are
> in order to make the complete absence of any early Indic impact on
its
> neighbours less absurd in your OIT.
>
Those neighbours have only a very recent history of written
representation. Most of their evolution and original forms are
invisible to us. Imagine we had to reconstruct PIE if we only had
the modern member languages to work from, and not Latin, Greek,
Gothic, Sanskrit and Hittite. Of course our reconstruction can reach
deeper if we have attested older forms. And where we do have them,
we do find IE traces near India. First of all we have the kentum
languages Tocharian near and proto-Bangani inside India. Then we
have IE (non-IA) loanwords in Chinese, as argued by a number of
Chinese-born scholars in Victor Mair's series Sino-Platonic Papers.
Mind you, we never would have noticed these if we had only had modern
Chinese to go from. There's no relation between nai, "milk", and its
posited IE pendant, Greek galak-; except for the reconstructed
ancient Chinese form *grak and its intermetiate older-Chinese forms.
Ancient Chinese can be reconstructed because writing in China is
ancient, and in spite of its non-phonetic character, we know a lot
about its pronunciation thanks to rhymes, puns, lexical explanations
and speculations, and real dictionaries since an early age. None of
that is available for Munda, Burmese, Nahali and most Dravidian
languages. They may contain well IE or ancient IA loans which have
evolved beyond all recognition.
But I agree that finding early lexical exchanges in India remains a
crucial challenge for any variety of OIT.
> > Once established in India, Indic started expanding in all
directions
> as can be expected.
> >
>
> >Indeed. Its marginal tentacles may have spread as far Mitanni and
> >Mokshaland.
==
> Its tentacles include :
>
> - Tibetan alphabet to the north
> - Chinese Fanqie system to the north-east
> - multiple LWs to the east into Austro-Asiatic languages
> - complete sanscritization of Dravidian languages.
>
> None of these languages show any sign of having been influenced by
anything
> but Indic,
> there is no Indo-european substrate in there,
> one more obvious proof that Indic arrived late in India.
>
Or the consequence of the fact that IE started small and became big
mostly after leaving India westward. And of the fact that IA
expanded to South- and East-India and then beyond to SE-Asia only
after coming into its own in North-India and acquiring a cultural and
technological superiority that allowed it to dominate its neighbours
and influence their languages.
Again, this lexical exchange with neighbouring languages is a real
challenge, but by no means a closed debate. Worldwide, the people
trained in both IE linguistics and Munda, Dravidian etc. can be
counted on the fingers of your hands. And those I know have other
professional priorities. So if nothing has been found, it must be
kept in mind that only little searching has been done.
Unfortunately, me too, I have other priorities. But the eager OIT
defenders on this list, some of whom are native Dravidian-speakers
and a few of whom even seem to know Munda languages, are hereby
invited to start the hunt for early Indo-Ayan and especially non-Indo-
Aryan Indo-European loans in those languages.
Good luck,
KE