From: fournet.arnaud
Message: 58228
Date: 2008-04-30
----- Original Message -----
From: "koenraad_elst" <koenraad.elst@...>
>>
>> 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.
I beg your pardon ?
Arabic has occupied Spain for centuries.
You can trace Arabic LWs coming from two directions :
thru Spain : they bear the article al-
thru Italy : they are naked.
Arnaud
===========
> 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.
=========
No,
In the case of Mordvin
They are not coming from a distance.
In fact, there is a question to answer :
Are Mordvins Uralic people with a strong indo-aryan substrate ?
or
Are Mordvins actually Indo-aryans that have been uralicized ?
This is not a theoretical question.
I don't have a fixed answer.
The standard view is Q1.
but it's not the only way to look at it.
Arnaud
==========
> > And it will always crash on the obvious problem that there is no
> reason why IE should have only expanded toward the north-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.
No,
Arabic expanded in all directions.
Originally, it was spoken by a little tribe around Hejaz.
It has expanded east, south, north, and east.
To the point of replacing about all varieties of Semitic (expect Hebrew)
and replacing Berber and Egyptian in most places.
And PIE did the same,
Expansion in all directions.
And when Indic enters India,
It did the same, expansion in all directions.
Arnaud
=========
>> 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.
=========
I think on the basis of Balto-Slavic, Germanic, modern Greek, Romance,
We could reconstruct PIE just about as well.
And I will add that Salish is great : highly conservative of consonants.
Bangani is obviously a fraud forged to have a centum language within India's
borders.
Chinese has both Indo-Aryan and Tocharian LWs.
Arnaud
===========
>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.
=========
This reconstruction as nai3 "milk" as being **grak is absurd.
Starostin quite reasonably has *nhe?
This word exists in URalic : Moksha lof-tse > *nhe?-tsa
The connection with galak or lak is unclear and difficult.
Arnaud
========
>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.
>KE
=====
PIE started in Anatolia 15 000 years ago,
it started big,
and it had a tremendous impact everywhere
to the point that 90% of the world's languages are disappearing and are
being replaced by IE varieties.
Arnaud
==========