Re: beyond languages: Mitanni and Rg-Vedic chronology

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "fournet.arnaud"
<fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:

> > 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.

I said "most" Euro languages, including and esp. those which, unlike
Italian and Spanish, did *not* border on the Arabic speech area, such
as Dutch, Swedish, Latvian etc. This merely illustrates the simple
phenomenon that a language can have influence far beyond its borders
if only it is the vehicle of something worthwhile in the economic,
technological, religious etc. field.

> ===========
> > 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.

You don't know that, as you yourself admit in the next sentence:

> 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.<

In the first case, IE is an adstrate. It's only a substrate if in
the interaction of the two languages under consideration, it was the
original language of the population concerned. In the second case,
with IA immigrants entering Uralic territory and getting assimilated,
it's a substrate. And even in the first case, chances are that
(unlike in the case of the Arabic loan words discusse above) the IA
contribution only came about because native IA speakers actually
moved into the Mordvin territory.

> ==========
>
> > > 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.
>

In the Koran and Hadith, practically all the names of people in
Bahrain or Yemen are Arabic. Arabic was already there, it didn't
need to expand to there anymore. As for the small theough important
border area on the Euphrates, with Babylon, its arabicization is a
fact though it was no big deal, swapping one Semitic dialect for
another. But for well over 90% of the territory concerned, Arabic
expansion was to the northwest of its heartland.

Anyway, my whole point was that the reasons why IE expanded the way
it did (possibly starting in India and moving northwest, and for the
non-IA branches *only* northwest) is due to contingent historical
factors. There is no law of nature that determines a uniform pattern
of language expansion that, since it is found in the case of Arabic
therefore must also apply to the case of IE. Therefore, the
discovery of some expansion pattern in the case of some other
language can never constitute an argument to decide the expansion
pattern of IE.

> And PIE did the same,
> Expansion in all directions.
>

That is entirely dependent on which place was the starting-point.
Which is precisely what we're looking for, eventhough some think that
the answer has already been definitively established. BG Tilak and
some Ahnenerbe authors thought that IE originated in the Arctic,
whence it expanded south and only south. They were wrong, but not
because their expansion scenario was unidirectional.

> And when Indic enters India,
> It did the same, expansion in all directions.
>

It did. And that too because of contingent historical factors, one
of them (dare I say it?) the fact that it had become the vehicle of a
superior culture. That at any rate is how its neighbours saw it,
such as the East- and South-Indian kings who invited Brahmins to
settle in order to confer some Vedic sanction on their dynasty. Or
the Kushanas, Chinese, Thai etc. who brought in Buddhism and a lot of
IA vocabulary with it.

> =========
> >> 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.
>

It was at any rate discovered by a non-Indian. Only after a bit of
debate entirely between European scholars did an Indian team of
linguists investigate the matter and confirm proto-Bangani.

> Chinese has both Indo-Aryan and Tocharian LWs.
>

Apart from Buddhist-era loans, which have little bearing on the
question at hand, could you tell us which these IA loans in Chinese
are?

> >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.
> ========

I quoted that from memory, I think from some lecture I heard in my
student days in the 1980s (when it was already common knowledge that
most Chinese terms concerning cattle-rearing were IE: ma/mare,
quan/kuon/hound, mi/melitta, niu<ngiu/gu/cow). Indeed, I can't find
it back in Karlgren. More generally, I don't have too much
confidence in the specifics of the IE-to-Chinese etymologies of Chant
Tsung-tung and his followers, their grasp of IE linguistics is a bit
shaky. Yet, some of their thesis makes sense, and their editor
Victor Mair seems to give them credit. I wouldn't build on it yet,
but it certainly merits closer verification. To be sure, an Indian
Urheimat is perfectly possible without this Chinese connection, but
it would be helpful.

>
> >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.
>

I am trying to find answers. Since you already sound like being
firmly in possession of the answer, I suppose the effort is wasted on
you. Well, I have nothing against Anatolia, but I think all the
arguments raised against Renfrew's and Gamkrelidze & Ivanov's
Anatolia theses still make sense.

Kind regards,

KE