Re: Witzel and Sautsutras (was: Mapping the Origins and Expansion of

It's an interesting article and the Indian site pretty much plagiarized it all, but with better English.

Now, taking into account that the Iranians once putatively worshipped the Indian gods until sometime around the time of Zoroaster --or so I've read; and that the main difference with Iranian seems to be initial /s-/. Is it possible that Mittani Substrate and Sindes are descended from some branch that broke away from proto-Iranian or from Indo-Iranian?

From: Francesco Brighenti <frabrig@...>
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2012 10:30 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Witzel and Sautsutras (was: Mapping the Origins and Expansion of...)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

> An interesting place to look, which, I believe Torsten commented on
> is Crimea, for the Sindos-Meotians (vel sim). They seem to have IE
> vocabulary absent from Vedic. Their language also seem lambdic as
> opposed to Vedic rhotcisms. The term Sindos, however, seems to me an
> exonym, perhaps applied to them by peoples who identified them with
> peoples of the Indus/Sindhos valley. Has anyone done any serious
> indepth research on this group?

Cyril (Kirill) Babaev, founder of this List, once had an online article which also covered the topic of the so-called "Pontic Aryan" language(s) and the former assessments of this question by Kretschmer and Trubachov. It can be retrieved here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060712182124/http://indoeuro.bizland.com/archive/article17.html

Sindes also is the name of a river (with persisting, pre-/non-Iranian s-) mentioned by Tacitus (Annales X.10); it divides the Dahae from the Arii, and thus refers to the Merw (Murghab) or Tedzhen river.

Regards,
Francesco