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

shivkhokra:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Trond Engen <trond@...> wrote:
>
>> shivkhokra:
>>
>>> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Trond Engen <trond@> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Brian M. Scott:
>>>>
>>>>> At 3:00:03 PM on Thursday, October 25, 2012, shivkhokra wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister
>>>>>> <gabaroo6958@> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> [..]
>>>>>
>>>>>>> Among items that I offered, Shiv doesn't tell why
>>>>>>> retroflexed consonant sets do not show up in IE languages
>>>>>>> that are not from the subcontinent.
>>>>>
>>>>>> For the same reason:
>>>>>
>>>>>> a) That British after living in India for many years did
>>>>>> not pick up retroflex consonants. See the hindi spelling
>>>>>> of Pune where the n is retroflex and contrast it with how
>>>>>> british wrote it.
>>>>>
>>>>> Not comparable: the British were a superficial layer of
>>>>> Indian society that maintained continuous close ties with
>>>>> England.
>>>>
>>>> Actually it's a good example, but not the way he thinks. You just
>>>> have to take it a little longer, to current Indian English. The
>>>> language of a ruling elite from outside is acquired by speakers of
>>>> local languages, who bring substrate features into the language.
>>>
>>> Are you suggesting Aryan invaders had retroflexes and they
>>> passed it onto the "native" IndianS?
>>
>> By this? No, I'm suggesting that the Indo-Aryan language acquired
>> retroflexes from the language of those ""native" Indians" who
>> shifted to the prestige language, just like contemporary Indian
>> English has acquired retroflexes from the language of those ""native"
>> Indians" who shifted to the prestige language.
>
> Have you checked how many loan words Tamil and other Dravidian
> languages have from Sanskrit? What about the reverse? Are they
> comparabale? If not how do natives have an impact on the phonology of
> the Aryan invaders?

I don't pretend to be a specialist, but I know that your first two
questions have been answered, both for Sansnkrit proper and for IA in
general. The answer to the third is that thete are many different layers
of loans both ways and with different cultural implications. Not because
I know anything particular about IA and Dravidian, but because it always is.

But I don't see how any of those questions has any bearing on the
fourth. The reasons for phonological impact is long-time contact and/or
language shift. Even in the early days after the intrusion, whatever it
was like, most speakers of Indo-Aryan languages would be descended from
the native population, who became bilingual (or added one more language
to their multilinguality) and only gradually, over generations, lost the
language of their distant grandfathers. Also after that, the Indian
subcontinent has been a region of constant cultural exchange. People
have travelled and migrated back and forth, and command of many
languages has been the norm. In such a situation, languages do pick up
features from eachother.

>>>>>> b) That people in south east asia (thailand/burma/cambodia
>>>>>> etc) who were taught religious texts both in Sanskrit and
>>>>>> Pali did not pick up retroflex consonants.
>>>>>
>>>>> Not comparable: they weren't living amongst large numbers of
>>>>> native speakers of languages with retroflex consonants.
>>>>
>>>> Are there (still) local varieties of Pali that are spoken
>>>> natively (or from childhood in certain classes) in SE Asia? If so,
>>>> those will of course be heavily influenced by local phonology.
>>>
>>> But does this explain why Thais, Burmese and Cambodians not
>>> learn retroflexes?
>>
>> The point isn't retroflexes, it's substrate.
>
> My point is that is the substrate really well understood or is it
> whole bunch of speculation?

Do we talk about India again? Obviously, on such a timescale and without
direct evidence, there's a lot that is inferred. But it's inferred from
evidence. Also, if the immediate substrate of IA is Dravidian, it's well
understood. And on a more general note, how substrates influence
intrusive languages is also well understood.

>>>>>> c) And most importantly the Gypsies who migrated out of
>>>>>> India lost their retroflex consonants once they got to
>>>>>> Europe.
>>>>>
>>>>> Because they moved into regions occupied by speakers of
>>>>> languages that did not have retroflex consonants. This is
>>>>> precisely the same reason that the Indo-Aryans acquired
>>>>> retroflex consonants.
>>>>
>>>> Or some of the reason. For Romany proper, I don't think there's
>>>> been widespread conversion of speakers in the regions it moved
>>>> into. But the case is different in many regional Romany-based
>>>> languages.
>>>
>>> What is your theory on why Romanis dropped retroflexes from
>>> their alphabet?
>>
>> Phonemic inventory, not alphabet.
>>
>> Features get lost for no specific external or internal reason, so I
>> don't know if it needs explaining. But Romany has a long history as a
>> minority language with multi-lingual speakers, and there's a lot of
>> room for socio-linguistic speculatiom, so here's one possible story:
>> Somewhere along the way, let's say in Persia, speakers of Romany were
>> disparaged by the majority and could be spotted by the substrate
>> features in their version of the majority language, just like Indic,
>> or Jamaican, or West-African features can be spotted in the British
>> English
>> spoken by minorities today. Speakers growing up in an environment
>> bent on ridding themselves of such features might have carried that
>> over to their other language.
>>
>> [On that note: It would be interesting to know if speakers aspiring
>> to "upper crust" Indian English with its hyper-britishisms carry
>> non-retroflexion ond non-rhoticity back into their versions of the
>> local languages.]
>
> But does it explain why people like William Jones would not be
> able to acquire retroflexes? They had no gun held to their head.

Was I supposed to explain William Jones? It was a speculative attempt to
explain the circumstances around the loss of retroflexes in Romany.

And what has William Jones's personal example got to do with anything
anyway? Well, maybe a little. William Jones was an adult learner and
would probably have had a Welsh/English accent in his Bengali or
Hindustani. Likewise, his native consultants likely had an Indian accent
in their English. That's a pretty common situation when two languages
come into close contact, e.g. because a new prestige language is
superimposed on an older. When two languages co-exist like that for a
long time, such accent features get incorporated into the standard. If
one of the languages eventually is lost, features from the other are
still visible as a sub- or superstrate.

>>>>>> d) Lastly do retroflex stops in Swedish and Norwegian count?
>>>>>
>>>>> For what? They're retroflex stops. They have nothing to do
>>>>> with Rick's question, however.
>>>>
>>>> But they do show that retroflexion can develop without substratal
>>>> influence.
>>>
>>> So what is your thesis on the development of retroflex in Sanskrit?
>>
>> I'm agnostic. They may have developed internally from clusters
>> involving /r/, /l/ or alveo-palato-sounds like in Scandinavian, or
>> they may have been a result of how those clusters and phonemes were
>> mapped to the phonemic inventory by Dravidian (or other Indian) new
>> speakers.
>
> Dravidian possibility is on weak ground. Have you looked at the
> Pratisakhyas?

As I said, I'm agnostic, but what have the Pratisakyas got to do with
Dravidian?

But this is getting boring. I'm quite sure you know the scientific
answers to your faux-naive questions better than I do.

--
Trond Engen