Re: Hindu noise-makers, Elst and OIT -- a review of book by Harald

 I am not going to pretend to know much of anything about the Indo- parts of the Indo-European language family. But I do know highly selective data plucking and overly smoothed expressions of what those data say.

This is an example of such:

Thus, at least a dozen Indo-Europeanists have given me as their very first reason for rejecting the OIT that the homeland can't be at the far end of the area of expansion (whereas the Volga is neatly in the middle). But in fact, starting an expansion from a far corner is the rule rather than the exception: Austronesian (ca. Taiwan > south), Bantu (ca. Nigeria > southeast), Amerind (Canada > south), Turkic (western Mongolia > west); Russian (ca. Kiev > east), Arabic (Arabia < west). This is of course not enough to prove the OIT, but it undermines one of the common assumptions behind the AIT, 

I'm not going to go through them all. But let's take Russian.

First, Russian is part of the Slavic language family. This family likely originated somewhere in what is now Poland or Belarus, which is northwest of Kiev.

From this location, it migrated in every direction - north as far as north can go (i.e., the Kola Peninsula), west (Czech Rep), southwest (Balkans), south-southeast (Ukraine), and west (modern Russia).

Now let's take Russian. The Kiev region is a small area, but that's ok, because languages generally start in a small area. But to claim that Russian spread west only is blatantly false.

From the Kiev region, it spread south toward the Black Sea, southeast heading toward the Caspian, southwest heading toward Moldova aka Bessarabia. It also spread east (southeast, northeast) to other parts of Ukraine, Belarus. And north, northwest to Kola, the modern Russia core territories, and then through Siberia and to the Russian Far East. This was generally an eastward progression, but eastward from Moscow, not Kiev. And only generally. When large rivers were encountered it spread north, mostly, because that is the way rivers flow in Asiatic Russia, but also in a southerly route as rivers permitted. It also took a hook south-southeast into what we can generalize as Manchuria. And northeast/east to Alaska.

Two things are notable, however. To the east of Kiev is an area where Russian faced some of its greatest difficulties expanding to. Too many Turkic tribes already living there. Beyond that, more Turkic tribes, then Mongols of various ethnicities.

Second, we are playing games with time as well as distance. We are dealing with about 1500 years here. Long enough that Russia was no longer spoken in Ukraine, with similar linguistic differentiation in other areas of eastern Europe.

Russian returned to Ukraine in a not-very-friendly manner from roughly the late 17th century onward. In between, cities like Moscow and Novgorod became the centers of the Russian language. Again, there was little expansion out of the core cultural region until the 17th century. It was then that Russian explorers went north to found Arkhangelsk on the White Sea. Then that they began their long battle to the Pacific, requiring many wars against the Turkic and Mongol peoples who were already occupying locations such as Kazan and Samara.

Ultimately, the invention of the railroad was needed to successfully get Russian moved eastward. Until then, it arguably had as much success expanding north, south, and west as it did east.

The rule is that languages expand as a consequence of cultural expansion. They will generally attempt to expand in every direction possible. Certain things will hinder expansion. Geography and other cultures powerful enough to resist the expansion are the two major factors. There is also culture - unless you are a member of a culture with domesticated animals that you can ride on, or have agriculture, you generally don't have an expansionist policy due to absence of resources.

So what made Russian stop expanding west compared to east? Germanic peoples, and to a lesser extent, Baltic peoples. South? Ottoman Empire. Often with the support of various Germanic groups. What worked in favor in the east? After the Turkic groups in the relatively near eastern region from the Russian core (i.e., up to the Urals), the weather was terrible and the population was mostly subsistence hunter gatherers in small groups without coordinated governments. They're still there. They just have been given restricted access to the areas where the major rivers and the railroads are.

The furthest southeast was much harder. Manchuria was full of Manchus and other Tungustic peoples. And there were Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans to contend with as well. The result was lots of wars. Relationships there are still not so good. Competing claims over territories.

Northeast, nomadic tribes. So far east it's west, Alaska, was sold. Russian expansion east stopped. But if you live in a major city in the American east coast or Great Lakes area, you know that Russian expansion west has not stopped.

We can play similar games with other languages. For example, Arabic. I'm pretty sure that Iraq is not west of Arabia. I am also sure that what we know as Arabic was not spoken throughout what we now call the Arabian peninsula at the time of the Koranic expansion. Again, this is common. Languages expand from a small territory. But again, with Arabic, we can't go west. We have to go north and then west. Then we might go north again (Spain). We might take boats south along the African coasts (and Nile River) and across the Arabian Sea to India and beyond (Indonesians did not spontaneously become a Muslim nation. Nor did the Kazakhs. Neither group are west of Arabia).

Similarly, Turkey is rather far south of western Mongolia. And under the Ottomans, it went into a period of expansion south to Arabia, and famously to the walls of Vienna. Then it was pushed back.

Also, the further you go back in history, the greater the difficulty in determining whether a group of people is Turkic, Mongol, Tungustic, or otherwise. Since these groups were nomadic throughout most of history, the information comes from the people they invaded. The Slavs and the Chinese were not incredibly skilled at distinguishing among the men on horses that were attempting to kill them and ride off with their valuables. And the apparent lack of expansion of Turkic peoples to the east rather than west may very well be due to the Chinese being more skilled at repelling invaders. Or having a large belt of desert between them and north central Asia, and building a large wall.

Eurasia north of the Himalayas has had so many ebbs and flows of Slavs, Mongols, Turks, Chinese, Manchus, Persians and many other peoples (even Greeks) that it is extremely overly simplistic to say that any particular group expanded in any particular direction without being much more specific about the group, the locations, and the time.

And Amerind? It spread 10000 miles from northwestern Canada to populate two continents and hundreds of offshore islands, yet is considered to have just expanded south. Amerind expanded in all directions possible. Pretending that the Brazilian coast is south of the Canadian Rockies requires massively distorted cartographic thinking. Let's also remember that Alaska comes before Canada, and would be west, not south, of the route taken by the proto-Amerinds. Who came from northeast Asia, also not south of Canada. When, exactly, did Amerind become a group separate from the northeast Asian languages it is descended from? Again, without some sort of specificity of dates, we can play around with the information until we get our desired result.

OK, we have two left. Bantu spread with the development of advanced agriculture and metallurgy. It expanded  because the peoples already living there did not have these technologies. However, it is again rather crude to consider the bulk of Subsaharan Africa as "southeast" of Nigeria. Kenya and South Africa are a few thousand miles apart.

Bantu did not expand north because of the Sahara Desert. It did not do so well in the Nile region due to the presence of cultures with technology equivalent or better than the Bantu. Even this ignores important details - there were non-Bantu groups who survived the Bantu expansion, including those who moved into or already lived in regions where Bantu agriculture and metallurgy were not feasible. Bantu expansion was also halted and forced to retreat by the expansion of people with better technology, Europeans.

Austronesian: Again, rather crude to refer to Madagascar and Tonga as being south of Taiwan. And the most likely reason for a lack of expansion to the north and west was the existence of more advanced (technologically), more populous, and more politically organized cultures. In particular, the culture that would conquer Taiwan, the Chinese.