Gerry:
>Dear Glennie,
>Who is locating "the homeland"
north of the Black Sea other than
>Madame Kuzmina (likely built on info
from Gimbutas who placed it in
>the Russian Steppe)?
The sane
people :)
GRW: Ah me Glennie! You are in rare
form. And where do the less-sane people locate the
homeland?
>Ivanov and Gamkrelidze locate the Indo-Iranian
motherland in western Iran.
That's nice. They also posit ludicrous
phonemes that haven't gained
acceptance
at all, and their glottalic
idea, while typologically reasonable, doesn't
guarantee that the final
stage of IE had ejectives. It remains on the fringe
of IE studies. When
spoken in comparison to other IE theories, it is most
often mentioned as a
side-note or an afterthought.
GRW: OK. I'll (for the moment) accept
Ivanov and Gamkrelidze as presenting a fringe hypothesis for the origins of
IE.
>John Croft
'Nuff said. John's ideas are very
unique to the world. John seems to be deep
into the archaeology but hasn't
shown any deep understanding of IE
morphology
last time I checked. When
speaking of the IE language, there has to be a
knowledge of the language
first, archaeology second, not vice versa. Sorry,
John. Just my
sharp-tongued opinions again.
GRW: Thus your conflict with John Croft has
to do with linguistics vs archaeology. Are you perhaps claiming that
linguistics can exist without archaeology?
>Renfrew has
placed it in Turkey and Lamberg-Karlovsky in Pakistan.
But the question
is why anyone would place it there. Anatolian peoples
appear to be from
elsewhere, displacing original inhabitants of the area.
You'd expect
loanwords back and forth between IE and other Anatolian
languages but where
are they??
GRW: IMO, anyone trying to "pinpoint" an
area in which to locate the I-E is barking up the wrong tree. Are you
familiar with Mallory's recent presentations? Heard him speak last week
at Stanford and he proposes a "huge" stretch of area in which I-E was located
(plus he didn't even use evidence from China).
>Polosmak
has placed it in the Altai.
Well, then. Who are we to argue with
Polo... Polo-who? Nobody places it in
the Altai Mountains unless they want
to be funny or lunatic.
GRW: What's wrong with the Altai? The
archaeological evidence is there.
>In a recent lecture at
Stanford, J.P. Mallory identified the Indo-European
>homeland not as a
single geographic spot but as a sweeping swatch of land
>extending from
Ireland/GB in the north to N. Africa in the south and
>extending across
Eurasia (via Egypt and the Middle East) to the Altai,
>Mongolia, and
Russia. He didn't include China or other East
Asian
>countries.
And that is the least sensical of all since the
IE language must surely have
been in a localized area at one time for it to
be a parent of the
languages now in Europe and India! How on earth could a
language stay
cohesive across such a broad area? Get real.
GRW: You may have a point. The IE in
its grand spread *could* have been located over a broad swatch of territory
(as Mallory presents) yet each valley in that territory will have a
sub-language (dialect). It is my opinion that language operates *both*
over a vast swatch of territory while at the same time having distinct
dialects that are area (valley) specific.
- love
gLeN
Love & Kisses,
Gerry