New Message (aryan invasion)

[Luis Gonzalez-Reimann]

At 07:47 PM 12/5/96 GMT, Peter J. Claus wrote:

> 
>Robert J. Zydenbos's use of shop signs as an indicator
>of language use (the language situation) in Bangalore
>and Raja's reply to it make interesting reading not
>only for the discussion context in which they were
>intended, but also (perhaps) for some of the other
>discussions on this LIST over the past year, and
>particularly the recurent one on the Indus
>Valley/Indigenous Aryan controversy.
> 
>It suggests great research project in 'ethno-
>archeology' assessing the relationship between language
>and culture as found in cryptic material cultural
>remains.  A really thorough contemporary study might
>give useful leads to archeologists 5,000 years from now
>on the English Invasion of India.  Surely they would
>otherwise come to the conclusion that there was a swift
>and massive movement of people from a small island
>thousands of miles away in an armada dwarfing anything
>the Spanish had amassed only a century earlier.  And
>did they proliferate! [Of course it might be argued the
>other way around, that the English, coming from India
>(where we can see from the signs a language clearly
>emerging), invaded the rest of the world...]


Good point!
But I would suggest another comparison, this time to the spread of Spanish
in Latin America.  This is more recent and, obviously, better documented.
It was a combination of military conquest (in the earlier stages),
settlement (at first mainly by men), intermarriage (well, not really, rather
white Spanish men having children with dark-skinned native women) and
gradual acculturation, shall we say "Spanishization," to coin a familiarly
sounding term.

Luis Gonzalez-Reimann
University of California, Berkeley