Indigenous Aryanism

[Vidhyanath Rao]

thompson at jlc.net (George Thompson) wrote:

> Indo-Aryan migration theorists assume that retroflexion arises in Skt.
> after the separation from the Iranians [whether due to areal influence of
> Dravidian languages or independently, i.e., internally].  The indigenous
> school will have to account for the disappearance of retroflexion in
> Iranian. How do they do this?  And do they know whether, from the point of
> view of language typology, the loss of retroflexion is more "natural" or
> common than the introduction of it as a phonemic process?

I consider myself to be a sceptic rather than an `indigenous aryan'
theorist. So I guess I should not be answering this. But, as I pointed out
just a few days back:
Intervocalic retroflexes are lost in some Central Dravidian languages.
Most Central Dravidian and NorthDravidian languages merge n/_n and .n.

Also, Assamese has lost retroflexes.

Generally speaking, if IE migrated out of India (or Indo-Iranian 
borderlands), European languages would show substratum influences, to
which we can attribute the common features of European IE languages.
Surely, European scholars are not averse in principle to
substratum influence in their own languages.

be earlier than 1800 BCE. Once you modify `Indigenous Aryan' theory
in this manner, the rest of Thomson's arguments can be countered 
by arguing that Dravidians migrated from near the Vindhyas to further
north during the third millenium BCE.