Tampering with history

[Jacob Baltuch]

Lars Martin Fosse wrote:

>If the Aryan languages didn't come from India,
>they would have to have entered the subcontinent, and to be carried there by
>a group of people large enough to make a real impact.

My reading of Palaniappan's (as usual) excellent latest posting is that
"large enough" is so poorly defined as to become almost meaningless.
His example gives a group of 0.15 to 0.7 percent of the total population
(his sample, and note, not historical, figures) having a real cultural
and linguistic impact, to the point, if I understand him correctly,
of making Malayalam a language distinct of Tamil. So how large is "large
enough" for you? What do you have in mind as a figure for the number of
Aryans entering India?

>I suspect that by the
>year 1000 BCE, Northern India was a bit like Latin America 300 years ago:
>Lots of Europeans streaming in, mostly Spanish speaking, and confronting the
>local populations.

You must have a decidedly personal view of what happened in Latin
America. Using one of the numerous European colonial enterprises as
an analogy for how Aryans entered India brings us back to the image
of the conquering Aryan riding in and enslaving the indigenous popu-
lation. And I thought that stuff was history.