SV: method of dating RV, III

[N. Ganesan]

>I'd just like to register my support for Miguel Carrasquer Vidal's
>critique of Drew's eccentric dating of the PIE breakup [as well as
>Drew's strange insistence on a well-planned and highly organized
invasion
>of the known world by PIE speakers!]. I'd also like to thank MCV for
his
>overview of the commonly accepted version among scholars, as seen for
>example in Mallory.


David Anthony, in his 1996 article, Shards of Speech says:
"Terms for wheel, axle and draft pole, and a verb meaning 'to go or
convey in a vehicle' suggest that PIE existed as a single language
after 3500 B.C., when wheeled vehicles were invented. PIE must have
begun to disintegrate before 2000 B.C.: by 1500 B.C. three of its
daughter languages - Greek, Hittie and Indic - had become quite
dissimilar. Altogether, then the linguistic evidence points to a
homeland between the Ural and Caucasus mountains, in the centuries
between 3500 and 2000 B.C."

The lower limit of Anthony's PIE breakup date is 2000 B.C. which is
closer to Drews' date. To an outsider like me, it looks as though
Anthony, like Drews, is saying that IE spread is mainly due
to chariotry.

Regards,
N. Ganesan




> From     Chariot racers of the Steppes. by Shanti Menon.
         Discover, April 1995 v16 n4 p30(2)

<<<<<<<<<<<
                 That would support Anthony's views on a much broader
                 question--that of the origin and spread of
                 Indo-European languages. According to a theory that has
                 become popular in the past two decades, the
                 proto-Indo-Europeans were farmers who began to spread
out
                 of Anatolia around 6000 B.C., taking their language and
                 their agriculture with them. But Anthony holds to an
older
                 theory, which says the original Indo-Europeans were
                 horsemen from north of
                 the Black Sea--the people whose wagons appear to be
                 ancestral to the Sintashta chariots. The Sintashta
                 people, he thinks, were the original speakers of
                 Indo-Iranian, which later gave rise to ancient Iranian
                 and to the Indic of the Rig Veda. Theirs was an early
                 step in the spread of Indo-European language and
culture.

                 And the key to that spread, according to Anthony, was
                 wagons and chariots. In all Indo-European languages, he
                 points out, from Celtic to Sanskrit, the words for
axle,
                 wagon, and wheel derive from common roots in the
                 proto-Indo-European that has been reconstructed by
                 linguists. Clearly, Anthony says, speakers of
                 proto-Indo-European must have been familiar with
wheeled
                 vehicles, which weren't invented until after 3500 B.C.
                 "The out-of-Anatolia theory is too early," he says. "It
                 would require Indo-European languages to be widely
                 dispersed across Eurasia 2,000 years before the
invention
                 of wheeled vehicles." Far more logical, Anthony thinks,
                 is to see things this way: when the
proto-Indo-Europeans
                 and their descendants entered Europe and South Asia,
                 carrying their language and their customs with them,
they
                 traveled on wheels.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>




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