Non-IE loans

[Koenraad Elst]

Prof. Witzel,

If you want to keep yes-no-ing, go ahead, but I will repeat it only once: I
did not misquote you.  Let interested readers turn to the passages
themselves and see for themselves that both your and Erdosy's statements
pertain to a school of thought to which Talageri belongs (as is well-known
and as you yourselves have confirmed by mentioning him in that context).
But I admit you did not denounce Talageri alone.  However, denouncing the
whole school rather than one individual is not necessarily an improvement
(compare: "Robert Maxwell was a swindler" with "Jews are swindlers").

You impute motives when you say off-hand that I get "excited" about possible
"foreign" origins of language and culture in Panjab.  That I have nothing
against foreign origins is shown precisely by my rejection of the AIT:
Euro-nationalists decry me as "sell-out to the political corrrectness
brigade" and such things for "subordinating" white Europeans to brown Asians
which my sympathy for the out-of-India theory of IE.  And my position does
not follow from "excitement".  I used to be an AIT believer like yourself,
until the evidence made me look at the alternatives.


That early Dravid-IA exchanges indicate village life does indeed argue
against the identification of Vedic with Harappan, but not of Vedic and
pre-Harappan, which is the most common position among AIT skeptics.

More on the linguistic aspects in more peaceful times.

Yours sincerely,
Koenraad Elst
http://members.xoom.com/KoenraadElst/