Scenario of language replacement

[Steve Farmer]

Arun Gupta writes:

> In Frontline, Professor Asko Parpola gives mentions two historical cases of
> how the language of a minority displaced a majority.  Supposedly these
> parallel what happened in ancient India with the incursion of the
> Indo-Aryans.
>
> The two examples given are the British in India, and the displacement of the
> native languages in South America.  Neither case parallels what may have
> happened in ancient India because the technological gap between ingressor
> and resident was much more significant in these two examples; the ingressor
> remained vitally connected to a flourishing and
> technologically-rapidly-advancing external culture in these two examples,
> and in the case of South America, the native population was decimated by
> diseases new to them that came from Europe.

I've heard counterarguments like Arun Gupta's repeatedly, but
they always overlook a glaring problem. Indo-European languages
didn't just replace earlier languages in northern South Asia in
the second and first millennia BCE. They also replaced earlier
languages in vast portions of Eurasia, including of course
Anatolia, Greece, and the Italian peninsula. The Indian problem
is not as unique as chauvinistic writers make it out to be.

Steve Farmer