Scenario of language replacement

[Srini Pichumani]

While your counter-counterarguments is useful,  your use of the word chauvinistic
seems habitual and unnecessary.  Arun Gupta seems to be just questioning the
validity,  pedagogical or otherwise,  of Professor Asko Parpola's parallels.

-Srini.

Steve Farmer wrote:

> 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