Sanskrit and PIE

[Heike Boedeker]

At Wed, 6 Sep 2000 23:49:33 +0100,  Arun Gupta <suvidya at WORLDNET.ATT.NET> 
wrote:
>...
>Either the RV people did not encounter any significant number of 
>non-Indo-Europeans for any significant period of time before composition 
>of the RV,

Not necessarily: this assumed that groups of speakers met as if they were 
individual persons (which, of course, is the Bion'ian identification of the 
group with the mother's body) who then as a rule exchanged linguistic 
elements and/or structures, just as people otherwise exchange greetings, 
goods, influenza viruses, whatever.

>or the RV people had some exceptionally strong protection of language in 
>their culture that kept them from borrowing from non-Indo-European 
>languages after such encounters.

Likewise not necessarily: it merely means "they" (to accept this shortcut 
for the time being) didn't engage in interactions with identifiable non-IE 
speaking groups which had left linguistic traces (i.e. it does not mean 
they needn't have had any such interactions...).

>Other Indo-European language incursions into much more urbanized and 
>smaller non-IE areas (e.g. Hittite) show the influence of non-IE.

The Hittites, or actually the Anatolian branch, had quite an exceptional 
love of "going native" (very much more than the Greeks which had been 
mentioned on this list in similar contexts), and esp. the Hittites had been 
exposed to Mesopotamian types of culture where they i.a. picked up a ductus 
of cuneiform writing close to Old Babylonian before they moved north 
towards their classical habitats in Anatolia, then being forced to use 
writing on a larger scale, but also e.g. in their way of writing history 
displaying a style of their own which meets our present-day criteria of 
accurateness very much better.

>It seems incredible that Indo-Aryans could have effected a total language 
>replacement over a much wider area, much less urban area, much larger 
>population without any effect on their language unless possibility 3. or 
>possibility 5. applies.

Why not simply go with what is historically attested? Namely that there is 
no such cultural continuity as in the Hittite case? The IAs needen't have 
behaved like the Hittites, or even at least like the Greeks, simply because 
they were speakers of a IE lg! It also isn't just enough to point out that 
Hattic, Minoan or the IVC were "superior cultures", obviously the IVC 
simply didn't impress them too much (for whatever reason, and be it that it 
with the climate becoming dryer around 1800 BCE was on the decline anyway).

>But if possibility 5. applies, I-E language must have been in India for a
>very long time before the RV period -- the Indus Valley civilization must
>have had as dominant language an I-E language, say from 3000 BC.

I guess this is more of opening a family-size can of worms because it means 
asking what IE means at various stages in combination with a Joh. Nichols 
type of spread-over-previous-spread idea. It allows for a regressus ad 
infinitum of PIE, Pre-PIE, Pre-PPIE etc. etc. Apart from the fact that it 
methodologically is anachronistic to recur to such a Schmidt'ian type of 
wave theory.

>Then the original IE homeland moves closer to India -- not exactly OIT, 
>but the OIT folks will be satisfied if IVC was I-E.

Again: not necessarily... to stay with Nichols' scenario, spread centers 
may shift, e.g. from IE via Iranian to Turkic and Mongolian, whereby she 
even dares to speculate whether a Pre-IE spread might have been Kartvelian 
(Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time, p.313, Fn. 3). Whereby, in a sense 
then, of course, the ultimate IE spread center would be Western Iranian, 
which gave the recent thread on Urdu/Hindi a nicely ironic spin... though, 
on a  more serious note, nicely illustrating what such an armchair model 
really might mean. On the other hand, I think, if we want to halfway 
intelligently speculate on cultural correlates, we should have a closer 
look at the South West and South East Asian centers of "Neolithic 
Revolutions", while in Central Asia there wasn't so much happening, which 
might have constantly supplied the "superior cultures" at the Eurasian 
"fringes" with constant waves of "fresh immigrants" (please note that I'm 
not simply endorsing the Gamqreli3e-Ivanov scenario). Also typologically, 
as a rule, agriculturalists do not develop out of nomads, just as nomads 
(both in the Central Asian and Ancient Near Eastern case) tend to remain 
vitally dependent on neighboring agriculturalists. Further, e.g. the mere 
fact that Kurgan I (btw, for a barbarian wild steppe bunch quite remarkably 
able for coexistance with late Dnepr-Donec and Pre-Cucuteni III) had 
domesticated horses does not warrant an assumption like that there was a 
nomadic confederation like those very much later on including Iranian, 
Turkic and Mongolian peoples, not to speak of that they were IE speaking, 
or even that PIE originated as a "koiné of the steppes".

All the best,

Heike