[INDOLOGY] politics of ICHR

[Dean Michael Anderson]

Dear Koenraad,
Until a few years ago, when I got distracted by other projects, I had read all of the books and articles you suggest. Our library has a very complete Harappan and Vedic collection including copies of original archaeological reports going back at least to Marshall's original 1931 publication.
I'm familiar with the debates between Witzel and Talageri. By the way, do you have links to those? At the time they were scattered around a bit. Perhaps they've been collected by now. As you must know from reading those, since Talageri did not have formal training, he made numerous errors. He often admitted this and each successive book worked to correct them. There are, nevertheless, gaps in his theory. Some of your valuable writings have attempted to address some of them.
To date I have not seen clinching evidence for the OIT although some interesting considerations regarding the AMT have been raised. That's why I recommend to everyone the debates between Witzel and Talageri -- between the two of them they highlight some important issues.
In the final analysis, however, no one from the OIT camp has done a rigorous enough analysis of the linguistic issues to convince mainstream scholars to abandon their current paradigm. Your writings have dealt with a few of them but what it would require would be a systematic reworking of some of the foundations of Indo-European historical linguistics including, not just rules like RUKI, but to be complete, a refutation of the Laryngeal Theory. 

If the OIT supporters want to convince everyone, they should provide scholarships for one or more of their brightest students to study at the best programs in historical linguistics in the world -- while they still exist in today's rapidly corporatizing universities. Having mastered the discipline, they will then be qualified to attempt to dismantle the Indo-European edifice; if it can be done.
The only alternatives I can think of, off the top of my head, would be the deciphering of the Harappan script as an Indo-Aryan language, or the discovery in South Asia of something like a Sintashta-type chariot burial with unimpeachable provenance. Since we're fantasizing here I'd like to request that the glove box contain a copy of the Bhagavad Gita written in the Harappan script. If such a discovery were made, with or without the Gita, then I imagine the majority of the South Asian-oriented linguistic community would get on board to help rewrite the laws of linguistics.
Until this happens, the best the OIT can hope for is rearranging some of the pieces on the board. It is not a game-changer.
Best,
Dean Anderson



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