Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth

[member_23626]

That is the reality regardless of whether we see it as flawed or not!

Not to hurt the feelings of any Christians here, but if they argue that Christ is the sole begotten son of God sent to assume our sins and save us, and your argument mainly is, no, he is not, that is exactly where they want you. This is an argument they, historically speaking, almost always won.

The Hindu response to simply add a picture of Christ to the puja place and continue as before was infinitely more effective.

typical defeatist attitude.... you are going offtopic my friend

[member_23626]

That is the reality regardless of whether we see it as flawed or not!

Not to hurt the feelings of any Christians here, but if they argue that Christ is the sole begotten son of God sent to assume our sins and save us, and your argument mainly is, no, he is not, that is exactly where they want you. This is an argument they, historically speaking, almost always won.

The Hindu response to simply add a picture of Christ to the puja place and continue as before was infinitely more effective.

typical defeatist attitude.... you are going offtopic my friend

[SaiK]

once is enough said.. why this double emphasis by gang banging on the weak points, while the same may be a strongest point in another thread?.

[Vayutuvan]

Sanskrit: "virah" for man

Shivji, IIRC, vIrya in sanskrita is semen.

[shiv]

Sanskrit: "virah" for man

Shivji, IIRC, vIrya in sanskrita is semen.

Thanks. This is actually an illustration of how the theory, developed by Morris Swadesh, of how to find "cognates' in different languages can lead to utter GIGO. The minute you start reading about that, you are warned that some of it has to be guesswork. For example, words like "pater" and "pitru" are obvious cognates that hit you in the face and can be taken as cognates without batting an eyelid. Also "pada" and "ped" (foot), "danta" and "dens", for teeth. But Morris Swadesh's technique demanded the collection of 200 cognates from two or more languages. When you start looking for 200 cognates, you start gasping a bit. That is when you have to start broswing the dictionary for unlikely words and meanings that seem to correspond, especially if you bite off more than you can chew and select 10 or more dissimilar languages.

The particular example I copy-pasted for "man" has assumed "vir" for man in sanskrit. On what basis? Sanskrit has so many other more likely words for man. I mean why not look for Sanskrit for penis as a word for man. No errors there. And why have they taken vir as "man" in Avestan? Avestan was translated by people who knew Sanskrit from fragmentary evidence in old "gatha" texts, and from existing Zorosatrian documents written in Gujarati in the last 1000 years or so. Where are the scholarly papers that have cross checked the meaning of the word vir in Avestan? Was it man? Or was it hero in Avestan? No one seems to have asked these questions before taking those two words to reconstruct the PIE word for man as *wi*ro. The closest correspondence I can see is the Gothic word for man "wair" from which the English word werewolf - man-wolf was derived.

But heck the word "man" itself occurs in Sanskrit and "manav" or "manush". How on earth does anyone select "virah" as the Sanskrit word for man just because it sound like some other word that "seems likely" from guesswork to arrive at a "Proto-Indo-European" word for man which is "wi-ro". WTF! These guys are telling us that there was a mother language from which sanskrit descended that had the proto word "wi-ro" meaning man - after which sanskrit magically converted the word to mean "cum/spunk/semen" and then went on to use manush or purush instead. These scholars sound like blithering idiots to me.

Incidentally a dictionary I have with me now lists the following words for semen in Sanskrit
shukram
retam
dhatuh
tejam
vijam
viryam
indrayam
retanam
teram
anandaprabhavah


Note the word indrayam and viryam Both relate to heroism. The old vedic Indra. There is a roundabout link to manhood/heroism and sex. But using the word for "man" is a bit of a stretch especially when you select it only out of convenience and not any other corroborative evidence.

[Vayutuvan]

Note the word indrayam and viryam Both relate to heroism. The old vedic Indra.

Shiv ji, that is an interesting list of synonyms. vijam == beejam == seed. indrayam could be a vikriti of indriyam, i.e. sense as in the five senses. I expect that if we keep digging, it probably will turn out that PIE is nothing but sanskritam itself.

[Vayutuvan]

Another thought: werewolf is similar to koookaburra - a feral man who makes "wrrrr" sound like a wolf. Where is the connection to man?

[shiv]

it probably will turn out that PIE is nothing but sanskritam itself.

I would be very cautious of using the term "PIE" although I can fully understand the sense in which you use it.

The real PIE - the real language that probably preceded some Indian and European languages may well be sanskrit or something very close to Sanskrit. But PIE as it is used is a fake concept where they have worked backwards to find a root for 400 languages in a situation where there is no proof that all 400 have a single common root as opposed to multiple roots, some common, some different.

If fact Morris Swadesh's lexicostatistical method would be very interesting when you apply it to two languages that have a lot of commonality - like Greek or Latin and Sanskrit. But the reconstructed proto language would end up being pretty much like Sanskrit.

The real bullshit arises when you first cook up a common European proto language for Germanic, Celtic and Romanic language etc and try and fit them all into one common root called "Proto-European". After doing that if you want to compare with the "Indo" side of things and search for an Indic language you have ONLY Sanskrit. People might object and say "Oh what about old Iranian and Avestan? They are Indic langauges". The problem here is that anyone who knows Sanskrit will be able to understand Old iranian and Avestan. Both those latter languages were found from old texts in funny scripts like cuneiform, but the language itself is so close to Sanskrit that the translation has been done using Sanskrit. In fact one online source for people taking optional University courses in ancient languages goes so far as to say that anyone who knows Sanskrit will be able to pick up old Iranian right away. There is no proof that the so called difference between Sanskrit and Old Iranian may not be errors in decoding old scripts like cuneiform. I have managed to find exactly zero material suggesting that anyone has revisited that old decipherment done in the 19th century to see if it was correct.

So you have a hotch-potch mix called "Proto-European" created out of matching cognates from Celtic, Romanic, Germanic and other European languages. Then you cook up a "proto-Indic" using Sanskrit, Avestan and Old Iranian. The you mate "Proto-Indic" with "Proto-European" and voila you get PIE. Thoo! The method obfuscates so much detail that I cannot condemn it enough. While I have absolutely no doubt that Sanskrit and European languages have many similarities, what is being ignored in such reconstructions are the substratum/superstrata of many other languages that have created unique "Germanic" and other languages. Families and relationships are being created where they are unlikely, and by that method history is not being rewritten - it is being cooked up.

[A_Gupta]

Wiki Sanskrit Swadesh list does not list "vir".
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix: ... adesh_list

But it is here:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix: ... pean_nouns
and I think what the explanation is stems from the following:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vir#Latin
The claim seems to be that in Latin, "vir" is both man, and hero. The argument is probably that in the languages to the west, only the "man" meaning survived, while in the languages to the east, only the "hero" meaning survived.

Latin:
http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/look ... ir&ending=

vir viri m. [a man , male person]; esp. [a grown man; a husband; a man of character or courage, 'he-man']; milit. [a soldier, esp. an infantryman; a single man, individual].

virago -inis f. [a female warrior , heroine].

---
Shiv, I know I'm making myself very unpopular here by writing this, but you are tilting at windmills here. The relationships of the languages will stand up to scrutiny, and those relationships do not depend on the existence of PIE. The family tree of Indo-European languages is pretty solid. Yes, you might be able to collapse what are considered to be different languages today into different dialects of one language tomorrow. {dialect: a variety of a language that is distinguished from other varieties of the same language by features of phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, and by its use by a group of speakers who are set off from others geographically or socially.} That will not change the family tree.

E.g., no matter whether you think Hittite is a daughter language of a Indo-European language, or a sister language from a Indo-Hittite super language, its relative position in the family tree is the same.

What is not at all clear is the time span over which this tree of languages grew.
Most likely the relative short time span of the comparative linguists is wrong.

What I think you may be able to establish:
1. The Vedic speakers were already in India for a long time.
2. The Rig Veda is a bronze age text.
3. Indo-European language was in India by the time India had agriculture (currently around 7000 BC).
4. The horse may have been introduced by invaders or by trade. It however is irrelevant to how I.E. languages came to be in India.

IMO, (3.) is the really important one for those who want to make the case to fight modern political battles.

What I think you won't be able to establish:
1. Out-of-India for anyone but the eastern Iranians.
2. Rig Vedic Sanskrit as PIE

Lastly, contrary to popular belief, the linguistic data has been examined, reexamined and disputed to death. There is nothing new there to be had (unless the Indus script can be deciphered with a convincing decipherment).

The textual data might produce something more - (by this I mean the attempt to glean history, material conditions of existence, etc., of the authors of the Vedas, etc., from the Vedic texts.)

Archaeology could throw up a surprise. I'm doubtful that there is any sustained effort to do this archaeology. IMO, it also requires archaeology along the lower stretch of the Saraswati/Ghagghar/Hakra and that is in the hands of Pakistan.

What is new is the genetic data, it will force a rethinking. In particular, I think it will set the time scale for linguistics.

-Arun

[ramana]

Another thought: werewolf is similar to koookaburra - a feral man who makes "wrrrr" sound like a wolf. Where is the connection to man?

matrimc, kookaburra is a weird bird in Australia. Its cry resembles a human

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kookaburra
I read about it in fifth standard

[shiv]

Wiki Sanskrit Swadesh list does not list "vir".
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix: ... adesh_list

But it is here:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix: ... pean_nouns
and I think what the explanation is stems from the following:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vir#Latin
The claim seems to be that in Latin, "vir" is both man, and hero. The argument is probably that in the languages to the west, only the "man" meaning survived, while in the languages to the east, only the "hero" meaning survived.

Latin:
http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/look ... ir&ending=

vir viri m. [a man , male person]; esp. [a grown man; a husband; a man of character or courage, 'he-man']; milit. [a soldier, esp. an infantryman; a single man, individual].

virago -inis f. [a female warrior , heroine].

A lot of assumptions are made.

Swadesh is not guilty of PIE. He only worked on Red Indian languages but came up with the idea of lexicostatistics. Swadesh's list has purush but not the obvious manush

If you look at Sanskrit, Gothic, Latin, Greek and English - you find that there are clearly two words that are being passed off as man.

Vira is an uncommon usage for man in Sanskrit. Purush and manush are more common. I have never heard it other than the usage for hero in "Indic" languages. Most of us speak Sanskrit on a day to day basis in the number of words we use in our Indic mother tongues.

On the other hand Gothic has "manna" for man. Possibly wir as well.

Latin has only vir.

Greek has "homo" - that later became "human"

Why should "vir" be selected as root word for man in cooking up PIE?

[Vayutuvan]

Another thought: werewolf is similar to koookaburra - a feral man who makes "wrrrr" sound like a wolf. Where is the connection to man?

matrimc, kookaburra is a weird bird in Australia. Its cry resembles a human
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kookaburra
I read about it in fifth standard

ramana garu, exactly. It is named through the observed actions of the bird. First the bird "kooka"s and then flies away making "burra" sound. You would know the Telugu rhyme "burru pitta burru pitta turrumannadi". It would be a stretch to imagine that Australian aborigine language has a link to Telugu.

[ramana]

Oh. All along I thought the aborigines are our long lost cousins speaking proto-Telugu before it got refined by Nannayya!!!

[Vayutuvan]

ramana garu, one can have lot of fun cooking up stuff - "kooka" is Telugu "keka"

[ramana]

BTW, Husky of IF and Acharya had written this article now no longer in the IF journal

The Aryan Invasion Theory: more than meets the eye

There are some Indians today who are convinced that the subcontinent's population can be classified into Indo-Aryan and Dravidian ethnic groups. Ignoring the fact that Indo-Aryan and Dravidian are defined as being merely language families and so do not denote ethnicity at all, their conviction shows that it has now become a question of identity.

The Indo-European language family represents a model of the world which incorporates a view of history, of population dispersal and of language diffusion. Within its framework are to be found the now-familiar concepts of Aryan, Dravidian, Indo-European languages and their subfamilies, as well as the notion that at some point in its history, India accommodated entrants from Eurasia who supposedly brought with them India's first Indo-European language and an equally alien culture.

With these concepts having entered our everyday lives today (not just our vocabulary, but also our view of history), it is easy to forget how recent the Indo-European (IE) framework actually is. In a short span of time, just over two centuries, something has changed entirely. Indians have started to identify themselves with terms defined within the IE framework and have internalised its views.
Language and thought

Today, the Indo-European world-view has very cleverly and dangerously reduced our choices to either Indo-Aryan or Dravidian, thereby excising the valid third option of 'Indian'. This might appear very trivial, but it is a form of language control. Language control is a means to alter and limit people's way of thinking. George Orwell's cautionary novel Nineteen Eighty-Four [1] describes a totalitarian dictatorship that systematically destroys language, thereby shaping the very thoughts and reality of its undermined subjects. [2]

Language is the means through which humans understand and formulate ideas, and by which we communicate and express ourselves. Denying language is to deny thought; and controlling language is to control thought. Although this is what propaganda attempts to do in its own crude and overt manner, the subtlety of the IE world-view in imposing language control on Indians has mostly gone unnoticed by us. Many Indians have subconsciously absorbed its views and can now only look at the world according to how the IE framework has defined it. For a long time now, it has been shaping the reality of present-day India. Consider that we have a political party (the DMK) whose name contains the term 'Dravidian', whilst history books have long been teaching children about Aryans who allegedly invaded India sometime around 1500 BCE. The IE world-view, through denying us access to the term 'Indian', has effectively started denying our thinking of ourselves as Indians. It is shaping our perceptions of our own identity.

A few other examples of language control that Indians are being subjected to today include how, through the media, the term 'Dalit' has slowly but consistently been replacing 'Harijan' [3]; the vague and merely geographic 'South Asia' has come to replace the historic entity of the 'Indian subcontinent'; and we are forced to use the Portuguese-derived word 'caste' which describes neither jati nor varna nor any other Indian word or Hindu concept. [4] Though one may not immediately see it, these are impositions on our way of viewing and understanding history, our present world, and ourselves.

Another example: the Holocaust memorial in the US commemorates the genocides of the 'Soviets' and 'Yugoslavs' of World War II. Yet which nation today is called the Soviet Union? Where is Yugoslavia? There are no people and no nations today that go by these names. This is tantamount to an act of rewriting history: through calculated use of language, historic atrocities against the Russians and Serbs have been pushed to the background. Why? In order to prevent either from gaining public sympathy when the west intends to take action against them: Serbia during the Balkan Wars of the last decade; and Russia, because its imminent rise might come to pose a threat to the west. [5]

We return now to the Indo-European framework, which has attempted to explain (that is, to model) the observed linguistic similarities between European languages and India's Samskritam and northern languages. Like all models, it is based on some assumptions. Retracing the history of how the IE linguistic family was formulated will uncover the assumptions underlying its world-view. By re-examining their validity in light of what is known today, we can re-evaluate the IE framework and its applicability. And then perhaps, instead of passively accepting it, we may be in a better position to decide whether or not its world-view should be considered so final as to determine our own.
The west's understanding of its history and origins prior to the IE world-view
The origin of language and language diversity
In A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Andrew Dickson White writes that until the second half of the 18th century, biblical doctrines expounded by the Church defined all western understanding about the origins of languages, which taught that

the language spoken by the Almighty was Hebrew,--that it was taught by him to Adam,--and that all other languages on the face of the earth originated from it at the dispersion attending the destruction of the Tower of Babel.

In the whole of this period, all attempts at explaining the origins of language were based on Christian theology:

The most amazing efforts were made to trace back everything to the sacred language. English and Latin dictionaries appeared, in which every word was traced back to a Hebrew root. No supposition was too absurd in this attempt to square Science with Scripture. [6]

White discusses how

the sacred theory of human language had been developed: how it had been strengthened in every land until it seemed to bid defiance forever to advancing thought; how it rested firmly upon the letter of Scripture, upon the explicit declarations of leading fathers of the Church, of the great doctors of the Middle Ages, of the most eminent theological scholars down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, and was guarded by the decrees of popes, kings, bishops, Catholic and Protestant, and the whole hierarchy of authorities in church and state. [7]

The origin of various peoples

Genesis 9:18 to 9:27 of the Old Testament tells the tale of Noah and his three sons, Shem, Japheth and Ham. For a transgression by Ham, Noah curses Ham's son Canaan (and all his descendants) to become slaves to Shem and Japheth (and their descendants). [8] According to the biblical view of history, all the people of the world belonged to one of three races, each descended from one of Noah's three sons: [9]

* from Shem came the Semitic race, which today includes the Jewish and Arabian people;
* from Japheth came all the Europeans, as per Genesis 10:5 which narrates that the sons of Japheth moved to the "isles of the Gentiles" or the Greek Isles;
* from Ham came the Hamitic race: long believed to be all other people of the world (Africans, Asians, native Americans, etc.)

Until but a few centuries ago, this was the understanding that Christian Europe had about its origins, and that of others. Unlike the Jews, whom the Bible accorded the special position of being the biblical God's Chosen People, the Europeans - who due to their religion nevertheless resigned themselves to the biblical view - had no particularly privileged status. Being in second place did not match with their then expanding powers as colonisers nor with their ambitions. After the rediscovery of the majesty of the ancient Greek and Roman civilisations, Europeans wanted to find out more about their origins: A glorious present deserved a glorious past. They never fully quit the racial biblical view, however, but built on it. [10]
The creation of the IE framework
The field of philology, such as it was, floundered until the 'discovery' of Sanskrit. Andrew Dickson White writes that the period between Leibnitz arguing against the cherished "sacred theory" of languages (Leibnitz lived from 1646 to 1716) and

this modern development was a period of philological chaos. It began mainly with the doubts which Leibnitz had forced upon Europe, and ended only with the beginning of the study of Sanskrit in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and with the comparisons made by means of the collections of Catharine [the Great], Hervas, and Adelung at the beginning of the nineteenth.

Further,

Such was that chaos of thought into which the discovery of Sanskrit suddenly threw its great light. Well does one of the foremost modern philologists say that this "was the electric spark which caused the floating elements to crystallize into regular forms." [11]

When the west encountered Sanskrit in the 18th century, the discovery brought about a fundamental change in its outlook. Sanskrit was instrumental in the development of the IE world-view and its associated fields like philology, linguistics and comparative studies. It was the driving force in the re-imagining of Europe's history, the origin of its peoples and languages. [12]

Sir William Jones (1746 – 1794), the philologist regarded as a linguistic prodigy, made and propagated "the observation that Sanskrit bore a certain resemblance to classical Greek and Latin". In his The Sanscrit Language, he "suggested that all three languages had a common root, and that indeed they may all be further related, in turn, to Gothic and the Celtic languages, as well as to Persian." [13] He then proposed that there was a relationship between these languages. Having turned the observation into suggestion and then into proposition, Jones determined that all these languages were part of a family of languages which he referred to as Japhetic. [14] This word, biblical in origin, denotes European of descent. Thus the very naming of this family as Japhetic is revealing, in that it shows how non-European languages such as Samskritam, Avestan and other Indian and Iranian languages were immediately presumed to be of European origin without further justification.

Of course this raised an important question for the west: how did a 'Japhetic' language come to be spoken in lands populated by 'Hamitic' people? In time, this perceived discrepancy lead to the idea that these languages would have been introduced from a place external to India. What, then, had been the means of language transfer? The missionary Abbé Dubois, in his early 19th century Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, conflated the biblical character Magog, one of the seven sons of Japheth, with the Indian character Gautama. He then postulated that the brahmanas of India, because of their knowledge of Samskritam, were descendants of Japheth and originated in the Caucasus. [15] Obviously, this could not explain how such a vast number of Indians were speaking Samskritam-derived languages like Hindi. An explanation on a much larger scale was necessary.

By the time of Max Müller, the Japhetic language group was being referred to as the Aryan language family. [16] Slowly there emerged an ever-expanding vision of ancient Europeans, by then called Aryans, charging through India:

* Max Müller had arbitrarily fixed the date of the Vedas to around 1200 BCE - 1000 BCE [17]
* Equally arbitrarily, the time of entry of the Caucasian Aryans was chosen to lie somewhere between the 2nd millennium BCE and 1500 BCE
* The linguists had determined that there existed in South India a set of languages unrelated to any languages of Europe
* The remains of the Indus Valley Civilisation were discovered and found to be much older than the random dates accorded to the Vedas and the purported entry of the Aryans

And so the Aryan Invasion theory (AIT) was born: in the 2nd millennium BCE, waves of nomadic chariot-riding Caucasian people from beyond would have come, destroying the Indus Valley Civilisation, driving the supposedly Hamitic (signifying 'dark', i.e. non Caucasian, non Semitic) 'Dravidians' to the south, subduing and oppressing all. [18]

Koerner [19] tells us how 19th century scholarship in the field of Indo-European languages was not devoid of racism, even after dropping terms like Japhetic and Hamitic:

To return to the 19th century for a moment, racialist and what we now would call `white supremacist' views can be traced without any trouble in many scholarly writings, and to dispel the impression that it was largely a German affair, I could refer to books by American authors where we find such ideas expressed, one book entitled Lectures on the Arya (Pike 1873), another The Aryan Race: Its origin and achievements (Morris 1888), the latter affirming "all the savage tribes of the earth belong to the Negro or Mongolian race [], the Caucasian is pre-eminently the man of civilization" (pp.23-24), and that it were these Caucasians who had "perfected the Aryan method of language" (p. 51). (Let us remember, however, that `Aryan' was widely used in lieu of `Indo-European' in the Anglo-Saxon world, at least until the early 20th century, and certainly not always with `supremacist' undertones.)

After WWII, the term Indo-European would replace what were formerly called Aryan languages. [20] But the discussions of the invasion of India would always inevitably involve the proposed Aryans invading, destroying and then imposing their culture on the subdued populace. Along with their languages, they were then credited with having brought their Gods, beliefs and social ethos and having thereafter produced the Hindu religio-philosophical systems. While allegedly bringing this civilisation to India, the ancestors and relatives of these invaders had meanwhile also been the people supposedly behind the Parthian, Persian, Median, Greek, Roman and other civilisations all associated with the Indo-European language family. Europe had finally designed an ancestry that fit with its then imperial position as colonisers of the world: their Caucasian ancestors, the Aryans, would have devised and brought high civilisation everywhere.
The myth expands

Arya in Samskritam and Airya in Avestan (ancient Iranian, language of the Zoroastrian scriptures) are adjectives and do not denote either race or language.

When referring to Aryans, the indologists mean neither the citizens of Aryavarta, nor the people of the region Aryana in adjoining Afghanistan, nor the Zoroastrian Persians of Airyana (Iran) whom Greco-Romans had referred to as 'Arians' to indicate their nationality. [21] Instead, indology, being firmly entrenched in its world-view, interprets the above as supporting the IE framework and regards all these lands as those peopled or invaded by the various sub-branches of the founding Aryans.

Having invented and defined the original Aryans as the people who had dispersed in various directions and created civilisations in so many quarters of the Eurasian landmass, and having explained, through a series of invasion and migration models, the presence of languages deemed IE in non-European countries, Europe now set itself new quests:

+ search for the supposed original language of the supposed original Aryans
The original Aryans were presumed to have spoken the parent IE language, because the linguistic rules developed by indologists (to establish the relationship between the languages they had proposed as IE [22]) pointed to the existence of such a language, which they deemed extinct. It is to be noted that this hypothetical language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE) as it is called, exists only within the IE framework. It is nowhere attested in the historical record, it has left no traces of itself in any literature, there is no physical evidence for its ever having existed. Undeterred by this, however, the indologists focussed much effort into reconstructing it. Since there is not even a shred of tangible proof for PIE's existence, there can be no question of confirming the accuracy of any reconstruction: there are no external (non-linguistic) means of validating it. Thus, IE linguistics becomes the sole arbiter of determining whether or not any reconstruction of PIE is correct.

+ search for the supposed original homeland of the supposed original Aryans
This is purported to be the region of the Eurasian landmass where the Aryans would have originated (where they spoke PIE) and from where they would have dispersed. It is referred to as the Urheimat, German for 'original homeland, place of origin'.
The search for the Urheimat has looked through various places: from Germany, Scandinavia and other parts of north-western Europe, to Eastern-Europe and parts of Russia, to south-eastern Europe (Anatolia) and Central Asia, and - in the initial stages of IE research - India and Iran. [23] North-west Europe was eventually ruled out for the most part. There are still several takers for Eastern-Europe, the Russian expanse or the Caucasus, and a number for Anatolia (now Turkey). In general, the Urheimat has now come to be described by a vague 'Central Asia' - a term taken to encompass most of Eurasia beyond the Indian and Persian lands.

That the search for the Aryan homeland is often motivated and influenced by reasons other than the pursuit of truth, is shown by Koerner, who observes that

Both linguists and archaeologists have been obsessed with the desire to pinpoint the location of the homeland of the Indo-Europeans since the beginning of our studies, and their search has unfortunately not always been devoid of political motivation

and that in the 19th century a sizeable number of linguists, too, had ideological, including at times religious and possibly political, agendas for doing so. From the 19th century onwards,

we can see the number of possible homelands proposed, not always by linguists but also by archaeologists, cultural historians, and amateur writers, beginning to multiply: from Anatolia to the Balkans, from the southern Russian steppes to northern Europe, to central Europe, and eventually to Germany. The arguments in favour of a particular location were manifold, and varied according to the authors' expertise, personal interests or beliefs and, maybe, prejudices. They could be based on matters of climate, geography, history, archaeology, myth, religion, and of course language. More often than not, people seem to have picked a `pet' location first, and then engaged in selecting their `evidence' from any field in support of their `theory'. [24]

Koerner then goes on to find that this held true not just prior to and during WWII, but also in recent times. Next to Gamkrelidze's arguments [25] for a place close to his native Georgia:

Other recent authors could be added, like Kilian (1983) arguing in favour of Central Europe, notably Lithuania, or Witold Ma _ czak (b.1924), in a variety of publications over the past twenty years, pleading for today's Poland as the location of the Indo-European homeland.2

In short, Europe's interest in its origins had now taken it a long way from the start:

* They invented the Aryans, whom no one had heard of and of whom there is no evidence. There are no historical markers testifying to the 'original Aryans' poised to disperse and invade; there are only records of items and cultures that are considered flattering enough to be deemed 'Aryan'.
* Then they thought that these Aryans would probably have had an original homeland. Thus the Aryan Urheimat idea was born and they started frantically looking for the homeland which they assumed that the supposed Aryans (whom they had invented) would have had.
* They also looked at rebuilding the hypothetical PIE language, which they thought extinct, supposedly spoken by the unattested Aryans in their unknown Urheimat. Since this was a linguistic matter, both the evidence for the existence of PIE and the proof of correctness of its reconstruction were provided entirely within the field of linguistics, making PIE non-falsifiable.

From there having been no knowledge of any Aryans at all, Europe had within a few decades envisioned them, attributed qualities to them (Caucasian appearance, civilisational and philosophical skills), constructed the language they might have spoken and looked for the place they might have originated. And all this for a people about whom history is entirely silent. [26]
The IE world-view and reality

As stated earlier, Sanskrit was the key for generating the Indo-European theory and in the development of its associated subjects like philology and linguistics. Only after 1830, when indologists had translated numerous Sanskrit texts, did the west finally form a new origin theory for its languages and people. Until the IE language family and corresponding world-view gave them an alternative vision, the history of Europe had been the history of Christianity and their origin understood to be as given in the Bible.
The emerging research in IE allowed the west to devise a largely secular narrative of history for itself - one based on a model of language dispersal and migration of races, instead of one based solely on biblical myths. [27] It was this new narrative that later became the western understanding of the past. With various adjustments, the same narrative lent itself to different viewpoints: it was used by communism in projecting the history and origin of Europe as being separate from religion; the secular community could treat it as a non-mythical explanation of Western origins; and at the same time, it did not conflict with the fundamentals of Christian theology (see [27] again).
The assumptions and central premise of the Indo-European world-view

We have seen how the name of the language family has evolved along with the times: from initially being called Japhetic (signifying its European-ness), to Aryan (referring to the Caucasian people thought to have migrated to other parts and invaded other lands), and finally to the present term of Indo-European. Its new name, having now lost the overt racialist connotations, appears to merely signify the expanse from Europe to India where these languages have been spoken historically. Yet the underlying premise of the IE world-view has not changed, regardless of the change in name. The IE framework still holds fast to the idea that these languages are European in origin: not connected to Europe geographically, but intrinsically connected to those of its people whose ancestors are thought to have spoken an Indo-European language. The IE world-view is still centred on the idea that this group of people, the so-called Aryans, gave rise to the Indo-European languages and the civilisations derived from it; that these people and their languages share a common origin. [28] As evidence for this, linguists point to Proto-Indo-European - despite the fact that PIE itself is constructed and validated only by IE linguistics.

Since the central thesis posits that all IE languages are rooted in PIE and are therefore European ('Aryan') in origin, all assumptions of the IE framework derive from this:

* Any language that does not bear similarities to Europe's IE languages, is considered not IE and not related. Thus, the languages of South India, bearing no relation to Europe's IE languages, are not IE. They are therefore also dismissed in toto from ever being considered as related to Samskritam. The IE framework has restricted all talk of relationships between these Indian languages to that of only 'substrates' and 'borrowing'.
* Indians are not allowed to have developed an indigenous language that evolved into Samskritam, because Samskritam, being deemed IE, must have been derived from PIE and so is related to European languages, making it European (Aryan).
* Religio-philosophical, cultural and other civilisational developments associated with Samskritam are automatically conferred on the mythical Aryans as being 'Indo-European' achievements.
* India is consequently only ever viewed as a meeting place of various ethnic groups and languages - that is, various peoples were to have invaded or migrated into India and brought their languages with them. The IE world-view does not allow any possibility of considering the opposite: that India might have been the seeding ground for large diversifying population groups, giving rise to its different languages; with some outward bound populations.

Research in other sciences which contradict the IE framework

Current research in genetics, archaeology and anthropology have shown that there was no invasion (AIT), no migration (AMT) and no influx of Aryans into India:

* The inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), after its demise due to natural causes, resettled in the Punjab and Gujarat - not the South as the Aryan Invasion Theory had us believe. Other than this, archaeology can detect no cultural discontinuity in the Indian subcontinent, but rather affirms the opposite. [29] The same is confirmed in anthropology, which finds that the remains of the ancient Harappans of IVC match with the present-day people of the subcontinent's north-west (Punjab, Gujarat). [30]
* Most of the subcontinent's gene pool is ancient and indigenous. India has received no significant genetic input from Central Asia. (See [31] for more information.) The little that has been found, could merely be from the Shaka invasions of the 1st century BCE, or it could be counter-indicative: outward-bound migrations of a number of small Indian tribes who settled West Asia and Central Asia. This is also supported by the fact that the Tarim Basin dwellers were specifically not European, but were the same as the inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilisation. [32]

This means that the method by which indologists had envisioned the introduction of Indo-Aryan languages (starting with Samskritam) into the subcontinent has fallen through. Therefore, the very nature of the link between Samskritam and the European languages has to be re-investigated [33] - but indology is not doing that. (See also [34])

Unwilling to re-evaluate the IE framework's basic premise

If data from genetics, archaeology and anthropology appear to support the IE framework, they are cited as evidence for the entry of Aryans into India and for the introduction of an IE language sub-family. However, when studies in these sciences show no entrants into India anywhere near the time-frame considered and instead reveal a picture of a continuous indigenous civilisation going back many millennia, the IE framework disregards all such evidence as being merely secondary in nature. [35]

Linguistics is thus considered the field that trumps all others; the IE framework's basic premise is considered to have the final say in all matters. Regardless of whether any external evidence supports it, it is to be blindly accepted that the internal, linguistic evidence supporting the IE framework is so strong, that its fundamental premise still holds in spite of any indications to the contrary. Since it is self-sustaining - originating within linguistics, its existence verified and its rules validated internally by linguistics - it cannot be disproved by the other sciences.

It is this underlying basis of the IE world-view which gave rise to the theory of an Aryan Invasion of India. [36] It follows then, that even on disproving this invasion, or migration or influx, the central thesis will still not be abandoned: Samskritam will still be considered of European extraction, because it is considered an IE language derived from PIE. IE's central premise, kept alive unnaturally by not allowing challenges to itself from areas external to linguistics, continuously gives rise to variations on the AIT/AMT/influx/acculturation theories as it constantly attempts to explain the perceived extra-Indian origins of Samskritam.

For instance, at a time when the genetics research into the subcontinent had not yet progressed far, Frank Raymond Allchin [1995] argued that there must have been Indo-Aryan entrants into India to bring the Indo-Aryan languages there:

we hold the view that the initial introduction of any ancient language to a new area can only have been a result of the movement of speakers of that language into that area. [37]

That was in 1995. With each genetics study, therefore, genetic markers that could potentially indicate the 'Aryan entry' were regarded with great interest. As it happened, each of those which were initially considered to be 'Aryan Invasion markers', eventually turned out to be indigenous to India instead, being both older and more diverse within the Indian gene pool. [38] After a recent genetics study, the National Geographic News article of January 10, 2006 begins with:

India Acquired Language, Not Genes, From West, Study Says
Most modern Indians descended from South Asians, not invading Central Asian steppe dwellers, a new genetic study reports. [39]

Since the gene pool of the Indian subcontinent has now been shown to be ancient and indigenous, the final resort for indology is to claim that only the language was transferred. This, in spite of the fact that they had previously - by their own admission as seen above - insisted that any ancient language required the immigration of its speakers to introduce it into new territories. Disheartened perhaps, but not defeated, the proponents of the IE framework have only changed their explanations of what constitutes an invasion, migration or influx. The new models generated by indology for explaining the means of IE language diffusion are becoming increasingly more divorced from anything that can be (in)validated by other sciences. In this way, the field of linguistics has now entirely appropriated control of picturing the history of the IE language in India. [40] Comparative linguistics and philology, working in a theoretical vacuum, insist on continuing to do so when it comes to Indo-European language matters by disregarding counter-indications from the other sciences.

Bias in Indo-European research
Linguistics

That the field of linguistics is not without its share of ideological bias, is revealed by Koerner in Linguistics and Ideology in the Study of Language, which focussed on

specific, conscious or subconscious underpinnings of arguments made or maintained within the science of language, i.e., the field of linguistics, which is often presumed to be guided only by value-free scientific principles in the search of truth.

He deals specifically

with two other areas in the history of linguistics that can be shown to have carried along with them in one form or another an ideological baggage from the early 19th century onwards, namely, language classification and the search for the Indo-European homeland.

Koerner cites numerous instances of ideological considerations influencing language classification and typology in IE research since the 19th century [41]:

The connection between language and the people who speak it has always been there, of course; it just needed to be argued that some languages and hence their speakers were more `primitive' than others. For instance, Franz Bopp (1791-1867), the supposed `founder' of comparative Indo-European linguistics ... could be shown to have made connections, if not a direct identification, between language structure and the cultural state of its speakers.

Indeed, a careful study of language classification and the `genius' of the people speaking particular languages would reveal that these value judgments and prejudices are by no means confined to German-speaking lands: France and the United States, for instance, have their fair share in this. Even the great American Sanskritist and general linguist William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) cannot be excluded from criticism (Whitney 1867; cf. Hutton 1998:269-271), at least from today's vantage point. However, none of these scholars could be found expounding racial theories.

Koerner concludes that:

the field must learn to accept that linguistics, past and present, has never been 'value free', but has often been subject to a variety of external influences and opinions, not all of them beneficial to either the discipline itself or the society that sustains it. [42]

Racism

Besides other ideological motivations [43], racism, too, has played its part in IE studies and the framework it constructed, as has been noted by a number of scientists in the field. As recently as the late 90s, archaeologists Jim Schaffer and Diane Lichtenstein remarked:

As data accumulate to support cultural continuity in South Asian prehistoric and historic periods, a considerable restructuring of existing interpretative paradigms must take place. We reject most strongly the simplistic historical interpretations, which date back to the eighteenth century, that continue to be imposed in South Asian culture history. These still prevailing interpretations are significantly diminished by European ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism, and antisemitism. Surely, as South Asia studies approaches the twenty-first century, it is time to describe emerging data objectively rather than perpetuate interpretations without regard to the data archaeologists have worked so hard to reveal. [44]

Anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote an essay on the same in 1990. [45] In spite of all this, visions of Caucasians and even Nordic stereotypes invading India, which had been so prevalent in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, never really died out and are still held by several indologists. (See also [46]) Evidently, the terms 'Aryan' and 'Indo-European' have not lost their original racial connotations.

The Aryan Invasion of India, postulated by early western indologists, hinged on their methods of classifying languages. Their linguistic rules for doing so appear to have been motivated by their bias in favour of their belief in Aryans (which had lead them from Japhetic to racial Aryans to linguistic Aryans who were yet Caucasoid, to the basic assumption that all IE languages are European of origin). Since there was no way to go back in time to check on the real events of history, the early indologists felt confident that their constructed version of history was secure from questioning.

As time progressed, the field of indology got more sophisticated. With the new name for their language family (Indo-European) no longer betraying its less scientific origins, and with the establishment of whole fields of science dedicated to researching and tracking down the Aryans, PIE, and the IE Urheimat, the IE framework has by now gained so much legitimacy that it has managed to convince many Indians to uncritically accept its whole premise.
Since ideology continues to exert some influence in directing IE scholarship, some care, even suspicion is warranted. Bruce Lincoln states in the introductory pages to his work Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship:

Given the unhappy example of scholarship on myth, particularly that on Aryan or Indo-European myth, is one forced to conclude that scholarly discourse is simply another instance of ideology in narrative form? The topic is a painful but important one for me, as I continue my struggle to extricate from a discipline, a paradigm, and a discourse that I adopted early in my academic career with insufficient critical reflection. To a certain extent, writing this book has been an attempt to undo my earlier lack of awareness and make amends for it. [47]

As a student of history of religions, I was taught that Fredric Max Muller inaugurated our discipline but his work on "comparative mythology" foundered on his own incompetence, as did the later attempt of Sir James George Frazer. The field was rescued, so the narrative went, by Dumezil with the support of some talented colleagues, Wikander, Otto Hoffer, Jan De Vries, and Emile Benveniste among them. Older scholars also entered my awareness, including Hermann Guntert, Herman Lommel, Walter Wust, Rudolf Much, Franz Altheirm, Richard Reitzenstein, and Hans Heinrich Schaeder, and many of these men were deeply involved with the Nazi movement. To that side of their work, however, I was largely blind. Instead of dangerous ideologues, I saw talented linguists, erudite Orientalists (a word not yet suspect), and trailblazing students of myth. Whatever questions I had—and they were not many—were deftly deflected. The "Aryan thesis" was fundamentally sound, I was told, although Hitler and Co. had badly abused it. But no one spoke of "Aryans'" anymore or located their (presumed) Urheimat in Scandinavia, Germany, or the North Pole. Rather, the postwar discourse dealt with Indo-Europeans, elided questions of race, and placed the origin of this sanitized people off to the east, on the Russian steppes. In the pages that follow, I hope to show that things are not that simple and the problems —moral and intellectual— that attend this discourse or discipline are not so easily resolved. [48]

The parallel case of Rwanda
Timothy Longman's paper Christian Churches and Genocide in Rwanda [49] discusses the creation of ethnic categories in Rwanda by missionaries, its enforcement by the German and Belgian colonial governments and its perpetuation through the missionary-colonial education system. The paper highlights a case very similar to that of India.

In the introductory essay to his edited volume on the construction of ethnicity in Southern Africa, Leroy Vail argues that European Christian missionaries played a crucial role in the development of ethnic ideologies in Africa.

Vail argues that missionaries "incorporated into the curricula of their mission schools the lesson that the pupils had clear ethnic identities," and claims that they "educated local Africans who then themselves served as the most important force in shaping the new ethnic ideologies."(16)

The role of missionaries in the construction of ethnicity in Rwanda offers an excellent example of the process that Vail describes. In Rwanda, missionaries played a primary role in creating ethnic myths and interpreting Rwandan social organization -- not only for colonial administrators, but ultimately for the Rwandan population itself. The concepts of ethnicity developed by the missionaries served as a basis for the German and Belgian colonial policies of indirect rule which helped to transform relatively flexible pre-colonial social categories into clearly defined ethnic groups. Following independence, leaders who were trained in church schools relied extensively on ethnic ideologies to gain support, thus helping to intensify and solidify ethnic divisions. The exact meaning of the categories of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa in pre-colonial Rwanda, Burundi, and Zaire is a subject of considerable debate among scholars. Nearly all scholars, however, agree that the three were not clearly distinct and rigidly separated ethnic groups. The three groups shared a common language and common religious practices, and they lived in the same communities throughout the region. The groups were distinguished primarily by their position within the political and economic system, which assigned members of each group specific economic activities and social roles.

Longman then writes how the missionaries

viewed Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa as three distinct peoples representing three separate waves of immigration. They viewed the Twa as the autochthonous population, the original inhabitants of the region, who many centuries earlier were subdued by Bantu migrants from the west who became the Hutu. According to the missionary account, the Tutsi arrived from the northeast sometime later, around 1600, and because of their clear superiority, conquered the Hutu, whom they had ruled ever since. Doubting that Africans could have designed so complex and efficient a political system, the missionaries hypothesized that the Tutsi were not really African but a Hamitic or Semitic group from the Middle East, perhaps a lost tribe of Israel.(18)

The shift in missionary support from Tutsi to Hutu in the 1950s did not substantially alter either the nature of the Rwandan ethnic system or the role of the churches in defining ethnicity in Rwanda. While myths of Tutsi superiority and a long history of dominance over the Hutu served to justify continued Tutsi control of Rwanda in the early colonial period, the same inaccurate history became justification for revolution in the era following World War II. The new "progressive" missionaries who championed the cause of the Hutu in the 1950s promoted an ideology of exploitation that identified the Tutsi as the culprits in Rwandan history while ignoring exploitation by the German and Belgian colonial rulers. Hence, when a Hutu uprising occurred in 1959, attacks were directed against the Tutsi rather than the Belgian administrators.(21) The inaccurate idea promulgated by the missionaries that Tutsi had grossly exploited the Hutu for centuries continues to shape Hutu understandings of Rwandan history and eventually became a primary ideological justification for genocide.

India's situation during colonialism was also fuelled by similar reasons: the euro-centrism of the imperialists, the theological motivations of its missionaries posing as scholars, as well as serving political and economic purposes. Koenraad Elst observes:

The AIT was turned into a political tool in order to question the Indian identity of the Indians, and thereby weaken the claims of Indians to their own country. This political use of the AIT continues till today, especially at the hands of what Hindu nationalists call “the anti-national forces”. Christian “liberation theologians”, Islamic missionaries, assorted separatists and like-minded anti-Hindu or anti-India activists... [50]

For all of the similarities with the myth created for Rwanda, there is but one main difference in India's case: the linguistic one. It stems from the fact that Rwandan Tutsis were identified as possibly Semitic, not Japhetic like North Indians were (for speaking languages thought to be IE). This intimately tied India and its people to Europe's search for its own origins and identity. Whatever myth Europe has created for itself has now enmeshed India with it. The linguistic aspect has become but an additional support for the fictive history created for India; one that has served to perpetuate the tale long after the British Empire ceased to exist.

The west has now dropped the lies it had created about Rwandan origins - perhaps it was the recent genocide that claimed between 800,000 and a million Rwandan lives, that finally did it. The IE-framework, however, in spite of the copious genetic and other evidence to the contrary, still insists on 'Aryans' entering 'Dravidian' India, merely in order to satisfy its linguistic model.
Conclusion

The linguistic model central to the IE framework is non-falsifiable, because it does not lend itself to extra-linguistic scrutiny or evaluation. Logically speaking, the rejection of the major AIT/AMT-related scenarios (which posited that Caucasian IE-speakers came to India and upon which hinged indology's model of IE language diffusion in the subcontinent), should have made indologists take another look at their basic premise and the very nature of the linguistic connections. (See [51]) Yet indologists still refrain from questioning their linguistic model: they do not re-assess their central assumptions about PIE, the Aryans and the Urheimat. This is why present-day findings in genetics, Indian archaeology and anthropology, including that of the Tarim Basin, has but lessened the force of the IE world-view's thrust. Since indology still retains the basic premise that underpins its whole framework, it attempts to bypass the findings of the other sciences by giving rise to new scenarios of small-scale Aryan migrations down to tiny influxes.

There might be other explanations to account for the similarities that Samskritam and Avestan bear to the various European languages; explanations which do not necessarily coincide with the monolith of the IE framework. Indology's continued insistence on linguistics being the final determinant in all matters relating to the spread of IE languages and in defining the nature of the connections between various languages deemed IE, could well be obstructing the envisioning of new paradigms: models that might be able to explain the observed similarities between Samskritam, Avestan and European languages, whilst still being consistent with the data revealed in the other sciences.
Time to ask why

Why does their model still persist? Why do indologists not reconsider the fundamental premise of their theory? Though they have retracted the Aryan Invasion and have been forced to give up large scale migrations (to the point where, at present, one must imagine tiny bands of Aryan entrants to have silently crept into India, wiped out all records of their presence and interactions there, and then disappeared or died out without passing on their genes), they refuse to reformulate or even re-evaluate their basic assumption.
Why? What are the reason(s) governing indology's non-self-critical approach when dealing with counter-evidence from other sciences?

As we have seen, linguistics has historically been, and continues to be, motivated by concerns that are not always scientific. What motivations are driving IE linguistics and indology research today?

* Is it inertia? Are they unwilling to sift through the material that laid the foundations of IE research in the last 150 years of the field? Or are they, unlike real scientists [52], so sure of the inerrancy of their framework that they are unwilling to re-evaluate it, its assumptions and central premise?
* Has the IE world-view come to define the very identity of the west? Has their view of their past and their origins become so intimately tied up with the Indo-European framework? (See also [53])
* Are there other motivations propping up the IE framework today, just like there was during the period of British imperialism when the AIT served its purpose? [54]

Indians today need to reconsider whether they should so whole-heartedly base their entire world-view upon a model whose very premise remains unverified and unverifiable. [55]

[ramana]

Endnotes:
[1] Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, 1949, electronic version
[2] As described by a casual reviewer summarising this particular thrust of George Orwell's narrative.
[3] Dalit or Harijan? Self-Naming by Scheduled Caste Interviewees by Alan Marriott

The terms harijan and dalit have evolved over the last many decades, with the latter more or less replacing the former in published works of recent years. What do members of the scheduled castes call themselves?

Though the media prefers to use the term dalit continuously, the same does not hold true for the very Indians under consideration:

The data from the National Family Health Survey of 1998-99 suggests they strongly prefer harijan to dalit.

The paper also states that

while harijan (or harizan or some other spelling) was used by 1351 respondents in 18 different states, and a number of respondents used scheduled caste, not one respondent chose dalit.

[4] Similarly, the term 'adivasi' (meaning aboriginal or indigenous), introduced by Christian missionaries as a means to designate India's tribes, implies that all other Indians are not indigenous. See Koenraad Elst, Who is a Hindu, Voice of India, New Delhi (Ch. 9)
[5] See Barry Lituchy, What is the Vatican Hiding? The Vatican's Complicity in Genocide in Fascist Croatia - The Suppressed Chapter of Holocaust History, 1998
[6] A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, by Andrew Dickson White, 1896
The biblical world-view permeating the west determined their understanding of all aspects of the world:

* The biblical chronology, which put the creation of the world at around 4004 BCE, greatly influenced the dating of various distant civilisations and cultures.
* Not only did Christian peoples of the west believe that the mythical Babel incident gave rise to the many languages of the world, but The Warfare of Science With Theology by Andrew Dickson White reveals how some went so far as explaining that America (like other 'drifting' continents) was separated from Europe by the same divinely-instigated natural disaster which had caused the tower of Babel to fall.
* White also states how there were even those who argued that not only all the languages, but all the learning of the world, had been drawn from the Hebrew records.
* For a long time, letters were thought to have come down from Adam, who was also regarded as the first philosopher for having named all animals (except fish) according to their natures. From the 18th century on, writing was attributed to Moses. Yet, writes White,

this theory of letters was soon to be doomed like the other parts of the sacred theory. Studies in Comparative Philology, based upon researches in India, began to be reenforced by facts regarding the inscriptions in Egypt, the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria, the legends of Chaldea, and the folklore of China--where it was found in the sacred books that the animals were named by Fohi, and with such wisdom and insight that every name disclosed the nature of the corresponding animal.

[7] ibid.
[8] Genesis 9, New International Version. (In some versions of the Bible, the Hebrew word for 'slave' is translated as 'servant'. The NIV has translated this correctly as 'slave'.)
[9] Wikipedia, Japhet, as at 26 July 2006
The first chapter of Stefan Arvidsson's Aryan Idols, titled "From Noah’s Sons to the Aryan Race: The Foundation Is Laid", looks at how the idea of Aryan (Indo-European) ethnicity originated in the Bible's racial classification. (Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science. Translated by Sonia Wichmann, The University of Chicago Press, 2006)
[10] As we have seen, it was not just the racial ideas of the Bible that continued to hold sway in scholarship. For a long time, the origins of the various languages of the world were still accounted for by referring to the biblical Babel myth:

By the 19th century the idea of Hebrew as the lingua Adamica had been abandoned, and Babel was no longer used as an explanation for the varieties of languages in the world, though some of these ideas lingered on among members of the educated public.

E. F. K. Koerner, Linguistics and Ideology in the Study of Language, University of Ottawa
[11] A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, by Andrew Dickson White, 1896
[12] The extent of the effect Sanskrit's discovery had upon European self-perceptions is illustrated by Lincoln (Theorizing Myth) who remarks on the German experience:

Reading [early philologer and indologist] Jones with these preconceptions and interests, Germans rapidly came to see themselves as a Volk with a much deeper, more glorious, and more heroic past than anyone previously dared to imagine. Germans were relieved of the need to compete with Greeks and Romans, for they now discovered themselves part of the same primordial group. Since India was assumed to be the oldest member of that group, interest in Sanskrit burgeoned, as did the prestige for all things ancient and Indic, particularly after publication of Friedrich Schlegel's Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808), which made the case for India as the Aryan homeland.

Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 55-56
[13] Wikipedia, William Jones, as at 26 July 2006
Sir William Jones' work in philology has now been recognised as having been driven by imperialist purposes. Lincoln observes:

His accomplishments and large body of admirers notwithstanding, Jones's reputation has slipped in recent years, particularly since Edward Said traced the genealogy of Orientalism—that is, an acquisitive, dominating, classifying, and distorting exercise of knowledge and power in the service of Western imperial interests—directly to Sir William's door.

Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 84
[14] That William Jones was influenced by and not independent of his biblical leanings is additionally corroborated by Koerner (Linguistics and Ideology in the Study of Language):

Sir William Jones, in 1792, still adhered largely to traditional biblical scholarship, which set the date of the Flood as about 2,350 B.C

Jones also took Genesis to be true, including the Babel myth:

we may for the present assume, that the second, or silver, age of the Hindus was subsequent to the dispersion from Babel

Because of the many indologists who were working entirely from and for the Christian perspective, the biblical account of history was first made secure by condensing Indian history to fit into the Christian chronology.
Edwin Bryant (Quest of the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate, 2000) writes that near the end of the 18th century, philologer Sir William Jones

concluded his researches by claiming to have “traced the foundation of the Indian empire above three thousand eight hundred years from now” (145), that is to say, safely within the confines of Bishop Usher's creation date of 4004 B.C.E. and, more important, within the parameters of the Great Flood, which Jones considered to have occurred in 2350 B.C.E. Such undertakings afford us a glimpse of some of the tensions that many European scholars were facing in their encounter with India at the end of the eighteenth century; the influence of the times clearly weighed heavily. However, Jones's compromise with the biblical narrative did make the new Orientalism safe for Anglicans: “Jones in effect showed that Sanskrit literature was not an enemy but an ally of the Bible, supplying independent corroboration of the Bible's version of history” (Trautmann, 1997, 74). Jones's chronological researches did manage to calm the waters somewhat and “effectively guaranteed that the new admiration for Hinduism would reinforce Christianity and would not work for its overthrow” (74).

At the same time, numerous 18th century indologists were of the opinion that India was the origin of civilisation.
[15] Abbé J.A. Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, 1816 (p. 100-103). Scans of these pages: 100-101, 102-103
The languages native to Caucasia (the Caucasus region) are called Caucasian languages. They are non-Indo-European. Since IE languages are not native to Caucasia and most of them arrived there in later times, this makes Abbé Dubois' suggestion - that the Samskritam-speaking brahmanas must have originated in the Caucasus - another of his uninformed conjectures.

Caucasia, Microsoft Encarta 2002 (Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia 2002. © 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.)

Caucasia or Caucasus mountainous region ... includes the countries of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, as well as a portion of far southern Russia. ... The region’s native Caucasian languages are usually divided into two main groups: North Caucasian and South Caucasian. ...The most widely spoken South Caucasian language is Georgian.
Caucasia also has a number of Indo-European languages, including Armenian, Russian, and Ukrainian, as well as languages of the Indo-Iranian languages subfamily such as Kurdish and Ossetic. The third major language group in Caucasia consists of Altaic languages, including the Turkic languages Azeri and Karachay-Balkar.

In the Northern part of Caucasia, Ossetic, a modern Iranian language (modern remnant of Sarmatian), is spoken. North Ossetia is also known as Alania - derived from the Alans, a Sarmatian tribe who had moved into this region in the 4th century BCE. The various Sarmatian tribes, just like the Scythians, all spoke Iranian languages. The Altaic languages (non-IE) spoken in Caucasia are also from recent times. The Slavic IE languages Russian and Ukrainian are spoken in North Caucasia, because this is the region where Russia borders Caucasia. In South Caucasia (Transcaucasia), Armenian is one of the IE languages spoken; and because this is where Caucasia borders Iran and Kurdistan, Iranian languages like Kurdish are also spoken here.

It is also interesting to note that most of the languages spoken by the very people who have been considered as having the original European (Caucasian) features, are languages that are not part of the Indo-European language family at all.
[16] Friedrich Max Müller, Science of Language, Vol. 1 (p.460).
Max Müller was not the first to refer to the whole language family as Aryan, but he helped popularise it. Anquetil-Duperron had already come up with the term in 1763, after which the 19th century indologists Schlegel and Pictet used the same in their works.
Indo-Germanic was also used for a time (in place of what is now called Indo-European), often with the attendant notions of race.
[17] Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max Muller, Vol. 1 (p. 152)

The collection of hymns of the Rig-veda was completed towards 1000 B.C. That cannot of course be proved like 2 + 2 = 4, but it is as sure as all our knowledge of these times can be.

Klaus Klostermaier, in Questioning the Aryan Invasion Theory and Revising Ancient Indian History writes that

Max Müller himself conceded the purely conjectural nature of the Vedic chronology, and in the last work published shortly before his death, The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, admitted: 'Whatever may be the date of the Vedic hymns, whether 1500 or 15 000 BCE, they have their own unique place and stand by themselves in the literature of the world' (p.35).

Astronomical data and the Aryan question by Koenraad Elst, states that

In a rather shoddy way, Friedrich Max Müller launched the hypothesis that the Rg-Veda had to be dated to about 1200 BC, and eventhough he later retracted it, that arbitrary guess has become the orthodoxy.1 It is forgotten too often that in his own day, other scholars rejected this extremely late date on a variety of grounds.

Among the early arguments against Müller's dating that Elst discusses, we read that:

In 1790, the Scottish mathematician John Playfair demonstrated that the starting-date of the astronomical observations recorded in the tables still in use among Hindu astrologers (of which three copies had reached Europe between 1687 and 1787) had to be 4300 BC.3 His proposal was dismissed as absurd by some, but it was not refuted by any scientist.

Playfair's judicious use of astronomy was countered by John Bentley with a Scriptural argument which we now must consider invalid.

Bentley argued that a high antiquity for the Hindu scriptures would "sap the very foundations" of Christianity by turning the Mosaic account into myth.
Playfair also showed that it was impossible for the ancient astronomical observations recorded in Hindu scriptures to have been back-calculated from a later age.

That Hindu astronomical lore about ancient tuimes cannot be based on later back-calculation, was also argued by Playfair's contemporary, the French astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly: "the motions of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the [modern] tables of Cassini and Meyer. The Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as that discovered by Tycho Brahe -- a variation unknown to the school of Alexandria and also the the Arabs".6

[18] Later on, Max Müller in his Rig-Veda-Samhita: The Sacred Hymns of the Brahmans, redefined what he had initially meant with 'Aryan':

"I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language..."

That Max Müller recanted, not denied, that he ever referred to an 'Aryan race' (and in connection with the 'Aryan languages'), is apparent from biologist Julian Huxley who repudiated Müller's institution and use of the term in such a manner. Huxley wrote (Oxford Pamphlet No. 5, OUP: p 9.):

In 1848, the young German scholar Friederich Max Müller (1823 – 1900) settled in Oxford…. About 1853 he introduced into the English language the unlucky term Aryan as applied to a large group of languages. … Moreover, Max Müller threw another apple of discord. He introduced a proposition that is demonstrably false. He spoke not only of a definite Aryan language and its descendants, but also of a corresponding ‘Aryan race’. The idea was rapidly taken up both in Germany and in England. (Ibid.)

In England and America the phrase ‘Aryan race’ has quite ceased to be used by writers with scientific knowledge, though it appears occasionally in political and propagandist literature…. In Germany, the idea of the ‘Aryan race’ received no more scientific support than in England. Nevertheless, it found able and very persistent literary advocates who made it appear very flattering to local vanity. It therefore steadily spread, fostered by special conditions. (Ibid)

[19] E. F. K. Koerner, Linguistics and Ideology in the Study of Language, University of Ottawa
[20] Bruce Lincoln explains how merely replacing 'Aryan' with Indo-European has not done away with the associated problems:

Since the atrocities of the Nazis in the Second World War, the term "Aryan" has virtually disappeared from polite conversation. Scholars who wish to pursue the old discourse while marking their distance from its less savory aspects now use the term "(Proto-)Indo-European," also a coinage of the nineteenth century. In doing so, many sincerely believe they have thereby sanitized the discourse and solved the problems, but things are not so simple. Often such euphemizing attempts are incomplete, superficial, evasive, and disingenuously amnesiac.

Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 94-95
[21] Diodorus of Sicily (1st century BCE) in his Library of History wrote about the Zoroastrian (Mazdean) Iranians:

Thus it is recorded that among the Arians, Zathraustes [Zoroaster] claimed that the Good Spirit gave him his laws...

This, however, is not proof that Iranians described themselves racially (or linguistically) as "Aryans" (Elst, Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate, Ch 1.4):

Iranian Avesta uses Airya in referring to a specific community, the cultivators in the Oxus river basin, contrasting it with nomadic barbarians who were similar in race and equally Iranian-speaking (generically known as Shakas/Scythians), but who were not part of the sedentary Mazdean “Airya” world.

It is also noteworthy that Shakas (Scythians) spoke Iranian languages (Elst, Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate, Ch 5.3), not any other languages that are considered IE:

However, every testimony we have of the Scythians, including the Haumavarga ones in whose sites traces of the Soma ceremony have been found, is as an Iranian-speaking people.

Beyond the regions of India, Afghanistan and ancient Iran, no countries have been found with either Arya or Airya in their name. It is a complete error, though it has now become a common one, to imagine Ireland (Eireann, not pronounced like Aryan) is named for this word.
Mythical Ireland explains the actual origins of that country's name:

Eire - variant of Eriu, one of the greatest of the women of the Tuatha de Danaan, she was one of three daughters of the Dagda who gave her name to Ireland

[22] "The early Indo-European studies established many principles basic to comparative linguistics", Indo-European Languages (section Establishment of the Family), Microsoft Encarta 1996
[23] E. F. K. Koerner, Linguistics and Ideology in the Study of Language, University of Ottawa
[24] ibid.
[25] ibid. Apparently there is no lack of suggestions for the Aryan homeland, with each motivated scholar creating new theories to reconstruct PIE in such a way that would make their chosen region the Urheimat:

Gamkrelidze's paleontological reconstructions as regards the words for fauna and flora supposedly shared by the Indo-Europeans and used in support of his argument in favour of the location of their homeland in the northern slopes of the Caucasus, incidentally at the doorsteps of Gamkrelidze's home country, Georgia.

Gamkrelidze's so-called Glottalic Theory is one of the major proposals in the market of ideas in the field, and his Caucasian homeland hypothesis is one of the main current contestants, next to the late Marija Gimbutas' (1921-1994) Kurgan or Eurasian Steppe hypothesis and Colin Renfrew's (b.1929) Anatolian theory. So we cannot argue that we have here to do with a marginal author, outside the main field of Indo-European studies.

Gimbutas (mentioned above) was not entirely objective in advancing the Russian steppe Urheimat theory either. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship by Bruce Lincoln (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 215) states:

And when the aggressive tendency to conflate the Aryan with the Nordic caused alarm in the 1920's and the 1930's, scholars who had their reasons for opposing the Nazis, like Sigmund Feist (1865-1943), V. Gordon Childe (1892-1957), and Wilhelm Koppers (1886-1961) advocated a homeland out on the Russian steppes. After the Nazis and their views had been defeated, Marija Gimbutas won considerable support for this thesis in a series of publications that began in 1956. As she fleshed out her ideas in later decades, however, it became clear she had a more complicated story to tell. Her invasionary narrative drew a sharp contrast between aggressive, patriarchal, nomadic and artistically incompetent Indo-Europeans from the "Kurgan culture" of the steppes and the pacific, matrifocal, agricultural aesthetically sophisticated, much more ancient and admirable Old Europeans of Mitteleuropa. The Soviet takeover of her native Lithuania was a transparent subtext.

[26] In Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln writes how there is little justification for the wholly theoretical narratives entertained in IE scholarship:

In specific, reconstructing a "protolanguage" is an exercise that invites one to imagine speakers of that protolanguage, a community of such people, then a place for that community, a time in history, distinguishing characteristics, and a set of contrastive relations with other protocommunities where other protolanguages were spoken. For all this, need it be said, there is no sound evidentiary warrant [p. 95]

He argues that the various discussions in scholarly circles about the hypothetical life and times of the Aryans could well be an extensive excercise in turning undescriptive data into props for their narrative:

All of these exercises in scholarship (=myth+footnotes) suffer from the same problem. They attempt to reach far back into prehistory that no textual sources are available to control the inquiry, but where archaeology offers a plethora of data. In practice, all the remains found throughout Eurasia for a period of several millennia can be constituted as evidence from which to craft the final narrative, but it is often the researchers' desires that determine their principles of selection. When neither the data nor the criticism of one's colleagues inhibits desire-driven invention, the situation is ripe for scholarship as myth. Prehistory here becomes "pre—" in a radical sense: a terrain of frustration and opportunity where historians-cum-mythographers can offer origin accounts—complete with heroes, adventurers, great voyages, and primordial paradise lost—all of which reflect and advance the interests of those who tell them. Ideology in narrative form. [p. 215]

Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999
[27] Although the myth of Babel was no longer used, the indiscriminate assignment of IE languages to the 'Japhetic' people and the late dates accorded to certain historical events that antedate biblical creation are still founded on biblical tales. Since these aspects have not been revised and remain the same in essentials, the IE world-view cannot be completely seen as secular.
[28] Though it is no longer made explicit, these Aryans (or Indo-Europeans) are still by-and-large assumed to be Caucasian in features (see [46]). The IE framework does allow that their precursors, the 'Proto-Indo-Europeans', might not have had the Caucasian features expected of the later PIE-speaking Aryans. This is yet another area where IE research has set itself a quest: finding the untraceable Aryans was not enough. Their ancestors too have been considered.
[29] Archaeology:
In Migration, Philology and South Asian Archaeology (1999), archaeologists James Schaffer and Diane Lichtenstein conclude:

That the archaeological record and significant oral and literature traditions of South Asia are now converging has significant implications for regional cultural history. A few scholars have proposed that there is nothing in the "literature" firmly placing the Indo-Aryans, the generally perceived founders of the modern South Asian cultural traditions(s), outside of South Asia, and now the archaeological record is confirming this…. Within the context of cultural continuity described here, an archaeologically significant indigenously significant discontinuity was a regional population shift from the Indus valley, in the west, to locations east and southeast, a phenomenon also recorded in ancient oral traditions. As data accumulate to support cultural continuity in South Asian prehistoric and historic periods, a considerable restructuring of existing interpretative paradigms must take place.

James Schaffer and Diane Lichtenstein, Migration, Philology and South Asian Archaeology, in "Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation and History," (University of Michigan Press, 1999).
[30] Physical anthropology (Wikipedia, as at 31 July 2006):

1. Kenneth Kennedy (1984), who examined 300 skeletons from the Indus Valley Civilization, concludes that the ancient Harappans

“are not markedly different in their skeletal biology from the present-day inhabitants of Northwestern India and Pakistan”(p.102).

A later study [a] finds no evidence of discontinuities in the skeletal record during and immediately after the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization. The two discontinuities that Kennedy finds in the prehistoric skeletal record do not correspond to the second millennium BCE. The first of these discontinuities occurred between 6000-4500 BCE (a separation of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic inhabitants of Mehrgarh), and the second occurred after 800 BCE (between 800-200 BCE). He concludes that

"there is no evidence of demographic disruptions in the north-western sector of the subcontinent during and immediately after the decline of the Harappan culture. If Vedic Aryans were a biological entity represented by the skeletons from Timargarha, then their biological features of cranial and dental anatomy were not distinct to a marked degree from what we encountered in the ancient Harappans.” (1995: 54).

Comparing the Harappan and Gandhara cultures, Kennedy remarks that:

“Our multivariate approach does not define the biological identity of an ancient Aryan population, but it does indicate that the Indus Valley and Gandhara peoples shared a number of craniometric, odontometric and discrete traits that point to a high degree of biological affinity.” (1995: 49).

The craniometric variables of prehistoric and living South Asians also showed an

"obvious separation" from the prehistoric people of the Iranian plateau and western Asia (1995: 49).

2. Brian E. Hemphill and Alexander F. Christensen's study (1994) of the migration of genetic traits does not support a movement of Aryan speakers into the Indus Valley around 1500 BC. According to Hemphill's study,

"Gene flow from Bactria occurs much later, and does not impact Indus Valley gene pools until the dawn of the Christian era."

In a more recent study, Hemphill concludes that

"the data provide no support for any model of massive migration and gene flow between the oases of Bactria and the Indus Valley. Rather, patterns of phenetic affinity best conform to a pattern of long-standing, but low-level bidirectional mutual exchange."

[a] (Hemphill, Lukacs and Kennedy 1991, see also Kenneth Kennedy 1995)
Hemphill 1998 "Biological Affinities and Adaptions of Bronze Age Bactrians: III. An initial craniometric assessment", American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 106, 329-348.; Hemphill 1999 "Biological Affinities and Adaptions of Bronze Age Bactrians: III. A Craniometric Investigation of Bactrian Origins", American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 108, 173-192
[31] Genetics:

1. Stephen Oppenheimer's book The Real Eve on population genetics shows how humans from Africa first went to India and from there, humans then settled the rest of the world. According to his research, India was populated from the South, to the East and then the rest of India. (Oppenheimer's results on human population dispersal are summarised in a pictorial presentation: Journey of Mankind). He specifically writes what his research findings revealed about any Aryan Invasion of India:

For me and for Toomas Kivisild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a `male Aryan Invasion of India', (p. 152).

Study of the geographical distribution and the diversity of genetic branches and stems again suggests that Ruslan, along with his son M17, arose early in South Asia, somewhere near India, and subsequently spread not only south-east to Australia but also north, directly to Central Asia, before splitting east and west into Europe and East Asia (p. 153).

Higher diversity and frequency indicate greater ancientry and origin populations, thus making South Indian tribes the origin for M17.
Central Asia was initially populated from India:

Nowhere outside of Africa do we find such deep diversity [as in South Asia] except, to a much lesser extent, in Central and North Asia. This picture of Central Asia as another transition zone between East and West is borne out in the rich mixture of European and Asian maternal mtDNA line also found in that region, suggesting that one of the primary splits after the arrival in India was to travel north up the Indus to Central Asia. (p.191)

2. Kivisild et al., Deep common ancestry of Indian and western-Eurasian mitochondrial DNA lineages, Current Biology, 9:1331–1334, 1999
It shows that the European and Indian lineages for a key genetic cluster (haplogroup U2) split around 53,000 +/- 4000 years ago.
3. Kivisild et al., An Indian Ancestry: a Key for Understanding Human Diversity in Europe and Beyond, Archaeogenetics: DNA and the population prehistory of Europe, edited by Colin Renfrew & Katie Boyle, McDonald Institute of Monographs, 267-275, 2000
This confirms Stephen Oppenheimer's research on population dispersal, but this paper specifically looks at how Europe was populated and the part the Indian gene pool played in it.
4. Kivisild et al., The Genetic Heritage of the Earliest Settlers Persists Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations, The American Society of Human Genetics, 72:313–332, 2003
Two ancient tribal groups from South India - the Chenchus and Koyas - were analysed and it has been shown that not only are their genes pervasive throughout the entire Indian population, but they are also present in the West Asian population (Afghanistan, Iran):

Taken together, these results show that Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions since the Holocene.

5. Kivisild et al., The Genetics of Language and Farming Spread in India, Examining the farming/language dispersal hypothesis, edited by Peter Bellwood & Colin Renfrew, McDonald Institute of Monographs, 215-222, 2003

Indians appear to display the higher diversity both in haplogroups 3 and 9 - even if a pooled sample of eastern and southern European populations was considered. If we were to use the same arithmetic and logic (sensu haplogroup 9 is Neolithic) to give an interpretation of this table, then the straightforward suggestion would be that both Neolithic (agriculture) and Indo-European languages arose in India and from there, spread to Europe.

That is, were the researchers of this paper to use the same reasoning (as the indologists who expected haplogroup 9 to be the invasion marker, indicating the direction of IE language diffusion) in determining which genes were associated with the spread of IE languages and farming, then the results of their research would point to India as having been the origin for both. Of course, the IE world-view does not accept genetics interpretations that will make India the origin of IE languages, thereby contradicting the central premise of the IE framework.
6. Sengupta et al., Y-Chromosomal Variation in India, The American Journal of Human Genetics, 78:202-221, 2006
("Polarity and Temporality of High-Resolution Y-Chromosome Distributions in India Identify Both Indigenous and Exogenous Expansions and Reveal Minor Genetic Influence of Central Asian Pastoralists")

The ages of accumulated microsatellite variation in the majority of Indian haplogroups exceed 10,000–15,000 years, which attests to the antiquity of regional differentiation. Therefore, our data do not support models that invoke a pronounced recent genetic input from Central Asia to explain the observed genetic variation in South Asia. R1a1 and R2 haplogroups indicate demographic complexity that is inconsistent with a recent single history. Associated microsatellite analyses of the high-frequency R1a1 haplogroup chromosomes indicate independent recent histories of the Indus Valley and the peninsular Indian region. Our data are also more consistent with a peninsular origin of Dravidian speakers than a source with proximity to the Indus...

This shows that the genetic input from Central Asia in recent times is very minor - and such as it is, it does not necessarily indicate a small band of Aryans bringing the IE languages.
Additionally, the results indicate how old the regional genetic variation in India actually is: exceeding 10,000-15,000 years. It also reveals that South Indians were not driven south from the IVC, but had generally been living in the peninsular region of India even as far back as the times of the Harrappan civilisation.

[32] Bioarchaeology: The Lives and Lifestyles of Past People, Clark Spencer Larsen, Journal of Archaeological Research, Vol. 10, No. 2, June 2002 .

...Cavalli-Sforza (2000) argued that populations living in the Tarim Basin of western China (Xinjiang Province) had a European origin. He noted that the mummies Bioarchaeology 145 found there lacked the so-called “Mongoloid” cranial features that distinguish them from surrounding Asian groups. Hemphill’s biodistance analysis of cranial metrics, however, provides compelling evidence that the ancestry of the Tarim Basin groups was non-European (Hemphill, 2000). Rather, his analysis reveals a biological affinity with the Indus Valley population of northern India for the earlier groups, whereas the later groups show affinity to populations of the Oxus River valley in south-central Asia.

The Oxus River starts in the Pamir mountain region of north-eastern Afghanistan and south-western Tajikistan, and passes northwest through the border region between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, emptying in the Aral Sea.
[33] Of course, the relation between Persia's Avestan and India's Samskritam is apparent from these two countries' ancient scriptures, the Zend-Avesta and the Rg Veda. See also Shrikant G. Talageri, The Rigveda, A Historical Analysis, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi (Ch. 6)
[34] The preface to Myth of Aryan Invasion, Update by Dr. David Frawley (2005) takes into account the results of recent studies in bringing together the findings about the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, and provides an explanation that is consistent with the data.
[35] The initial searches for Aryan entrants into India looked for invaders or migrants from Central Asia, Eastern-Europe and beyond. Since the sciences found nothing but a dearth of evidence for this, the case has become so desperate that proponents of an 'Aryan entry' have now started looking for migrations from regions nearer by: Iran, Afghanistan; even Pakistan and areas west of the Sindhu which are known to have been part of the same gene pool until more recent times.
Nevertheless, even considering such rigged cases, genetics shows that population dispersal occurred in the opposite direction: from within India's south, to east, then west and beyond into West Asia. (Only in an earlier, questionable, genetics study did the data lead to concluding an invasion; the biased nature of that study is discussed in the article Hating Hindus in a scholarly way by V. Agarwal, section 13.)

It appears that researchers have now even been tempted to look for an invasion of India by the Indus Valley Civilisation, but conclude that this, too, did not happen:

The pattern of clustering does not support the model that the primary source of the R1a1-M17 chromosomes in India was Central Asia or the Indus Valley via Indo-European speakers. (Sengupta et al.: Y-Chromosomal Variation in India, 2006)

Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, indologists, firmly fixed in the IE framework, continue to search for the Indo-Aryans.
[36] To bolster the AIT, and indeed, serving to support the general Indo-European framework, various statements in the Vedas were misinterpreted and mistranslated (the Puranas are ignored) to find invasionist terms and, more recently, to find mentions of any migration into India from the west:

* Vishal Agarwal, The Aryan Migration Theory: Fabricating Literary Evidence

However, the AIT has become unfashionable now, and even certain Western Indologists like Hans Heinrich Hock (an eminent linguist) have come to acknowledge that the earlier invasionist interpretations of the Rigveda were in error [Ref. 9] and that the Rigveda does not allude to any invasions from Central Asia to India.

* It has been shown that Dasas, Dasyus and Panis are names of Iranian tribes (Dahas, Dahyus, and the Iranian tribe which was called Parnoi in Greek). They do not therefore, as frequently assumed, refer to any people(s) supposedly subdued by any invading Aryans. See Koenraad Elst, The Vedic Evidence
* Koenraad Elst's, Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi (Ch.4., discusses more invasionist terms
* Koenraad Elst, Aryan Invasion Theory and Politics: the Case of David Duke

Next to reading evidence for an invasion into the Vedas, indology has also ignored useful information (though contrary to the AIT) that is present. Astronomical data and the Aryan question by Koenraad Elst, discusses the astronomical arguments against the late dates accorded to the Hindu scriptures.
[37] Quoted in V. Agarwal, What is the Aryan Migration Theory? See section D. Varieties of AMT
[38] Paul Manansala, an associate of Stephen Oppenheimer, remarked on how haplogroups (genetic clusters) formerly thought to have been of European origin and indicative of an Aryan invasion, are later ignored when found to have originated in India. Referring to [31]6, he writes:

This looks like an "advance to the rear" strategy.
While admitting that Central Asians had little Holocene impact on South Asia in terms of Y chromosomes, they are also cutting off any possible South Asian origin for markers in Central Asia and Europe.
In other words, when R1a1 was thought to have indicated an Indo-Aryan invasion/migration it had one origin, now that it could possibly show migrations the other way around, it possibly has multiple independent origins.

[39] India Acquired Language, Not Genes, From West, Study Says, National Geographic News, January 10, 2006
[40] A very feeble explanation for the presence of the Indo-Aryan language subgroup of IE - one which will leave no discernible genetic imprint nor be significant enough to be detectable in archaeology or anthropology - has been suggested by indologist Michael Witzel (V. Agarwal, What is the Aryan Migration Theory?, section E. The First Aryan 'Migrants': Victorious Marchers or Lost Tribes?):

He says, in a message dated 13 April 2001 on the Indology list[6] :

Ehret's "elite kit" and a post-Indus, opportunistic shift to more pastoralism will work best here. No big wave of "invaders" is necessary then, just some Afghani tribesmen who chose to stay in their winter quarters in the Indus, instead of going back to the Afghani highlands (as they did in Avestan times and as they still do.)

Of course, this new scenario ensures that the IE world-view is retained, without having to defer to the other sciences: the IE language enters India from 'beyond' (in this case Afghanistan). And since the effort on the part of the 'Aryan entrants' trickling in is no longer like the full-blown Invasion of before, no (counter-)evidence for such imperceptible movements can ever be offered in the other sciences. In this way, the job of providing evidence for such events having happened at all, is yet again diverted to rest solely on comparative linguistics and philology. It becomes a closed system, where scenarios are posited and proven within the IE framework, since they cannot be substantiated outside of it.
In the end, indology might have to consider finalising the scenario to the Aryan Encounters Theory: the Indians, all of whom are indigenous to the subcontinent, would have obtained the Indo-Aryan languages from contact with the Aryans who came and went leaving behind no evidence except the presence of the IE languages in India. In this way, the unattested Aryans, the unrecorded PIE and the undiscovered Urheimat will be joined by the unrecorded Aryan Contact. Thereby still leaving the burden of disproving this unverifiable narration on Indians.
[41] E. F. K. Koerner, Linguistics and Ideology in the Study of Language, University of Ottawa
Koerner shows how some linguists working in typology and language classification were presupposed to thinking certain linguistic characteristics demonstrated that some languages were more developed and therefore superior than others. Though this ranking was implicit at times, it was nevertheless influenced by their perceptions and motivated by extra-linguistic considerations.
Subjective considerations are also apparent in William Jones' informal argument for a relationship between Greek, Latin and Samskritam (published in The Third Anniversary Discourse, On the Hindus):

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.

It is worth noting that Old Persian (Avestan) bears a far greater resemblance to Samskritam than any of these other languages - though Jones, in spite of his highly regarded capacity as a philologer and his knowledge of Persian, which he had studied, failed to perceive the extent of the close kinship between Samskritam and Avestan.
[42] E. F. K. Koerner, Linguistics and Ideology in the Study of Language, University of Ottawa
[43] Early Indology of India - part I and part II looks at the theological motivations of various early indologists, showing how these were not always above suspicion.
Even the missionary zeal of Max Mueller, who was of the view that the English colonisers ought to convert Indians, was found insufficient, as noted by Bruce Lincoln in Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 68):

One might think this position would have endeared Max Muller to missionaries, but in fact it did not. Rather, they found him entirely too sympathetic to the "heathen" and suspected him of being insufficiently committed to the faith. Accordingly, in 1860 he was passed over for Oxford's Boden chair in Sanskrit, which carried responsibility for preparing the Sanskrit-English dictionary, both of which were intended, under the terms of Lt-Col Boden's will, to advance the conversion of Indians to Christianity, not to foster English understanding or respect for India.

Yet it is not only Indo-European linguistics that has suffered from ideologically motivated scholars. The identification of Dravidian as a separate linguistic, cultural and even racial group, was initiated by Bishop Robert Caldwell, a Scottish missionary, who did not always make effort to conceal his biases either.
[44] James Schaffer and Diane Lichtenstein, Migration, Philology and South Asian Archaeology, in "Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation and History," (University of Michigan Press, 1999).
[45] Edmund Leach, Aryan Invasions Over Four Millennia. Published in the book "Culture Through Time" (edited by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, 1990).
Subhash Kak in his sulekha article Indology and Racism quotes from Leach's paper:

Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?... Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion?...

Where the Indo-European philologists are concerned, the invasion argument is tied in with their assumption that if a particular language is identified as having been used in a particular locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what was there before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine this happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates the previously existing population!

The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework... Because of their commitment to a unilineal segmentary history of language development that needed to be mapped onto the ground, the philologists took it for granted that proto-Indo-Iranian was a language that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it followed that the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this we derived the myth of the Aryan invasions. QED.
The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing `pure' civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but 'morally corrupt') kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of an independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history.

[46] Belief in the Hamitic-Japhetic dichotomy of the IE framework continues, with communist-historian D.N. Jha appealing to its authority in arguing for Aryans with Caucasian features, obviously undeterred by the fact that there is no evidence for any 'Aryans' at all:

It is likely that the early Aryans had some consciousness of their distinctive physical appearance. They were generally fair, the indigenous people dark in complexion. The colour of the skin may have been an important mark of their identity.

There's no more talk about IE speakers, it's down to real business now. Besides speculating about the Aryans' appearance, Jha can apparently read the minds and infer the opinions of unattested people presumed long dead: seeing as how he discusses their consciousness and thinks to know how they may have identified themselves. All this, whilst actual scientists have yet to find any proof of Aryans.
This belief is shared not only by Witzel [1997:xxii, note 54] , but even exceeded by the more extreme expectations of Victor Mair [Mair 1998:14-15] who prefers his Aryan invaders-cum-migrants to have full-blown Caucasian features. (V. Agarwal, What is the Aryan Migration Theory?, section G. Physical Appearance of the Aryan 'Migrants')

Not only indology, but also Indo-European studies in general, is suffering from racialist readings and expectations. In 1999, IE researchers assumed the Tarim Basin dwellers to be Caucasian Indo-Europeans. Nathan Light in his Hidden Discourses of Race: Imagining Europeans in China (1999), shows how IE scholars were already hypothesising an IE contact with China, where Caucasian Indo-Europeans would have influenced Chinese civilisation via the Tarim Basin (effectively an Aryan Civilisational Contact scenario for China). Pages 3 and 4 of Indo-European Pursuits, Scientific paths diverge in the quest for ancient Eurasians, Science News, Vol.147, No.8, 1995 shows how motivated indologists readily and eagerly jumped to conclusions about IE Europeans contributing greatly to Chinese civilisation.
Then in 2000, anthropologist Brian Hemphill showed that the Tarim Basin people were specifically not European.
Tracking Genes Across the Globe, by Theodore G. Schurr in American Scientist Online:

Genes, Peoples, and Languages is a thorough summary of the biogenetic data from modern human populations. But some of its interpretations don't reflect the complexity of recent findings. The putative Caucasoid ancestry of mummified individuals found in the 1970s in the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang Province in western China is a case in point. As Cavalli-Sforza notes, these mummies lacked typical mongoloid (northern Asian) cranial features, had greater stature and different hair color than other populations in the area and differed in their material culture from surrounding Asian groups. Some individuals were buried with tartans similar to those made in Scotland, Austria and Switzerland. It was hypothesized that the Tarim Basin people spoke an extinct Indo-European language (Tocharian) and were pastoralists from the Russian steppes who migrated from northern Europe into western China some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.

Despite the fact that preliminary mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data suggested a possible European (Eurasian) origin for these people, a craniometric study by B. E. Hemphill published in 2000 (after Genes, Peoples, and Languages had presumably gone to press) indicates that the Tarim Basin populations had a more complex ancestry than was initially supposed. The earliest groups had their closest affinities with populations from the Indus Valley, and the later ones exhibited affinities with peoples of the Oxus River Valley of south-central Asia, with both groups being considerably divergent from one another. These results argue against a Russian steppe origin for the Tarim Basin peoples and indicate that further genetic research is needed to clarify their relationships to other Indo-European and South Asian populations.

The above also shows how 'Eurasian' has come to imply European (Caucasian). Thus, even in genetics studies looking for an Aryan Invasion of India, DNA samples from Central Asia and Eurasia are in general immediately categorised as European. This means Iranian populations of Central Asia are classed as European too when their DNA is compared with India. [35] discusses this further.
[47] Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. xii
[48] Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. xii-xiv
[49] Timothy Longman, Christian Churches and Genocide in Rwanda, Revision of paper originally prepared for the Conference on Genocide, Religion, and Modernity, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, May 11-13, 1997, Vassar College
[50] Koenraad Elst, Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi (Ch. 12)
[51] There are cases in which linguistics has been way off center, like in postulating an Austronesian homeland in isolated Taiwan.
And the unity of the Altaic language family (like the inclusion of Japanese therein and the connection between Turkic and Japanese) is regularly questioned. Therefore, expressing similar doubts about the IE language family should not be considered taboo either.

Numerous researchers and scholars question the IE theory to various degrees. While some are unsure of the means by which the relationship between the various IE languages came about, a number question this relationship altogether. Yet others are skeptical about the classification of certain languages as IE. Some have argued that there might never have been a PIE, others doubt whether such a Proto-IE language might have ever been developed or spoken by an ethnically homogeneous population.
In fact, some archaeologists are critical of the linguistic approach altogether, including when it comes to IE.
Indo-European Pursuits, Scientific paths diverge in the quest for ancient Eurasians, Science News, Vol. 147, No. 8, 1995

In an ironic twist, Indo-European’s close family ties have triggered an estrangement in the last decade between archaeologists and linguists, the two groups of scientists most involved in answering questions about the origins of modern Eurasians.

Many archaeologists have come to view this linguistic exercise as potentially misleading and, at best, secondary to excavations of ancient human settlements.

Archaeologist John Robb of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, for instance

argues that prehistoric Indo-European may elude curious linguists forever.
The growth of states and civilizations, which began around 6,000 years ago, probably wiped out the majority of languages that had flourished for the previous few thousand years in farming communities, Robb writes in the December 1993 ANTIQUITY. Linguistic loss was hastened in parts of the Indo-European world by the adoption of languages used in regional trade and the borrowing of words from foreign speakers. These words were eventually woven into entirely new “creole” languages, Robb holds.
Indo-European tongues predominate today by happenstance. They were spoken just outside the range of civilizations expanding out from the Middle East and thus escaped this linguistic onslaught, the Michigan archaeologist says. Moreover, some languages now lumped under the Indo-European rubric may have acquired vocabulary and grammatical resemblances through random changes over time, Robb says.

Bruce Lincoln in Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999) gives further examples of dissent in IE scholarship. Besides the popular Stammbaum model for IE (which visualises the organisation of the language family as a tree structure rooted in a common ancestral language - the hypothetical PIE - which branches out into subfamilies and finally into individual IE languages), other possible explanations do exist. A few of those that have been considered, though not as favoured as the model indologists insist on, are mentioned by Lincoln:

Conceivably, the Stammbaum theory is correct, although its logic involves leaps that are open to question. First, it explains the relation among the Indo-European languages as the result of divergence from a hypothetical protolanguage, or Ursprache. In theory, however, one can also explain this as resulting from processes of convergence, rather than divergence, as N. S. Trubetzkoy argued in a famous article published on the eve of the Second World War. Pace the Stammbaum, Trubetzkoy offered a wave model, in which each group in a string of peoples had its own language and interacted socially and linguistically with its neighbors. [p. 212]

Other authors have challenged the Stammbaum model on other grounds, observing that even if the historically attested Indo-European languages did descend from a single proto-language, the existence of this ancestral language by no means implies the existence of a single, ethnically homogeneous people who spoke it. Thus Franco Crevatin suggested that Swahili—an artificial lingua franca, spoken across vast portions of Africa as an instrument to facilitate long distance trade—may be a better analogue than Latin for theorizing Proto-Indo-European. His desire, like Trubetzkoy's, seems to be to imagine a more irenic, more diverse past as a means to guard against scholarly narratives that encode racism and bellicosity. In Crevatin's view there was a Proto-Indo-European language and there were people who spoke it for certain finite purposes, but no community of Proto-Indo-Europeans. Similar is Stefan Zimmer's position, intended as a rebuke of racist theories, hypothesizing a protolanguage spoken not by an ethnically pristine Urvolk but by a shifting, nomadic colluvies gentium, a "filthy confluence of peoples,". [pp. 212-213]

Though Lincoln accepts the inclusion of all languages currently classified as IE in the IE family, he advocates an agnostic position when it comes to considering how these languages came to be related. He urges us to

acknowledge that the relations among these languages can be described in several fashions. Of the available hypotheses, the Stammbaum model is the most popular, but by no means the only one. It ought not to be accepted as long as others exists, and we ought not discard these others unless there is compelling reason to do so. In the absence of such compelling reason, we can remain agnostic, recognizing the existence of multiple hypotheses and maintaining a particularly skeptical posture toward those with histories of subtexts of racism.

And advises that

we recognize that the existence of a language family does not necessarily imply the existence of a protolanguage. Still less the existence of a protopeople, protomyths, protoideology, or protohomeland. [p. 216]

[52] Compare the complacency of indology in re-evaluating its basic premise, to the behaviour of real scientists: Guardian Unlimited (July '04), Hawking: I've solved the black hole riddle

Physicist does U-turn on his theory of the parallel universe - and loses his bet in the process
" I want to report that I think I have solved a major problem in theoretical physics." With those words the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking opened a lecture at a scientific conference in Dublin yesterday which, in true Hawking style, overturned decades of scientific thinking, surprised and thrilled many of his academic peers and left everyone else scratching their heads.

[ramana]

[53] From the book description of Aryan Idols (Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science. Translated by Sonia Wichmann, The University of Chicago Press, 2006):

Critically examining the discourse of Indo-European scholarship over the past two hundred years, Aryan Idols demonstrates how the interconnected concepts of “Indo-European” and “Aryan” as ethnic categories have been shaped by, and used for, various ideologies. Stefan Arvidsson traces the evolution of the Aryan idea through the nineteenth century—from its roots in Bible-based classifications and William Jones’s discovery of commonalities among Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek to its use by scholars in fields such as archaeology, anthropology, folklore, comparative religion, and history. Along the way, Arvidsson maps out the changing ways in which Aryans were imagined and relates such shifts to social, historical, and political processes.

Concerning ethnic origins, it is particularly interesting to find that although English is considered an Indo-European language of the Germanic subfamily and although the various Celtic languages of the British Isles (Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Breton, Cornish) are also grouped as Indo-European, geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer has examined the genetic data for the region and concluded that most of the population living in these Isles have descended from a people related to the Basques (one of Europe's pre-Indo-European peoples, who originally spoke a non-Indo-European language).
Myths of British ancestry by Stephen Oppenheimer, October 2006

Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands

What is more, new evidence from genetic analysis (see note below) indicates that the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, to the extent that they can be defined genetically, were both small immigrant minorities. Neither group had much more impact on the British Isles gene pool than the Vikings, the Normans or, indeed, immigrants of the past 50 years.

The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands. Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the ice age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country. The first settlers were unlikely to have spoken a Celtic language but possibly a tongue related to the unique Basque language.
Another wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago. But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix.

Therefore, most of the gene pool of the British Isles is of pre-IE European (Basque) origin, while the genetic input of immigrants who introduced the IE languages into this region is small. This means that most of the population of these Isles are today speaking languages of an immigrant language-family: IE.

IE languages are also imports to Germanic-speaking lands, whose indigenous people were not IE-speakers.
The following excerpts from Universalisme en heidendom ('Universalism and heathendom') by Koen Elst are followed by their translations. Elst is writing from the European point of view, so the use of 'foreign' below refers to places outside of today's Germanic-speaking regions:

Omgekeerd zijn zogenaamd voorouderlijke tradities in feite uitheems. Of zoals ik in een Asatru-publikatie las: “De Asen kwamen uit Azie”. Zo is recent aangetoond dat de legende van koning Arthur eigenlijk uit Iran afkomstig is.

Translation: Conversely, so-called ancestral traditions are in fact foreign. Or like I read in an Asatru-publication: "The Aesir came from Asia." Likewise, it has recently been demonstrated that the legend of king Arthur actually originates in Iran.

Aldus is ook het Germaanse heidendom goeddeels uitheems. Wij weten inmiddels met toenemende nauwkeurigheid dat de Germaans-sprekende bevolking een mengsel is van een Oud-Europese oerbevolking en een groep Indo-Europees-sprekende immigranten uit het Oosten. Hoever uit het Oosten -- Oekraine, Centraal-Azie, India? -- is nog steeds voorwerp van diskussie, maar in ieder geval een heel eind van hier. De kernwoordenschat van het Gerrnaans, bij uitstek een bastaardtaal, bestaat voor zowat een kwart uit niet-Indo-Europese woorden (bv. drinken, schaap, eik, smaak) die blijkbaar door de oerbevolking in de door hen overgenomen taal van de dominante nieuwkomers binnengesmokkeld zijn. Op kultureel en religieus gebied is ongetwijfeld hetzelfde gebeurd: de Germaanse tradities bestaan uit een mengsel van inheemse Oud-Europese en ingevoerde Indo-Europese elementen.

Translation: Thus, a signicant portion of Germanic heathendom is also foreign. We now know with increasing accuracy that the Germanic-speaking population is a mixture of an Old-European pre-historic population and a group of Indo-European-speaking immigrants from the East. How far from the East - Ukraine, Central Asia, India? - is still a topic of discussion, but in any case, a great distance from here. The core vocabulary of Germanic, which is pre-eminently a language of mixed origins, consists for about a quarter of non-Indo-European words (e.g. to drink, sheep, oak, taste) that the original population have apparently smuggled into the language they adopted from the dominant newcomers. No doubt the same happened in the cultural and religious fields: the Germanic traditions consist of a mixture of indigenous Old-European and of imported Indo-European elements.

[54] Incidentally, why are there so many 'Sanskrit' departments in the west? Why are there not any devoted to studying and reviving an Indo-European language of Europe, like Old German, Old Norse, or reconstructing and reviving the Gothic branch? Why not departments to teach the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European? (Or even Persia's old language Avestan, since Iran is somewhat closer to Europe than India.) Why Samskritam, which was never even spoken in Europe historically and which originated and was developed in India?
[55] We also need to be aware that most terms and concepts of the IE framework are loaded with connotations:

* Aryan (Japhetic, Caucasian) implies Dravidian (Hamitic), and vice versa. In spite of these being called 'language' families, they do have racial connotations, as we have seen.
* Aryan Invasion implies subjugation.
* Indo-Aryan implies belief in either extra-Indian ancestry (that there are descendants of PIE-speaking Aryans in India), or belief of indigenous ancestry but that the languages spoken in the north have extra-Indian origins (that North Indians had learnt it from migrating Aryans). Consequently, since language is a major cornerstone of culture and civilisation, the term Indo-Aryan also implies that all the Samskritam-derived culture and civilisation is indirectly owing to the PIE-speaking Aryans and directly owing to the unattested Aryan entrants.

[RajeshA]

That is the reality regardless of whether we see it as flawed or not!

Not to hurt the feelings of any Christians here, but if they argue that Christ is the sole begotten son of God sent to assume our sins and save us, and your argument mainly is, no, he is not, that is exactly where they want you. This is an argument they, historically speaking, almost always won.

The Hindu response to simply add a picture of Christ to the puja place and continue as before was infinitely more effective.

No that was not my argument at all. That is a completely different topic, which would be here seriously off-topic.

I was talking about the reality of instrumentalization of AIT to serve the interests of Christianists in their mission to proselytize. I was under the impression that my post was fairly clear.

[shiv]

http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/ ... ately.html

The Met office in India, as elsewhere in the world, forecasts monsoons based on the Gregorian calendar. But that system has repeatedly proved unreliable. We must look to the nakshatras for solution.
<snip>
The Nehruvian quest for “scientific temper” led to slavish adoption of the Gregorian calendar for calculating the seasons and monsoon rhythm, though objective analysis shows that every year the monsoon arrives in harmony with the panchang, though ‘scientists’ keep bleating about ‘delays’. Refusing to learn from experience or history, they have ruined farmers and harvests.

OT but no farmer that I know of uses the Gregorian calandar to sow. They use the Hindu calendar. By blaming Nehru for many of our ills we are shutting down our own brains since we have found out the cause of our problems and can safely close our eyes . Which is exactly what Nehru is accused of.

[Virendra]

Anything on Dr. Vartak's claim to have done astral travel to Mars? He says he made 21 observations that were later corroborated by the ones of spaceship Viking 1:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/ ... etter-way/
Please read and also let me know of your analysis of the comment no. 15, 18, 20, 22, 41, 62, 64, 82, 83 there.
I'm still in two minds on whether I'm going to read Dr. Vartak.

BTW, Husky of IF and Acharya had written this article now no longer in the IF journal

Ramana Ji have you read posts of member id - 'dhu' at IF? He has divulged a lot on AIT, AMT, OIT and the Genetics, Linguistics of this debate.
Although, much of his posts go way above my head But that is because I'm naive.

Regards,
Virendra

[svinayak]

BTW, Husky of IF and Acharya had written this article now no longer in the IF journal

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7447100/The-A ... an-History
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It is in the scribed and it is spreading everywhere.

We had some EJs look at it start discussing it. They even referred this to source of OSS.

[RajeshA]

Shiv, I know I'm making myself very unpopular here by writing this, but you are tilting at windmills here. The relationships of the languages will stand up to scrutiny, and those relationships do not depend on the existence of PIE. The family tree of Indo-European languages is pretty solid. Yes, you might be able to collapse what are considered to be different languages today into different dialects of one language tomorrow. {dialect: a variety of a language that is distinguished from other varieties of the same language by features of phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, and by its use by a group of speakers who are set off from others geographically or socially.} That will not change the family tree.

E.g., no matter whether you think Hittite is a daughter language of a Indo-European language, or a sister language from a Indo-Hittite super language, its relative position in the family tree is the same.

The problem with language is that at some point in the narrative, one makes a connection between language and people. When one does comparative and historical linguistics, one starts off by using just language as the object of study and analysis. Once however that is done, then one makes the connection between whatever conclusions one may have arrived at, whatever proto-languages one may have constructed, and people who either speak that language or spoke that language.

At the level of labiovelars and palatals and producing language-change laws, all discussion on socio-linguistic linguistic context is ignored - which people are we talking about, what was their original pronunciation, with which other people did they have contact, did they mix with other people, which words they loaned, how did they change the pronunciation of those words, etc.

History is deduced by linguists about these early people with a very wrong model. The hierarchical language tree model is really the wrong model to use.

For example, if in Lahore, people are speaking Urdu, what does it tell one about the people - were they initially Awadhi speakers, or were they earlier Persian speakers. If they spoke Awadhi earlier, then how come when they pronounce those words, they don't sound awadhi, and when the pronounce Persian words, they don't sound Persian. Where does Urdu belong - in the Indo-Aryan languages or under Iranian languages?

The model should be a lot more flexible - more like a graph, a new language node appears with the passage of time with the original intonation of the people working on multiple words they take from neighboring languages. When people mix with another people, then one has multiple initial intonations working on multiple initial vocabularies.

The linguistic tree model in fact tells us nothing about whether the language spread and changed due to language evolution within the same language speakers or due to mixing with a different language speaker group. In the linguistic tree model all substratum languages are simply ignored.

What is not at all clear is the time span over which this tree of languages grew.
Most likely the relative short time span of the comparative linguists is wrong.

What I think you may be able to establish:
1. The Vedic speakers were already in India for a long time.
2. The Rig Veda is a bronze age text.
3. Indo-European language was in India by the time India had agriculture (currently around 7000 BC).
4. The horse may have been introduced by invaders or by trade. It however is irrelevant to how I.E. languages came to be in India.

IMO, (3.) is the really important one for those who want to make the case to fight modern political battles.

What I think you won't be able to establish:
1. Out-of-India for anyone but the eastern Iranians.
2. Rig Vedic Sanskrit as PIE

Establishable? 1)
Proto-Vedic speakers were in India too for a long time, something like 40,000 years.

Establishable? 2)
Rig Veda should have been compiled between 8000 BCE and 4000 BCE.

Establishable? 3)
This is a moot point, as a proto Indo-European language developed in India, so it would have been here 40,000 years ago as well.

Establishable? 4)
The horse was a trade commodity between Arabian countries and Indian Subcontinent, and would have been known to Indians by 8000-7000 BCE.

Non-Establishable? 1)
Eastern Iranian were definitely in India - North India (Kashmir, Punjab, Afghanistan).

The other European groups cannot be considered a 'pure' folk. Mostly it would have been non-Indics speaking Sanskrit derived languages, however there would have been an intermixing of non-Indics with Indics. Whatever the genetic make-up of the European groups, the language they got, they got from Indians.

Non-Establishable? 2)
It is not needed to claim Rig Vedic Sanskrit as PIE. But the PIE would have been in India proper.

Lastly, contrary to popular belief, the linguistic data has been examined, reexamined and disputed to death. There is nothing new there to be had (unless the Indus script can be deciphered with a convincing decipherment).

The textual data might produce something more - (by this I mean the attempt to glean history, material conditions of existence, etc., of the authors of the Vedas, etc., from the Vedic texts.)

Archaeology could throw up a surprise. I'm doubtful that there is any sustained effort to do this archaeology. IMO, it also requires archaeology along the lower stretch of the Saraswati/Ghagghar/Hakra and that is in the hands of Pakistan.

What is new is the genetic data, it will force a rethinking. In particular, I think it will set the time scale for linguistics.

-Arun

The linguistic data till today was examined only by those so-called scholars who were convinced of AIT and hence looked at the data selectively. Their objectivity and neutrality cannot be taken for granted.

This linguistics research need to be carried out by OIT believers as well.

[shiv]

Anything on Dr. Vartak's claim to have done astral travel to Mars? He says he made 21 observations that were later corroborated by the ones of spaceship Viking

The problem with such claims is that even if they are 100% true the can be ripped to shreds and discarded easily.

The man talks of Mars, but it has to be corroborated by someone else. If that cannot be done his words remain unproven. It's like asking a person to secretly pick a number from 1 to 4 and then saying the number you have picked is 1, 2, 3 or 4. And when that is found to be true you can claim that you are able to read minds.

Could the good prof serve the nation and visit Hafiz Saeed's office and say what is being discussed?

[shiv]

The relationships of the languages will stand up to scrutiny, and those relationships do not depend on the existence of PIE. The family tree of Indo-European languages is pretty solid.

Guptaji. I still intend to scrutinize it and see if it actually stands up to scrutiny outside the community of philologists. I can see what seem to be some pretty big holes in the way the tree has been constructed and need to make sure for myself. What amazes me is that no one has even asked he questions that occur in my mind.

Lastly, contrary to popular belief, the linguistic data has been examined, reexamined and disputed to death. There is nothing new there to be had (unless the Indus script can be deciphered with a convincing decipherment).

Not sure what popular belief you are referring to, but I would not be me if I took your word for it. Show me who has written a critique or validation of the original Behistun decipherment. Show me the complete list of original documents from which the Mitanni scripts were deciphered and translated. I can provide links to translations. But the original papers? Or their translation? Where are they? They either must be revalidated or a paper where they are revalidated needs to be checked. Perhaps they are all there. But where is it? I need to check for myself

I will in due course write once again, and hopefully with greater clarity about the objections I have to comparative linguistics in the way has been applied. But I have some work to do before then.

What I think you won't be able to establish:
1. Out-of-India for anyone but the eastern Iranians.
2. Rig Vedic Sanskrit as PIE

Let me not reach any conclusions about anything. I am only going to do my dharmic duty and study what is available What comes out of such study cannot be predicted. I am not going in thinking hat I will achieve a particular aim, but I am fairly sure that what is "accepted" is probably not correct.

[RajeshA]

AIT-Sepoy Propaganda

Posting here because of the great rebutting review on Amazon.com and the author's background!



Publication Date: 1999
Author: Ram Sharan Sharma
Advent of the Aryans in India

Description:
The book highlights the distinctive traits of the Aryan culture and discusses the identity of the Indus civilization. It presents the archaeological counterpart of the early Vedic culture reconstructed on the basis of textual and lexical evidence. The features of the Aryan culture in the Central Asian archaeology during the second millennium BC are pointed out, and the question of the migration of horse-using tribes from there to the subcontinent is examined.

Review:

The author is well known in India as one of the staunch defenders of the Aryan Invasion Theory. Indeed, his 2005 book India's Ancient Past continues to push the notion, which is not supported by one iota of hard evidence, that India was invaded from the North West in the 2nd millennium bce by some, as-of-yet unidentified Indo-European nomads from some unidentified location between India and Europe. Not only is there no archaeological support for this Linguistics-based myth, recent DNA stuides have dispelled these myths on hard scientific evidence (see Danino's web essay Genetics and the Aryan Debate discussing recent DNA studies debunking the Aryan Invasion myth). As discussed in Bryant's The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Civilization, this Aryan Invasion Theory was a product of Colonial European Race mythology. 19th Century French racist Aristocrat Comte de Gobineau wrote on the Inequality of Races claiming that White Races, of Germanic stock, were responsible for creating all Ancient civilizations. Thus we had the Aryan Model superimposed on Ancient Greece (discredited by Bernal and others over the last 25 years) of blonde-haired Northern conquerors. The Germanics (who actually destroyed Classical Mediterranean civilization) tried to claim ancient Greece and Rome as part of the heritage of Germania!

Similarly in India, the Aryan Model was applied based on the linguistic commonalities of Sanskrit with European Languages. As late as 1920 (reprinted 1931) The Oxford Student History of India by Vincent Smith was peddling myths of Blonde-haired, Fair-skinned beautiful, tall Aryan invaders invading and conquering the flat-nosed, dark, short, ugly aboriginals in India. In fact, this imaginary story was concocted by German Sanskritist F. Max Muller in Oxford around 1859 (before Darwinism was well-established and scholars were obsessed with Biblical timelines). He scoured the Rg Veda (the oldest Hindu literature) for evidence of a Racial conquest and could only find one ambiguous word, anasa, in one hymn (out of over 1,000) to support this projection of Nordic conquest of dark aboriginals from Colonial Europe onto Antiquity. In fact the Aryans enemies in Rg Veda, the Dasa, Pani etc. are names of Iranian tribes known to other ancient civilzations, not dark-skinned South or Eastern Indians. Muller also tried to date Rg Veda coming up tentatively with 1200 bce by allowing only 200 years for the rise and fall of each Hindu literary genre. This was immediately rubbished by fellow Sanskritists as much too late as 200 years was much too short a period and Muller agreed with them. But the views expressed in his translation of Rg Veda became set in stone for European scholars - i.e. that fair-skinned Indo-Europeans invaded India about 1500 bce.

It was only in the 1920s that Indians rediscovered the ancient Indus-Saraswati civilization from the 3rd Millennium bce, by far the largest of the first-generation civilizations. As Edmund Leach wrote, Indologists should have accepted this startling new evidence and abandoned the old myths and started again from scratch on ancient Indian History. But too many academic reputations were at stake to abandon the old myths. Furthermore, Rg Veda clearly indicates that it was written in NW India, in exactly the region where the Indus-Saraswati civilization flourished, even listing all the rivers of the Punjab. Rg Veda says Saraswati (the legendary lost river of Hinduism) was the main river situated in what is now desert between the Yamuna and Sutlej rivers. Indeed, satellite imagery and archaeology has led to the rediscovery of the lost course of the Once-Great Saraswati between the Sutlej and Yamuna, which dried up around 1900 bce as its tributaries were diverted into the Indus and Yamuna. Countless ancient sites from the 4th Millennium bce are dotted along the old river course in modern Pakistan alone as in tthe research by Mughal. In contrast the Indus has only about 35 sites along it. Rg Veda also mentions a place Hariyupiya sounding like Harappa (i.e. Harappans). Brahmanic tradition says Rg Veda was written by seers living in an ancient Indian civilisation, not by invading white nomads!

In 1894, both Tilak and Jacobi, independently arrived at evidence of the far greater Antiquity of Rg Veda (as Hindus always maintained). This was based on the changing astrological position of the Moon at Equinox due to Precession of the Equinoxes. This indicated that Rg Veda had hymns dating back from before 2,500 bce. Indeed, Muller had accepted that it could have been written from 3,000 bce.

In his 2007 BBC A Story of India, British Indophile Michael Wood, acknowledging the controversy, nonetheless sided with Ukrainian archaeologists who claimed that the horse bones and mounds by the Danube were where the Rg Veda, the oldest Indo-European literature was produced. This is nonsense for, as stated above, Rg Veda's hymn repeatedly refer to the rivers of the Punjab, primarily the Saraswati and the Indus! Indeed, recent DNA studies of human migrations Out-of-Africa suggest that the more extreme Hindu views that the Europeans are descendend from migrants out of India (NW India) may hold some truth! The old myths of Language being correlated with ethnicity have been debunked although North Indians do have genetic relatedness to Europeans. The first wave of humans Out of Africa followed the coastline of India to Australia. Most Eurasians are descended from people who around 50,000 years ago lived in NW India, the region where later, the Rg Veda and Indus-Saraswati civilization emerged.

Colonial historians tried to claim India had no history except that of its invaders (a view promoted by racist historian James Mill who rose to 2nd in command of the East India Co. Max Muller was also sponsored by the E. India Co - see The Company that Changed the World for the crimes it committed). Thus Karl Marx wrote that India has no history except that of its invaders. In fact Indo-Aryan speaking Kassites conquered Babylon around 1500 bce and Vedic deity worshipping Indo-Aryan Mitanni ruled over what is now Kurdistan around 1600 bce. Indians went out and brought civilisation to the tribes of S.E. Asia from Burma to Indonesia and the Phillippines. Note also that contra the Colonial myth of one-way migrations invading India, the Gypsies migrated out into Europe from India and Buddhists took Buddhism into Tibet, Central Asia and China. However, even today, Western scholars display tacit ethnocentrism and some Westernized Indians indoctrinated in Marxian views that all Religious literature is myth anbd superstition refuse to accept that the Hindus were correct and the famous white professors of Sanskrit and Philology and Archaeology got it completely wrong!

The astonishing thing is this guy, R.S. Sharma was the first chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research. It was established in 1972!

Also the Indian History Congress has constituted Vishwanath Kashinath Rajwade Award for lifelong service and contribution to Indian history which was given to professor R.S. Sharma in 2002.

The same Indian History Congress which has over 10,000 members, all Indian historians, sent its its President D.N. Jha to testify in the California Court case on school textbook portrayal of Hindus, and he testified in favor of the Aryan Invasion Theory!

It seems all our History Associations is filled with anti-national professors! So one can imagine what kind of bullshitt, the caretakers of our history would feed us!!!

[RajeshA]

Sounds like a good book!



Publication Date: January 2004
Author: Thomas R. Trautmann
Aryans and British India

Bit from the preface Page xxiv

I should perhaps have said that Max Müller was right on the first count - that the tight connection of languages and races was a source fo mischievous racial doctrines - and wrong on the second - that recognizing the non-necessary nature of the connection of languages and races would end the harm; in fact, it increased it, by releasing racial thinking from the straitjacket of language classifications. It is in the second half of the nineteenth century that racial theories of history come into their own, and they did so, explicitly and directly, against the logic of linguistic classifications, against the "tyranny of Sanskrit".

In India this takes the form of what I call "the racial theory of Indian civilization," which I have explained in Chapter 7. Since writing it I have come to see that further work needs to be done on this formation and its relation to parallel developments in Europe. I had thought that the European side of the question was well-studied, but the writing of this book has prompted me to give closer attention to that side of the things and has disabused me of that assumption. As it now appears to me, the key text for the emergence of a racial theory of world history is the notorious work of Arthur de Gobineau, the massive four-volume Essay on the inequality of the human races (Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines), 4 vols, Paris: Firmin Didot Freres, 1853-55.

[RajeshA]

I think I can now understand a bit about the "tyranny of Sanskrit"!

Sanskrit as a language clean-bowled all those Brits and Germans. It was both a part of them but also much more superior to anything they had or ever had.

It was both a reminder of their majesty being part of the Sanskrit family, as well as a deep shame putting them as junior to those SDRE hymn chanters! It reminded them of what they once were and what they had lost, and but also something they could not get over themselves to be again - the dark enslaved heathendom!

Aryan Invasion Theory had three motives:

1. To help the Europeans overcome this sense of inferiority!
2. To help the Aryan Germans get rid of the Jewish blot!
3. To sanctify the British rule over India!
4. To help the Christianists convert the Hindus, through divide and rule!

The third may not be valid anymore, but more parties have jumped onto the AIT bandwagon as they have found vested interests in the current situation.

[RajeshA]

“Even if it were proven that there never had been an Aryan race in the past, we would want one for the future.”

[ramana]

RajeshA, Please do read Husky and Acharya's article posted above.
- AIT is the core pillar of the West.
- All others (Christianity, Technology, Capitalism etc.) are props.

[shiv]

http://www.hinduwebsite.com/hinduism/sanskritwords.asp

The following is an essay suggesting some sort of Hindu linguistic influence upon English, Germanic, and Scandinavian lands, circa 1200 to 1600. Is it possible that some group speaking some Sanskrit-related language(s) was present in Northern Europe prior to the British occupation? I managed to get a qualified language expert to admit, albeit begrudgingly, to this possibility, however implausible the strange theory seemed to him.

<snip>

I will use Sanskrit as a basis for this theory, but most defintely some Sanskritic derivative(s) is/are the active language(s) involved since Sanskrit evolved into other languages circa 300 to 400 AD., according to some sources.

As I will show, some English words will have two or more dissimilar meanings; I will suggest that some of them are Sanskrit-based.

[ramana]

Ramana Ji have you read posts of member id - 'dhu' at IF? He has divulged a lot on AIT, AMT, OIT and the Genetics, Linguistics of this debate.
Although, much of his posts go way above my head But that is because I'm naive.

Regards,
Virendra

Dhu is a member here also.
He has a series of blogs on all these subjects.

[SaiK]

I am thinking on "core pillar of the west" .. in the definition of the west, the map shows only white population for being west. This includes Australia!.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... es_map.png

How the heck, directions became pigmented?


So, if India had white skins, it would be still WEST?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... bution.png
In the above map, interestingly there is a red zone at the top of south america. (guyana)

[Prem]

I was having coffee with my Kurd Friend and he recognized the word Bhraa ( Bhrata=Bhai) used by me on the phone. They also use the same word for brother and call each other Bhraa and use the word Kak as respectful Ji.

[shiv]

Folks I want to ask you all a question. It sounds like rhetorical question but it is a serious one and I urge people who are interested in the topic to take a shot at it. I will state my own views below, after posing the question.

First let me present a few facts/datapoints. I do not have scholarly cites for all of them but I have no reason to suspect them as being grossly misleading

• European languages, Sanskrit and many Indian languages are classified into a group that are called "Indo-European languages"
• About 1/3rd of all words in German do not have an Indo-European origin
• About 2/3rd of all Greek words do not have an Indo European origin
• The name "Indo-European" (earlier Indo-Aryan) was coined only because European languages including Latin, Greek, Germanic, Romance, Gothic, Slavic, Celtic languages etc were all discovered to have common words with Sanskrit.

Now please answer this question:

European languages in which less than 50% of words traceable to a common Indo-European origin, are called "Indo-European languages" because of a minority of words (in some cases) traceable back to a common root with Sanskrit (Old Indic). What percentage of Sanskrit (old Indic) is of Indo European origin?

Surely if languages with as little as 10% common Indo-European (IE) origin can be called "IE languages" we should be able to say what percentage of Sanskrit is of non Indo-European origin. Someone please tell me what parts of Sanskrit are not of Indo European origin? 10%? 50%? 75%?

If Sanskrit, like European origin languages, has inherited a large percentage from non IE languages - what languages has Sanskrit inherited from? Dravidian languages? But every linguist tells us that Sanskrit has taken very little by way of vocabulary from Dravidian languages. Has Sanskrit taken much from Sinic languages like Chinese? No. What about Arabic? No. How about non IE Sanskrit roots from Phoenician or Red Indian languages? No. I think there is a far eastern "Austronesian" group? Does Sanskrit have anything in common with that? No. It seems to me that 95+ % of Sanskrit is of Indic origin.

On the other hand people are trying to figure out where and why the 33% non IE words in Germanic languages came from and there is a theory called the "Germanic Substrate hypothesis" to explain that. Sanskrit has no "non Indo-European" words that people can puzzle over and wonder which language they came from. What this means is that the "Indo" in Indo-European is Sanskrit. There can be no other explanation if all European languages are a 33% or greater mix of non IE languages but Sanskrit and Sanskrit alone is 95% or more Indo-European only. If Sanskrit is a mix of some Indo-European language plus some other language no evidence of that "other non-IE" language exists anywhere within 20,000 km of India. This is a major anomaly in the IE theory. How come every European language retained some part of some other old language but only Sanskrit remained nearly 100% IE onlee?

If you look at various non IE substrate theories for European languages, various theories exist about ancient Slavic substrates, old folk Germanic, Basque etc. Everyone knows that some other languages have influenced European languages. How come no similar influences exist for Sanskrit? The theory to explain this was made up 150 years ago. That was to say that Aryan invaders completely drove out every last vestige of Dravidians and kept them racially segregated that virtually no trace remains of Dravidian (or any other) languages today in Sanskrit (other than retroflex consonants). This is complete nonsense.

If Sanskrit represents the "Indo" (or Indic) half of Indo-European what does that mean for PIE? (Proto-Indo-European).
It only means that European languages may find some non Sanskrit root which mixed with Old Sanskrit to give modern European languages.

Reconstructed PIE cannot represent proto-Sanskrit unless the non IE roots of European languages are removed from lexicon of IE words used to reconstruct PIE. That cannot be done unless one knows how non IE substrates affected pronunciation.

[RajeshG]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.K._Mozumdar

In 1913 Mozumdar became the first Indian-born person to earn U.S. citizenship, having convinced the Spokane district judge that he was in fact Caucasian and thereby met the requirements of naturalization law then restricting citizenship to "free white persons".

Ten years later, however, as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, stipulating that no person of East Indian origin could become a naturalized United States citizen, Mozumdar's citizenship was revoked. A decision on his appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the revocation.[4] He apparently remained, however, in the United States until his death in San Diego in 1953,[1] as he was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Sta ... ingh_Thind

The eligibility of this applicant for citizenship is based on the sole fact that he is of high caste Hindu stock, born in Punjab [Amrit Sar], one of the extreme northwestern districts of India, and classified by many scientific authorities as of the Caucasian or Aryan race...In the Punjab and Rajputana [Rajasthan], while the invaders seem to have met with more success in the effort to preserve their racial purity, intermarriages did occur producing an intermingling of the two and destroying to a greater or less degree the purity of the “Aryan” blood. The rules of caste, while calculated to prevent this intermixture, seem not to have been entirely successful... the given group [Asian Indian] cannot be properly assigned to any of the enumerated grand racial divisions. The type may have been so changed by intermixture of blood as to justify an intermediate classification. Something very like this has actually taken place in India. Thus, in Hindustan [India] and Berar [town in India] there was such an intermixture of the “Aryan” invader with the dark-skinned Dravidian.[1]

[member_20317]

Re. A_Gupta Post subject: Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to TruthPosted: 17 Jul 2012 08:00 as Last edited by A_Gupta on 17 Jul 2012 08:38, edited 1 time in total.

A_Gupta ji, you are taking into account only one example of wiro. The post timings suggest you have not read what shivji is trying to convey @ (shiv Post subject: Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to TruthPosted: 17 Jul 2012 07:49)

I believe he has explained himself quite well still kindly let me also have a go at it.

Example 1
Lets assume 3 sister languages A, B and C start from the same age zero.
A=10 years old at the time of its death
B=15 years old at the time of its death
C=100 years old at the time of its death

Now in year 102, analysis is not needed and bare claim will stand as both ‘sisterhood’ and ‘start point’ are a given.

Example 2
Lets assume A, B and C (not necessarily sister languages) start from the same age zero.
A=10 years old at the time of its death
B=15 years old at the time of its death
C=100 years old at the time of its death

Now in year 102, you have to prove sisterhood based on basically the preference for words that these sister languages displayed.

Example 3
Lets assume A, B and C (not necessarily sister languages) start from different points in time.
A=10 years old at the time of its death
B=15 years old at the time of its death
C=100 years old at the time of its death

Now in year 102, you have to prove sisterhood based on basically the preference for words that these sisters displayed. And you have to prove what came first and in which year since the base year is not known. Only thing you are now sure of is the year of death.

Example 4
Lets assume A, B and C (not necessarily sister languages) start from different points in time.
A=’x’ years old at the time of its death
B=’y’ years old at the time of its death
C=’z’ years old at the time of its death

Now in year 102, you have to prove sisterhood based on basically the preference for words that these sisters displayed. And you have to prove what came first and in which year since the base year is not known. And you have to prove the year of death too.

The languages family in the world, over a period of time, have presented to us a scenario like example 4. In such a case:

1) if you have a relic excavated (object or piece of literature), how do you know the relic belonged to a period nearer to the death of the language or for that matter the birth of it. For all I know it could have been at any time during the lifetime. People display a penchant for using both the colloquial and the classic whether in literature or in objects. I would like to believe this would have been the case for ever in time unless some special case otherwise, is evidenced. Also if the dates are to be known from the circumstantial evidence of surrounding material even then situation does not changes. You can easily have say in the case of a ritualistic site, a very old murti, new flowers, old books and differences can easily be in terms of hundreds of years. Likewise for a burial site you can easily have a new corpse with decades old objects but in a very old coffin/urn, probably even a re-used urn. Living sites are even more interesting in this regard. You get say a wall or even a ruin. But then what stands is new because it was new that is why it was strong or what remains is old and new repair work was shoddy and that is why the older one stands. The newer material being from a declining phase with lesser quality stuff in it. Also the bricks are scavenged from older material or are new ones, also remains a question. Mohanjodaro bricks were being used in nearby areas even after 4500 years. Great Wall of China bricks are used even after 2000-3000 or whatever years. Now remember in the old world where the pressure for change was not that great, bricks can easily have differences in age as great as a few decades if not centuries. All this guesswork has to be done one on top of the other. That is perhaps the reason why you have ‘calibrated C-14 datings’. I don’t know but I suspect calibration is done based on what is the ‘generally accepted truth’. Every single sentence in this point requires assumptions.

2) If you still have the date of the relic which has nothing to do with the date of death of the language it evidenced, how do you get the date of birth of the language from these two probably disparate dates. And if you cannot then ‘setting up of birth of languages’ is not an exercise in ‘relative dating of language’ it is only an exercise in ‘relative dating of relic’. An old stone newly carved with some archaic language is as much a plausible case as an old carving teaching a methodology that is taken up later by people. If you remember ManishH ji had difficulty accepting the proposed antiquity of Bhimbetka caves. What difference does it make that a carving or a writing is done on a wall or on a stone or clay tablet. Whatever reasoning is applicable to a cave wall is also applicable to a clay tablet. For all we know the hoard of clay tablets found in various places in Mesopotamia are merely instructional material ergo old with the new actually used ones being depreciated or impaired. OTOH it could all be latest material basically abandoned with the instructional material having being lost as it was all imbibed by the people around or perhaps because all of it was at one place and that place got bombed out of existence.

3) Now comes the real fun part. How is relative dating possible without the capability for actual absolute dating. I mean can I say Arun Gupta ji is elder to ravi_g if I do not know the absolute date of birth of both or us. One way I can say this without knowing the dates of birth is in case Arun Gupta ji is dead something like 60-70 years (average human lifetime) before the date of birth of ravi_g. Even in such a scenario I need at least 1 DoB. Even in such a case as is shown by shivji in his post @ (shiv Post subject: Re: Out-of-India - From Theory to TruthPosted: 18 Jul 2012 08:44) do we really have a case of any dead language. It is more a case of mutation of languages, interaction of languages, but birth and death…hardly bhaijaan. The breaks and beginnings appear only because the observer wants to see only crests and troughs. You see languages are intimately tied up to humans in one smooth fashion. How would one know the threshold when one language is born and another is dead. Sanskrit is claimed by some to be a dead language. Well we don’t do business in Sanskrit nor do we do any useless banter in Sanskrit but Sanskrit is still The most important pooja saamagri and Hindus being Hindus, they will continue with it in future and Sanskrit will continue long after English as we know it today is used no more. So dead is not really dead. In such a case how and where does the Historian classify Sanskrit. See if somebody doesn’t know the year of death then also doesn’t know the total lifetime and then doesn’t know the year of birth which was the thing to be found out in the first place by way of reverse calculation, then under what system can such a person claim to be able to place something as sister / daughter / mother / mid-wife. This difficulty is there even within our own lifetimes. Are you sure Sanskrit is the mother of all ‘Indo-Aryan’ Indian languages and never ever took anything from say the ‘Indo-aryan’ language of Awadhi. What were the people living in Awadh speaking before Sanskrit or were they just waiting for ‘n’ number of years before Sanskrit was handed over to them. This in a case when Prakrits have a habit of changing the syntax, semantics and pronunciation every few decades and every few kilometers. And if you are not sure about the motherhood/sisterhood/daughterhood status of Sanskrit how can you be sure of the motherhood/sisterhood/daughterhood status of Prakrits. In study of genetics, we are warned of the possibility of people moving back to their place of origin. If it is so dicey with people I would believe the same to be even more so with languages considering languages are meant to shorten distances and basically anything goes in the linguistic scene.

Further to compound the matters the base data available is so restricted and small. With all the data about all kinds of things in the present, a subject like ‘Pakistan ka matlab kya?’ generates so much debate. With such a benchmark what reliance can be placed on the ‘theories’ that do not have the benefit of such data.

A_Gupta ji, to my mind the differences in perception that arise are on account of the benchmarking that one does. You draw a line bigger than the last and . . . What I am looking for is a harmonization of earlier believes with the newer ones based on the more data and more theories available in the present. What I am getting is a complete overthrow of the last theory and new theory being just as ill at ease as the last one. The new guys that come up in the AIT/AMT/PIE lineage are able to refute the last theory but have zero luck in establishing a new one. Now if PIE homeland has changed so many times what is to say that it will not change a few if not many more times.

[RajeshA]

Germanic substrate hypothesis: Wikipedia

The Germanic substrate hypothesis is an attempt to explain the distinctive nature of the Germanic languages within the context of the Indo-European language family. It postulates that the elements of the common Germanic vocabulary and syntactical forms that do not seem to have an Indo-European origin show Proto-Germanic to be a creole language: a contact language synthesis between Indo-European speakers and a non-Indo-European substrate language used by the ancestors of the speakers of the Proto-Germanic language. The theory was first proposed by Sigmund Feist in 1932, who estimated that roughly a third of Proto-Germanic lexical items came from a non-Indo-European substrate and that the supposed reduction of the Proto-Germanic inflectional system was the result of pidginization with that substrate. The culture and tribes from which the substrate material originated continues to be a subject of academic debate and study. Notable candidates for possible substrate culture(s) are the Ertebølle culture, Funnelbeaker culture, Pitted Ware culture and the Corded Ware culture.

Distinct language group

Grimm's law was a profound sound change that affected all of the stops inherited from Indo-European. The Germanic languages also share common innovations in grammar as well as in phonology, Half of the noun cases featured in what are commonly regarded as the more conservative languages such as Sanskrit, Lithuanian or Slavic languages are missing from Germanic. (However, other Indo-European languages attested much earlier than the Germanic languages, such as Hittite, also have a reduced inventory of noun cases. It is not certain whether Germanic and Hittite have lost them, or whether they never shared in their acquisition.) The Germanic verb has also been extensively remodelled, showing fewer grammatical moods, and markedly fewer inflections for the passive voice.

Hybridisation as conjectured cause

It has been suggested[citation needed] that Proto-Germanic arose as a hybrid of two Indo-European dialects, one each of Centum and Satem types, although they would have been mutually intelligible at the time of hybridisation. This hypothesis may help to explain the difficulty of finding the right place for Germanic within the Indo-European family (though the Germanic languages are commonly classified as Centum languages, because of the sound correspondences exemplified in the words *hund, not !sund ("hundred", ~ centum with a guttural fricative according to Grimm's law) and *hwis, not !his ("who", ~ Latin quis)).

Germanic has some words which seem to ignore Grimm's law: *ūp = "up": compare Sanskrit upa- and (Vedic) upári; "help" and Vedic kḷp- = "be adapted". Where Proto-Germanic shows a "p" the typical PIE reflex is "b", however Sanskrit also shows a "p", seemingly indicating that the PIE form also included a "p". However, if this is true, then the Germanic reflex should be ūf instead of *ūp (Note, German auf contains "f" as a result of the much later High German consonant shift in which High German p became f under certain conditions. Thus, both auf and *ūp go back to a previous form containing p).

Non-Indo-European influence

The Germanic substrate hypothesis attempts to explain these features as a result of creolization between an Indo-European and a non-Indo-European language. Writing an introductory article to the Germanic languages in The Major Languages of Western Europe, Germanicist John A. Hawkins sets forth the arguments for a Germanic substrate. Hawkins argues that the proto-Germans encountered a non-Indo-European speaking people and borrowed many features from their language. He hypothesizes that the first sound shift of Grimm's Law was the result of non-native speakers attempting to pronounce Indo-European sounds, and that they resorted to the closest sounds in their own language in their attempt to pronounce them. The Battle-axe people is an ancient culture identified by archaeology who have been proposed as candidates for the people who influenced Germanic with their non-Indo-European speech. Alternatively, in the framework of the Kurgan hypothesis, the Battle-axe people may be seen as an already "kurganized" culture built on the substrate of the earlier Funnelbeaker culture.

A number of root words for modern European words seem to limit the geographical origin of these Germanic influences, such as the root word for ash (the tree) and other environmental references suggest a limited root stream subset which can be localized to northern Europe.

Kalevi Wiik, a phonologist, has put forward a controversial hypothesis that the pre-Germanic substrate was of a non-Indo-European Finnic origin. Wiik claimed that there are similarities between mistakes in English pronunciation typical of Finnish speakers and the historical sound changes from Proto-Indo-European to proto-Germanic. Wiik's argument is based on the assumption that only three language groups existed in pre-Indo-European Europe, namely Uralic, Indo-European and Basque, corresponding to three ice age refugia. Then, Uralic speakers would have been the first to settle most of Europe, and the language of the Indo-European invaders was influenced by the native Uralic population, producing the Germanic protolanguage.

Venemann made a hypothesis of a Basque substrate and a Semitic Superstrate.

Existing evidence of languages outside the three refugia that he proposes, (e.g. the Tyrrhenian Language Family) create a complication to Wiik's theory, meaning it relies upon an undemonstrated link between each of these languages and one of the three proto-languages he proposes.

Words derived from non-Indo-European languages

Hawkins moreover asserts that more than one third of the native Germanic lexicon is of non-Indo-European origin, and again points to the hypothetical substrate language as the cause. Certain lexical fields are dominated by non-Indo-European words according to Hawkins. Seafaring terms, agricultural terms, engineering terms (construction/architecture), words about war and weapons, animal and fish names, and the names of communal and social institutions are centers of non-Indo-European words according to Hawkins.

....................................

The funny part is just like Pakis the Germans too identify themselves with the invading Aryans rather than with the non-Indo-European substratum language people who were already there. At least they have given them the name - "Battle-Axe" people which is also TFTA.

But identification with the original Europeans would in fact mean that much of their high-language and even mythology they got from some wandering pre-historic Gypsies from India. It would mean that instead of they being Aryans, they were beaten by Aryans, despite the Battle-Axe!

[RajeshA]

From above:

Hawkins argues that the proto-Germans encountered a non-Indo-European speaking people and borrowed many features from their language. He hypothesizes that the first sound shift of Grimm's Law was the result of non-native speakers attempting to pronounce Indo-European sounds, and that they resorted to the closest sounds in their own language in their attempt to pronounce them. The Battle-axe people is an ancient culture identified by archaeology who have been proposed as candidates for the people who influenced Germanic with their non-Indo-European speech.

That has been my hypothesis here from the beginning. Language changes when two people meet and "fuse" and substratum group changes the pronunciation of the newly introduced vocabulary depending on what sounds they had earlier on in their language. As such we need to know how a particular substratum language changes the pronunciation.

The dominant group's language (usually the immigrant/invading group) has more of an influence in naming social structures and processes, trade, and their original main occupations, tools, etc. The less dominant group (usually the settled group) have more of a say in naming household items, the flora and fauna, as well as the terminology related to more settled occupations.

I am considering the migrant group as the more dominant because otherwise the only influence the migrating group leaves is usually in newly introduced cuisine.

Coming back to the substratum influence on pronunciation, without knowing what that influence was, we cannot know how the migrating Indo-Europeans used to pronounce their words.

The AIT-linguists do not follow back this chain of pronunciation changes to create their proto-languages. This is probably they don't have enough data on these substratum languages.

What the AIT-linguists do is presuppose that there was a common vocabulary (semantics and phonology) across various languages and then try to create a tree of evolution of this language, so that at the end one reaches the current pronunciation in the various languages and they use only the various possibilities of the human vocal tract, the manner of articulation.

This process can be graphically visualized as a geography with various cities and one tries to imagine from where a postman on a horse would have to start, his post-office, to be able to reach all these cities, considering the difficulty in the terrain. Basically this is guesswork, and there can be many candidate places, including one of the cities itself.

The sole basis for these axioms of linguistic change are the closeness of various sounds in the vocal tract of the human. There is almost an unsaid reason that the sounds would change due to natural evolution of the same people with increasing the ease of pronunciation of words as the main driver. The driver however is most certainly a different one - the substratum language. The substratum language population would change the pronunciation of the words by mapping these to the sounds present in the phonetic diversity of their own languages - the substratum language as well as according to their style of articulation and melody.

Let's say a language takes an evolutionary path of change L1 = A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F -> G -> H. Now many of the intermediate stages may not be available. Depending on certain assumptions, which are then considered requirements, that various other languages too had a common origin, the various intermediate stages are tried to be reconstructed using the various language change axioms, such that some intermediate stage (a reconstructed proto-language) can lead to the origin. That depends very much on which other language is used as comparison L2. That language too may have had an unknown history of evolutionary path.

Here the assumptions start piling on. Which language to use as comparison? But then more assumptions are made about rate of evolution of each of the languages used in such a comparison.

It is just the case that languages change at different speeds, depending on influence from adstratum languages, invasions, migrations, mixing with other people, social stability, language standardization through authorities, etc.

Sanskrit has remained relatively unchanged over several millennia simply because of the vigorous tradition of Śrauta, in which speakers are trained from childhood itself in the correct pronunciation of sacred texts.

Other languages may have changed much more, as many more ethnic groups were assimilated during the wanderings and migrations, and also due to the lack of such a strict transmission of pronunciation as was the case with Sanskrit.

All in all, the PIE language tree is a figment of imagination, as too many assumptions have made regarding which languages to compare, how to extrapolate their common point of origin without regard of their different rate of change, and all that without sufficient data on the substratum languages, or about the various branches of Indo-European languages which died out and became extinct, which too would have had some influence on how the tree ought to look like.

Moreover the tree was built by so-called scholars who followed an agenda - either of proving that Sanskrit or another proto-Indic language was not the parent, and that the origins of the Indo-Europeans did not lie in India. Or these so-called scholars were simply there to continue with the agenda-based linguistics theories of their academic forebears.

What the AIT-linguists are not able to admit is that there just may not be sufficient data available to reconstruct the original proto-Indo-European language using their methods, not to mention that their methods themselves are error-prone.

And then going on to claim that this reconstructed PIE using this highly error-prone process is the original proto-Indo-European language is really making a very tall claim!

[RajeshA]

One way to kill AIT is simply for Indians, Russians, Greeks and Iranians to come together and say that Germanic languages because of their overly non-Indo-European vocabulary cannot be considered as Indo-European languages.

Perhaps if one tries, one would be able to declare a much higher percentage of words in Germanic languages as non-Indo-European.

If one shunts out the British and Germans out of the Indo-European language group, AIT dies!

[RajeshA]

RajeshA, Please do read Husky and Acharya's article posted above.
- AIT is the core pillar of the West.
- All others (Christianity, Technology, Capitalism etc.) are props.

ramana garu,

I did read Husky and Acharya's paper on scribd. An excellent paper.

It also has a lot of references from old books, and I see many of them, I have already linked here!

Actually that was the kind of work I was hoping many will do, after going through the various book links available in this thread. Good to know, some of that work has already been done!